I mixed two songs tonight. I was only planning on doing one. I had a song from the November list that was ready to finish off so I was going to take care of it, upload it to alonetone, maybe add it to a post here, and then go to bed.
Unfortunately it is the worst dog shit of a song that has ever come out of my untalented brain. It just sucked so bad. What was I thinking? What is wrong with me?
So rather than go to bed with that awful taste in my ears, and also with that song at the top of my alonetone queue, I decided to finish off a song for the new round or re-recordings. The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project and all that.
I feel a smidge better about my place in the universe after working on this one. Consider my ears’ palette cleansed.
No car music today. I was up early enough that I might have pulled it off, but I would have been cutting it close to the start of the work day and I just punted. I can’t do it tomorrow because tomorrow is take three of our visit to Vermont. Sunday it is. Or, as the old commercials for monster truck shows used to say:
SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!
…or something like that.
The Braves failed to eliminate the Dodgers last night. Here’s hoping the American League has a similar story after tonight’s game. Houston is up 3-2 over the majestic Red Sox. Games six and seven are in Houston. Given the last two games, I am thinking my home town team needs a bit of a miracle. Two of them. One tonight in game six, one tomorrow in game seven. Yikes. There’s not a lot of optimism around here. Not even the cautious kind.
We need to be in Burlington tomorrow a couple of hours before lunch. That means we have to get up super early. That means I don’t think I’ll be listening or watching the game for very long tonight. That being said, I require the Red Sox to jump out to a 30 run lead in the first inning. That’s probably enough to hope they can hold it. Maybe 40 runs would be better, but let’s shoot for 30, m’kay? I’ll settle for a 1-0 win, of course, but I want to be able to feel comfortable going to sleep early. Can you do that for me, Red Sox? Here’s hoping.
I finished the last of the fourth round of re-recordings tonight. I mixed it using Air Pods Pro which was probably a bad idea. I’ll share it for now, but if it sounds like garbage on better headphones, or on actual speakers, I will remix it.
I still need to come up with a final running order, but that’s it. After that I have to decide if I want to do volume five or not.
For the record, the lead guitar parts here are my new birthday present Les Paul. Have I mentioned that I love that new guitar, and that my wife is amazing for getting it for me, and that I love my wife more than words could ever express?
I mixed another re-recording today. I don’t think I like it. It’s originally from the 2016 RPM Challenge when I wrote a bunch of songs about people dumb enough to believe the Earth is flat. This one was supposed to be part of an argument between a flat earther and a person with a brain. Five years ago it was the idiot point of view. When it came to re-recordings I couldn’t really use it out of context so I wrote new lyrics. Can you guess what they are about? I wish they were better. They really suck. The vocals suck too. The guitars are okay, I guess.
Are you enjoying your Dr Martin Luther King, Jr day? I am. I mixed a song. Wanna hear it? No? I’m going to post it anyway.
Worst song title I’ve ever come up with. The sound effect was on my original demo from April 2014. Why? More important, why did I keep it? I don’t know, stop pestering me!
I wrote this puppy last February during RPM and somehow it is not in a three way tie for the most re-recorded song on my alonetone account (there are three versions). What a strange and wacky world we live in, right?
In honor of the cheeto getting impeached for the second time, I mixed a song tonight! It has nothing to do with the cheeto, or any cheetos for that matter, but it’s done so there.
So the United States is crumbling all around us. The president was impeached 11 months ago and guess what! He’s likely going to be impeached again either today or tomorrow, depending on whether or not the vice president grows a set of balls and removes him from office via the 25th amendment. Life is pretty strange here in the good ol’ USA.
So here we are, trying to go about our normal day to day as our little baby 245 year old nation implodes. What’s a red head to do to keep from just screaming 24/7?
Well, he works on The Great 2015 Re-Recording Project, of course. Also, he pretends to work on a January album in a month. I’ve done almost nothing on that one. Just a couple of little bass riffs. I need to get back onto that but I have a ton of work still to do on volume four of the re-recordings. For some dumb reason my plan to redo old songs in batches of eight has turned into a batch of 14. Oops. One of those songs is done, eight more have the vocals done and are ready for lead guitar. Two of those eight will need to have the rhythm guitars done over. I used some effects that I thought were cool at the time, but now listening back they were mistakes. After that, there are still five songs waiting to start.
So I’m calling it. The nine songs underway are now the total of volume four, and the remaining five will be the start of volume five. I’ll dig through the piles of awful songs and pull three more for a total of eight, and then I’ll wait until after RPM in February to work on them. This is the way. I have spoken.
Now, back to the source of stress that sits on top of the mountain of stress that is Covid-19… will Pence do his fucking job today or will he let trump get away with LITERALLY SENDING HIS CULT TO ASSASSINATE HIM. Do your job, Mikey boy. Cut the crap and grow a pair. Then Nancy can impeach the prick at her leisure. There are only nine days left in Cheeto McClownshoes’ term and nine days is too long to wait. He and the cult cannot get away with this. No unity without repercussions. This is the way. The people have spoken.
I had four songs ready to sing and they were all a struggle. My voice was croaky and it kept cracking like Peter Brady, even on the easy parts. I got through all four songs but it was tough and I am a little nervous that when I go back and review them later I’m going to realize I need to redo them all. Much like John Lennon on the first Beatles album, I saved the shoutiest song for last. When I got to it I had to face facts that my voice could get a little higher in February 2018 than it can in January 2021. I had to rewrite one of the parts. A two part harmony where the main melody was the lower pitch was rewritten to be a three part harmony where the main melody is the higher pitch. I probably ruined the song. We’ll see.
None of that is the point of the post though.
I made a joke to my wife that I was really going out to make sure there was no terrorist activity in the parking lot behind the movie theater. Hardy har har. When I got there, there were two cars parked right in the area I usually go to. Damn it! I went about five rows away from that spot instead. The two cars were empty though and in the hour and a half or so that I was there no one ever showed up. Suspicious. Was that parking lot being used as some right wing extremist terrorist meeting spot? Who knows. I forgot about it and went to work.
Then, after a long stretch of bad singing I was down to the last thing. 16 bars of shouting. Two tracks, the same part doubled, and maybe a third with a lower harmony. That was it. 16 bars to go and I was done but…
A car pulled into the lot. One row away from me. Not close enough for Covid worry, but given that there were only three cars in the entire parking lot, way too close for shouty singing comfort. Five seconds later, a second car pulled up right next to the first. Two masked women got out and starting having a friendly looking conversation. Two old buds, just catching up. What the hell? Couldn’t they see that there was a recording studio right there? Couldn’t they see that I was trying to sing the last 16 bars and wanted privacy? Couldn’t they see that they were practically right on top of me and messing everything up? Well screw that, I started up the car (and waited a few minutes because all my yelling had fogged up my windows) and moved as far away as I could without leaving the parking lot. I finished my awful singing there, but like some kind of diva I was all out of sorts.
Now I wonder… were they right wing extremist terrorists? Were they plotting another attack on the US Capital?
I mean, no. There’s zero chance of that. They were just two friends talking… but how do I know that? How can I ever be sure? Insert ominous sounding music here.
This is a picture from the second, less musically inspiring parking spot.
Inside the Red Head's Head 