With clouds and rain and shit. Yeah, I wrote yet another depressing song. This one must be the most depressing Christmas song ever. What can I say, Christmas is a season that gives me the blues.
Yet another quicky bounce. This is about the third time I played the song through, and I was still tweaking lyrics. There's still a few parts I need to fix before I consider it "finished", and I would definitely need to make a good recording rather than this quick bounce, but it's definitely a good start given that I started writing it tonight. (But started thinking about it several days ago).
Just my new guitar and my creaky voice.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
You know, it's been a long time since anyone with influence in the music business wrote some new Christmas music. What was the last one -- "Feed The World"? How's that one workin' out, Band Aid? Christ on stilts...
ReplyDeleteYou may be on to something here. Personally, and at the risk of sounding like a total asshole, I have to point out that your guitar is a little out of tune. It's a perfect pitch thing -- I cannot help myself. And besides, you were the one who brought up Jandek, so as far as I'm concerned, you're fair game from now on. But other than that, I liked what I heard...
High E was out, my strings are still settling in (they're just as new as the rest of the guitar) and it went out between me tuning up an hour before when I started writing this song, and me doing this take all the way through (and if you think this take was rough, shoulda seen the one right before it, I kept stopping and re-inventing lyric lines as I recorded as I realized that what I'd pounded into TextEdit wasn't going to work). Other than that, the guitar is in perfect tune. I do deliberately take some things out of tune here and there (string bending) to add dissonance, but that's deliberate -- with strings this thin and slinky on a short-scale guitar it's way too easy to bend strings so the thing to do is incorporate it into the music rather than have it happen where you don't want it to happen, that's sort of the point of using this guitar rather than my battered steel-string acoustic, it allows something different to happen.
ReplyDeleteI need to play it through twenty times or so, get the lyrics finished (there's still several places that are clumsy that don't need to be), tune up, and then get it down and add the rest of the instrumentation. Or maybe not, I'm going to be mostly out of town the last three weeks of the year and after Christmas there will be no incentive...
Please, please encourage anyone that even dreamed of writing a Christmas song to please, please, please write something new.
ReplyDeleteI can not go out for about 2 weeks before Xmas. I have been known to stand in the middle of huge stores, screaming "Change fucking music, assholes." Then I have cashiers that say, "What were you screaming about?" They can tune it out, I can't.
I once tried to run a contest in Phoenix, $1000 to whomever wrote the best new Xmas song. Same music, new words, no one won.
Somehow I think a song where Santa has ended up homeless and dies under a bush on Christmas night isn't exactly a Christmas song that has been written before. Like I said, I was a goddamn ray of sunshine writing that thing.
ReplyDeleteThe Mercury News, BTW, reports that "only" 67 men and women died while homeless this year in San Jose, and that their average age was 49. And this is happening in one of the richest cities on the planet. But doing something about it would cost money, so...
- Badtux the Christmas Penguin