Grateful for time
I’ve been making the most of the time, writing, listening, practicing, and cleaning and I’m grateful to have the time to do it. Oftentimes we leave things unfinished -this is always going to happen in some way because you can’t finish everything and that’s life: The messiness, the unknown future, the unspoken words. All together, all in time. The new recording is a snapshot of some of these things I was able to finish with the time that Covid gave us.
On another note….
I played last night in front of people at a little place in CT, and while most of the audience was on the patio outside and I was inside (playing to them indirectly) it was a relief to see people and play music for them again, to see their smiles and hear their laughter.
There’s backyard parties being planned for the next few months, the “new normal” as in … very “informal” and still grateful for everything coming down the road.
“FuturePlaneta” coming soon
Remember your name
All she sees is god
The Edge
All
Smoke
Leads me back to you
Walls
Lift
The wrong things
Things to consider
I was discussing the silver linings about our situation with someone and I thought I might share an insight:
There was a window of time in the history of this country (many others as well), say starting in 1945, in which we had time. We had nights and weekends and we didn’t carry computers around and our eyes didn’t burn from screens. We weren’t the prisoners of phones.
It wasn’t that long ago.
We read books, listened to records, went dancing, and most homes had a piano and there was always someone who could at least get along with it. We simply “showed up” at peoples houses and knocked on their doors, and if they were home we engaged.
Don’t misunderstand me, we also had crappier tech, less advanced medicine, more polluting machinery a few more wars to go, lest this be confused for a “it was better back in the day” statement because it isn’t.
Point being, a little slow down might help us in the long run lest we melt down from the heat that’s made by the culture spinning at the fastest speeds imaginable. And there are wonderful things about “yesterday” that are being ignored by “tomorrow” like looking in a persons eye when you’re talking to them or being able to live without your implant (phone) for more than an hour.
Things to consider…
Smoke
“Wake up to the life you’re missing
They give dollars for your time and steal ideas from your mind
Smoke is there to blind your vision
See through it with your thoughts and don’t believe their lies”
Lyrics as soup for your soul, words that can liberate your thinking.
The problem with technically brilliant art
I was in a discussion that touched on the subject of how little usage of real instruments there is in pop music right now (a trend that started a decade ago but that picked up considerably in the last 3 years).
There’s so much digital perfection and pitch correction, it’s hard to tell how much is really made by voices and hands, and in my opinion the humanity is sucked out of it.
While Rolling Stone Magazine quotes will stroke artists like Billie Ellish for creating her entire record by herself with only her laptop (anyone with half an inch of knowledge of such assumptions would guess that they’re simply erroneous and that there was 7 figure effort behind the release), there is truth in that there are virtually no real instruments and no band to speak of.
If anyone wants to make the case that pop music just isn’t that popular anymore, this could be one of the reasons why.
Thoughts:
- People long to hear something new and different even if they don’t know what it is.
- The same sound effects used in movie trailers, TV ads, and pop music is boring them to the point that they can’t remember what they’re seeing/hearing, even if they wanted to (thus the same ad has to play 17 times before it registers).
- If anything was sung live on TV, as in ANYTHING, with all the bits of imperfections that mix between a performer and an audience, people would talk about how great it was, because deep inside they might actually be relieved of the “computerdom digital perfection.”
Art is supposed to be messy. Let it be messy.