So my lovely girlfriend and I are moving into a house together soon, (cue the Bon Jovi song…) and I’m super excited so I’ll have a lot more space for music creation! WHEE! But until we get moved and settled, I won’t be doing much recording.
BUT, there is hope on the horizon for gigging, so I’m excited about that. More on that to come.
I hope everyone has a wonderful 2016. I appreciate your attention and your support, and this year should be a big one for me and music, so hopefully I’ll make some stuff that will make you happy.
Last night I was able to work up most of my song called “Miserable Bastard” into a full-band arrangement. The bass parts and vocals are just scratch versions at this point and everything needs more work (I want to compose a better bass part that has some more “movement”), but I’m satisfied with how things are progressing.
There’s another song I just wrote (a couple of days after “Way Too Long Of A While”) that I’m still working on, and that one might be next to be recorded…but there are others I still want to finish or rework, so who knows.
I’m just happy I’m getting things together for once. Now I have to get some acoustic gigs and get a new power trio together with Lee (Roman Holiday bandmate/drummer). I miss fronting an actual band.
Thanks for keeping up and HAPPY NEW YEAR! I hope you all have a prosperous and wonderful 2016.
TMS
My long personal nightmare is over: I’m writing again! And this is a pretty dang cool feeling…
The first song I’m sharing is a song that is very close to my heart. I decided to try and dig deep and “feel all the feels” as some might say, and this new one is the result. This one makes me cry. It also doesn’t sound much like anything else I’ve ever recorded, so it might be kind of shocking (especially vocally). Go with me here and don’t carry any prejudices – this is 100% from my heart.
It’s called “Way Too Long Of A While”:
It comes on the heels of spending some time with my family that I love deeply and miss terribly because I live over 1000 miles away (or more). It’s actually a fairly simple concept, inspired by my internal conflict of feeling sad because I’m far away, but really loving the life I’ve got aside from the distance from “home” (which to me isn’t a place, but rather the five other members of my family – my mom, dad, and three younger brothers).
Thanks for listening, and watch this space for more!
TMS
So my blogging is probably going to become more frequent…
As I now have a fun little portable device that will allow me to easily type and share stuff from my new iPad Mini (thanks for the hand-me-down, Heather!)
I got a case that has an integrated keyboard that is very small but actually quite functional, with real keys instead of being all rubbery.
So now to the updates…
I’m theoretically back with Capital Suspects once our schedules more properly align, which makes me very happy.
I’ve been filling in here and there with Texas Players, which has been a learning experience.
I’m now down a venue for my solo acoustic act, as 121 On Main closed a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately I’ve gotten a few bookings through Stargazer Live, which is nice – Cord’s been good to me and I appreciate it. I need to come up with a proper game plan for getting regular work down in my part of town, maybe even a weekly or bi-weekly show. Anyone with ideas on good venues where you’ve seen solo acoustic performers down south or Downtown, please send me a message and let me know.
The biggest news, I guess, is that I think I’m going to start doing some real recording again. I’m revisiting some old songs and song ideas I’ve saved on my phone and I think that there’s a lot of promise there. I think I’ll be able to easily hack some of the stuff into workable, good little tunes. Once they’re suitable for public consumption I’ll share them, but not before then. I’ve got enough half-assed shit out there on the net already. 🙂
Thanks for reading and look out for more soon!
TMS
…I’ve had spurts of being busy but mostly have been doing almost nothing musically. I played a solo show back in early July, and before that was filling in with Capital Suspects and Chandler here and there. All that was fun. Then at the end of July I took my annual trip back to Florida and played a reunion show with my old band Slaphappy. It was a really fun experience playing with the fellas again, and I’ll post audio from it at some point.
When I returned from vacation I quickly booked two solo shows in August, which went pretty well (though the first of the two was a really tough one because it was outside in the August heat). I have another show coming up on September 26th and I’m quite excited about that one because I’m adding a bunch of songs to the repertoire. I’m also making sure I don’t forget to play more of my original songs in there. It should be a really fun show, so if you’re around, come see me in Round Rock at 121 On Main that night – I start at 8pm and play until 11pm.
I also went to see an amazing show at Threadgills – Travis Larson Band opening for The Aristocrats. It was an amazing night of melodic (and sometimes very unmelodic) shredding. SO MUCH TALENT…
The next phase of the musical life of Le Schizo will involve continuing to grow my acoustic solo show thing, which I’m really enjoying, and starting to properly record some of my own music. I’ve said it over and over again on here, but now is truly the time for me to make it happen. I’m going to reconfigure my home studio to make it more amenable to easily getting the ideas down in the computer and really get good tracks recorded. I’ll get the best stuff done first, but then go through and record everything that’s at some level of completeness so they’re all updated with my current level of competence.
That should make for some exciting times on this site. Hopefully getting the studio together will inspire me to create NEW songs that relate more to my experience over the past few years, since I feel there’s a lot of “songwriting potential energy” there that hasn’t been spent. But we shall see.
I told a friend of mine recently that creatives create because we have to…and it reminded me how much of a I really have not been a creative in the songwriting sense. It’s come to the point where I actually cringe when I refer to myself as a songwriter. It is a fact that I have written songs, but it is not a fact that I write them. I haven’t really written or recorded one in a long time – I did fashion a chord progression into a song experiment back in late November of last year, but that’s been it. I haven’t even been writing music, though I’ve been playing guitar all the time at home.
Not much more to report. If you read this and can come, please check out my show on 9/26. I’ll make an event post soon on the ol’ Facebook page, as well as the dedicated page I have set up for the solo acoustic thing.
I do promise one thing: NEW BATHROOM SCHIZO VIDEOS ARE COMING!
