Tag Archives: music

Usual Rubbish

Refried show.

Hey, Matt .. what was that joke about the wooden balls again? Oh, right. Nah … it doesn’t work very well without the visual. Scratch that.

Oh, hello. We are, of course, working on the next installment of our podcast. It’s like the freaking Forbin Project, for chrissake. Takes us months to write the sucker, record it, edit it, compose and record songs, cut it all together, upload it, then collapse in a heap. (That last part actually happens kind of quickly.) Sometimes you want to just shout, “Enough!”, throw up your hands and walk away. Mic drop! But no, my friends, no … the show must go on.

That said, well … it HAS been kind of a long time. So we dropped another installment of our Ned Trek podcast – that’s the show that is just Ned Trek and no random jabbering between me and my brother. This month’s installment is extracted from one of last year’s THIS IS BIG GREEN episodes, Ned Trek 23: Mitt’s Brain. Based on the Spock’s Brain episode of classic Star Trek, it’s full of ridiculous plot departures and snarky portrayals of neocon freak bastards. Just the kind of thing you’ve come to expect from a Big Green podcast. On top of all that, there are 6 original Big Green songs in the mix, not available in Och, these cumberbunds are a wee bit tight.stores or on any album (yet). I could tell you what time code numbers they appear at in the show, but then you would just skip the whole play or simply laugh at my presumption, so I’ll forgo that.

The songs are, well, some of my favorites from the last year or so. I’d say number one in my book is “Two Lines”, a song sung by Lt. Sulu describing his artistic angst over being limited to two-line speeches throughout the entire three-year run of classic Star Trek. The chorus commandeers some of these two-line speeches to communicate Sulu’s despair:

Captain, the controls are frozen
the helm won’t respond; we’re being pulled inside
Aye, aye, my career is broken
like a giant hand has me in its hold
Captain, the controls are frozen
manual override is completely out
Aye, sir, I’ve been trying
but my shields are down and I cannot last

Then there’s a song about a yellow submarine. Actually not – there is one Pearle song called “Send in Some Advisers” which, well … the name pretty much says it. Anywho, the show it totally refried, so enjoy it … a second time.

Usual Rubbish

Vox test.

Hmmmm. That doesn’t sound quite right. Can you put a little more reverb on it? No, no … not just the plate. I mean generation reverb. Make me sound like I’m at the bottom of a well. Yeah, like that. Nope … nope, still no good. Bugger.

Oh, hi. Just caught us in the grips of an artistic quandary – the kind Big Green gets caught up in all the time: How to make a track not suck too badly. I just did a vocal on one of Matt’s songs an I’m not crazy about it. Sounds a bit too nasal for my tastes. Just try to sing like a full-throated Mitt Romney, and with that I say good luck to you. I’m at the point of auditioning ghost singers, kind of like what the Monkees used or the Partridge Family used to do … you know, the Partridges would move their lips and you would hear the mellifluous voices of some unknown bird-named stock singers; perhaps the Loon Family, down on their luck. Yeah, well … maybe we gotta get some of that shit.

Trouble is, when you live in an abandoned hammer mill and you have no money, putting out an open call for auditions is not an option. Ergo, we try to draw on the talent we already have. Like anti-Lincoln, for instance. I thought, inasmuch as he is the antimatter doppelganger of our great emancipator, that he would be endowed with the exact opposite of his namesake’s reedy voice. I imagined booming, pear-shaped tones emanating from that bearded gob, but no dice, my friends, no dice. Apparently that’s one thing that stays the same in the antimatter universe – we all have the same voices, even if we eat corn on the cob vertically instead of horizontally.

Psst ... Who's singing your parts?Next up in the internal audition queue was, well … Marvin (my personal robot assistant). This didn’t go very well either. Picture that scene in Room Service when the Marx Brothers are trying to pass customs with Maurice Chevalier’s passport, attempting to imitate him convincingly. Marvin was like Harpo with the phonograph strapped to his back. He’s got a bunch of scratchy recordings stored in his internal hard drive (or tape drive – he is getting a little long in the tooth), and when he sings he selects individually sung words from that entire library. It’s great if you want a mashup, but …. I don’t.

So, back to the drawing board. Or the singing board, more appropriately. Me-me-me. Who’s on the hook this time? Me-me-me.

Usual Rubbish

What’s that they’ve written?

I’ve taken to starting the day with a brief lyric from our storied past. (Mostly a two-storied past. We haven’t lived in a lot of high-rises in our time.) For some reason, this morning a particular song of Matt’s popped up, and I found myself humming along to this stanza from Natural Laws:

What’s that they’ve written all
up and down the wall?
Something about suction and my face.
I don’t know what they mean
or why it’s illustrated in green; is it
some tasteless reference to my
love for you?

Some people recite Shakespeare; others read Supreme Court decisions to their children. Me? My tiny mind focuses on the familiar, and there are few things more familiar to me than the boatload of crazy-ass songs I’ve been living with for the past three decades. Lots of material there – probably a couple hundred songs, poorly recorded on cassette 4-track decks or something meaner, all demos. The copyright folks down at the Library of Congress must think we’re a couple of crazy motherfucking crackers, though I’m sure most of the cassette collections we’ve sent to them as deposit copies have long since turned to dust. (They do digital file uploads now, of course.)

Us in the eighties (at an awesome wedding).Matt’s always been a very prolific crackpot. Myself? Less so, though my cumulative output over the years is less well-documented. Matt recorded practically from the very beginning of his songwriting days, whereas many of my songs floated around in my head and never got much farther (nor, frankly, deserved to). To this day, Matt writes about six or seven songs to my one. Not sure how he does it with that day job of his – tramping around the wilderness, feeding beavers, chasing falcons, snapping photos of butterflies, etc. My songwriting habits are pretty bad. Sometimes on a weekend I’ll pick up a guitar and play the same chords I always play, except in a different order. (One of these days I’m going to run out of orders.)

Of course, there’s always the piano. But most of my composing happens in the old brain case. If I don’t get a song in my head first, it doesn’t usually go anywhere. Sometimes I fram on the keys, record a snippet on my phone, and build it out from there, but usually not. Hey … whatever works, right? So long as you and the brick walls listen, we’ll keep tossing it out there. That’s how we roll.