Squeech music update (shameless self-promotion)

[Squeech]

One reason I haven't posted here in a dog's age is because I've been writing and recording these songs. Back at my first DU get-together in Cambridge, at the People's Republik, I passed out cassettes of my then-new song "Welcome to Kyoto," a knock at Smirky's prototypically short-sighted decision to blow off the Kyoto protocols. I promised that there would be more to come.

Well, it's almost here. I did three more songs with the engineer who helped me with "Kyoto," the semi-legendary Chuck U, who also co-runs the "No Censorship Radio" show on WMBR, produces occasional radio news spots for whatever they call the successor to Pacifica News, and in his copious free time (ha ha) plays with me in an art-rock band called Urban Ambience. Chuck is fearless, both in terms of his politics (he makes me look centrist) and his music-- I can explain my ideas to him in terms of Cage or Penderecki or Shoukichi Kina, and not only does he know what I mean but he's gung-ho to try it out and see what it sounds like. Plus there's a humongous advantage in that anything we do that comes out well, he'll use on his show-- guaranteed airplay :-)

So we now have finished versions of "Risk" and "American Dream." The former is actually an old song, dating from Reagan's covert proxy wars in Central America, using the well-known strategy war game as an allegory, the idea being that what makes it possible for our leaders to prosecute such wars is that they always do their planning in their situation rooms, moving little wooden pieces around on the table, and thereby avoid having to witness the real fighting and bleeding and dying. (I'd done a previous recording of it years ago, more of a prog-rock version with massive synthesizer orchestration, sounding like ELP or Genesis with Nigel Tufnel sitting in-- profoundly unfashionable!) "American Dream" is more typical singer/songwriter fare, gentle chording in the key of D and a wan, vulnerable voice, and lyrics about how our mercantilist society convinces us to cast our personal well-being in terms of peer status and the stuff we own.

But the real corker is "Man Behind the Curtain," my punk-rock attack on the monkey in the WhiteWash House. In addition to the aggressive guitar and double-tracked vocals, we're assembling a sound effects track that will hopefully illuminate the lyrics, a Pink Floyd sort of thing (although my own inspiration was "Lather" by the Jefferson Airplane). For instance, the verse about the "Mission Accomplished" photo-op on the USS Lincoln has jets taking off-- in wide-screen stereo, which if you listen to on headphones will cramp up your neck due to shear stress :-) This is the kind of thing Chuck and I do for fun. It'll be so dense that we'll also have to do a simpler mix with just guitar and vocal for anybody that just wants to hear the words!

Then yesterday I started recording my non-political set at the home studio of Frank Gerace and Cheryl Wanner, who as well as being a lovely couple and maintaining the most fascinating home this side of Gomez and Morticia's collectively constitute the goth/Celtic group Dreamchild. (They also produced Tim Mungenast's record, on which I played some bass and guitar.) Frank let me play his Guild acoustic, a wonderfully warm and responsive instrument, so I laid down guitar tracks for five songs, ranging from love songs to a little ditty about obsessive-compulsive disorder, plus a slow air by the ancient Irish harper Turlough O'Carolan. And, emboldened by my success at the above (I was really under-prepared in terms of both rehearsal and sleep, so I was afraid the session would turn out disastrous) I hauled out my mandolin and did this ersatz Celtic waltz tune I'd written a zillion years ago. I love mandolin, but I hadn't really incorporated it in my thinking about the project, so I'm glad I thought to pack it up and use it. (I also added it to the most adolescent of the love songs, entitled "Epistemology.")

Good thing the guitar tracks went so well, because we have to do my vocals next, and not only do I have distinct shortcomings as a singer but there's a lot about this repertoire that will seriously threaten my vocal range. (I don't get my best ideas when I'm playing; instead I hear these random scraps of song in my head, and then I try to build performable songs out of these figments, which don't often have anything to do with my own skills or technique or even taste. This is why I'm such an inconsistent songwriter, and why I'm not necessarily the most appropriate performer of my own work.) Here's where Cheryl comes in, because she's had vocal training and knows how to impart some of the trade secrets of breath and pitch and relaxation to amateurs such as myself. But I predict that getting good performances out of me will still be reminiscent of pulling teeth. (This was the main service they did for Tim, who's even a weaker singer than I am.)

There will also be a few more instruments: I want a trumpet chorale on "Broken Column," my love song to Frida Kahlo; I want naive fiddle on "Restless," the OCD song; I want Celtic harp (which Cheryl plays) on the love song I'm calling "Scribes" unless and until I can think of a better title; and then there's "Nature Mort," a meditation on life after death that I wrote in the depths of winter's gloom, which we'll turn into another humongous experiment with weird noises and electronic effects.

Short term, I intend to package up the stuff from Chuck U's sessions this week and duplicate several dozen CD-Rs. (I got a new computer with CD burning capability, just for this purpose.) There's a venue in New York called the Peoples' Voice Cafe at the Workmen's Circle (45 East 33rd Street in Manhattan, between Madison and Park) that's presented the best young political singer/songwriters I've heard since the end of the '60s, and they're having an open mike this coming Saturday, and I intend to go down there and sing "Kyoto" and "Man Behind the Curtain" and hopefully sell a few CDs. Then on the 29th Tim and I have a duo gig at Java Jane's, a delightful little coffee shop in the Boston suburb of Billerica, and I'll use the occasion as an ad hoc "CD release party." And I'll ramp up my open mike appearances (which petered out at the same rate as my DU posting) and try to get more visible gigs. The long range goal is to sing my anti-Bush songs as widely as I can between now and November-- paying particular attention to New Hampshire, the closest swing state, not to mention where Mrs. Squeech grew up and where my in-laws still reside. (I think they all identify as independents, and I think they all intend to vote for Kerry this time around.)

So if you're a DUer and you make it to either of these events, please identify yourself!