Now, things are looking really good for getting back in there (I’m literally texting with the booking agent in between typing sentences here), but it’s still frustrating because I really wanted to make this a very regular thing – at least once a month, preferably two or three times. It’s SO MUCH FUN and the extra cash is very helpful. 🙂
On other fronts, I’m trying to work out scheduling to sing some backing vocals for my friend’s first album, which is terrifying and exciting all rolled into one. I don’t consider myself much of a singer, which is probably silly, since I’ve been doing it in front of people for money on a regular basis now for 16 years, but it’s the fact that I’m not properly trained that keeps me from feeling good about my singing. I know I could be better. I even want to take lessons. Financially that hasn’t been an option.
I did get a promotion at the day job, which is nice, since it came with some extra scratch, which will make the solo gig money even more spendable. Perhaps on things like vocal lessons. 🙂
I’ve stalled at creating new music…but I am definitely feeling like it’s time to record some stuff. My main recording computer cooked a power supply last weekend, and fortunately that’s all that cooked, so after a $30 replacement it’s back up and running, but it scared me. I’m a creative person that hasn’t been creating, and that makes me feel like a fraud. I need to DO SOME SHIT. So I will.
And hopefully it’ll be worthy of posting here in Bloggington.
I FINALLY DID IT! I played a solo show this past Saturday. I’m quite excited about it. I had a pile of people come see me, and I recorded the whole thing on cruddy video (but good audio), so I will be posting clips here at some point. I played a broad mix of pop and rock stuff and it was very well-received by the audience. The owners of the place I played were very happy and said I did a great job. So, does this mean it’s going to happen on a regular basis now? I certainly hope so. Time to go build a website for this new endeavor…
When I was a small child, living in East Islip, NY, there are a few hazy memories that for some reason stick with me (we moved away when I was five years old). One of those memories was of our neighbors, the Infantes. I remember they had a dog. I remember they had a 1960s or early 1970s Chevy Impala that they used to park in the street. And I remember that their son Mike loved the album “Best Of Cream” that my dad had. So from a very very early age, Cream was on my radar.
When I got to be about 12 or 13, I started to become really obsessed with the idea of playing music – of actually making it myself. This new idea was largely a product of a new friend I made when my family moved from the Bay Area in California to central New Jersey near Princeton. His name was Ty Phillips, and he was very inspiring to me. He played trumpet, and he had a little Casio keyboard (an MT-100) that he used to make little compositions on. He also liked to hear music his dad would play for him. I always loved when my dad did that, too. And one of the bands my dad would play for me was Cream.
I remember being enchanted by the raw power of “Sunshine Of Your Love” and the weirdness of “SWLABR” and its tale of rainbows with beards, and I remember being moved by the propulsive live track “Crossroads” and its amazing guitar playing. But my favorite song – and still one of my favorite songs of all time – was “Badge”. Propelled by Jack Bruce’s signature bass line and his high-but-not-feminine vocal performance, it has lyrics that made almost no sense to me at all, and still don’t, but the music is so captivating I’ve never cared. That bass line is one of the first bass lines I ever learned – it’s a major part of what made me want to become a bassist. And that middle section before the guitar solo with the phase-shifted guitar pattern might be one of the most fantastic bits of music ever recorded.
Second to “Badge” was the song “White Room”. I always loved the thumping, almost orchestral-sounding intro with Ginger Baker’s pounding drum pattern and the sustaining guitar harmonies. Then the song takes off into muscular verses with a descending chord pattern that countless classic rock acts would ape in their own compositions. And then pretty falsetto singing in the chorus with wah-wah guitar that made me want to own a wah pedal immediately even before I knew what one was. It’s amazing that such a noodly, wanky band like The Cream had so many tightly-constructed pop songs. I guess they sort of lived a double life, though…tightly-constructed recorded music, insane improvisational live shows.
Over the years, I sort of wore out that “Best of Cream” record. Even when I first stole it from my dad it had a scratch on “White Room” that made me think that the line “black roof country” is going to go, “black roof-black roof-black roof…” When I finally got “Strange Brew – The Very Best of Cream” on CD in my 20s, I never even realized that the version of White Room on that vinyl LP I had was not only scratched, but it was an EDIT! There was even more of this wonderful song to enjoy.
And so, as a tribute to a major bass and vocal hero of mine, Jack Bruce, I submit the next Bathroom Schizo offering – “White Room” direct from my (off-)white (bath)room:
If you stay until the end, I’ve added a short clip of my old band from Jacksonville, Slaphappy, performing “Sunshine Of Your Love” at a show in January 2005, shortly before it ended. I hope you enjoy this little tribute and may Jack Bruce rest in peace. I’m glad his music is still around to make us all happy and challenge those of us who try to recreate it. I know I’m a better musician because he was one of the people I strived to emulate.
Yes, in the next few weeks I’ll be recording a large pile of new videos from my bathroom, probably releasing a new one every few days. This is the first one, with a Green Day “classic”.
So my time with Nudge has come to an end. I won’t go into gory details publicly of my displeasure with how the situation was handled, but it basically came down to scheduling issues that I created by demanding that my weekends with my kids are free. Priorities, you know? I do wish them well…
The good thing is it frees me up for finally having more ownership in my musical endeavors. Whether that’s a new power trio with me back on bass with my buddies from The Extractors Ed and Lee, a bunch of solo acoustic gigs, an acoustic duo of some sort, or finally working on my album, it’s a brave new world, and this time, it’s going to be MINE.
I have to start making shit instead of just talking about it or regurgitating it. Talking about it makes you an entertainer, agent or a critic. Making it makes you an artist. And I’m tired of not being an artist. (Though I won’t stop being an entertainer, too, because that pays…)