Tag Archives: songwriting

Usual Rubbish

Hammer day.

What, raining again? Huh. Very well. Looks like it’s rainy day schedule, kids. Coloring books and tunafish sandwiches. Except that we don’t have tunafish. So … I’ll have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) make crayon sandwiches. Gotta make do as best we can, boys.

Hey, what would you do if you were stuck in an abandoned hammer mill and the weather went all pear-shaped? Probably something similar. They say that musicians do their best work behind closed doors, removed from all distractions. They also say that more songs are written on rainy days than on sunny ones – the theory being that crappy weather makes songwriters want to stay home more, and home with nothing to do means picking up the guitar or banging on the piano. Wanna know what else “they” say? What the fuck, I don’t know. Ask them.

This might be a good time to write some songs. As I’ve pointed out in these pages before, Matt and I have different approaches to songwriting, so the time may be right for one of us; likely not both of us. Matt writes songs on the hoof, tromping about the hills, streams, and woods, singing verses into his smart phone while he’s feeding the beavers, then harmonizing the song later when he gets within grabbing distance of a guitar.

Big Green in 1988My process is much more gradual. It usually starts in the shower with me humming some random bit of nothing. I do it and do it, and sometimes something bobs up that works with the various thoughts running through my head. I scribble it down on a cheap-ass notepad and maybe, just maybe, sing melody fragments into my phone. Then I take a swing at it every time I’m near the notepad. Matt’s more like Thoreau, communing with nature and all the rest of it. I’m like some tin pan alley hack, trying to turn nothing into something and usually failing. Hard to believe we were ever any more disciplined than this sorry spectacle.

Turns out, we were, as I mentioned last week. I reviewed some more of those old recordings with Jeremy Shaw, who played guitar with us for a while, and some of his parts were amazing. Then I started cutting up the video program, and as an experiment I exported a soundcheck we did using fragments of Sensory Man. I’ll post that when I’ve got the song to post as well. (The audio needs a little help. The video looks like us in somebody’s garage, which is pretty close to the truth.)

This may turn out to be a total YouTube summer … if it keeps raining.

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.

Usual Rubbish

Knob turning.

That doesn’t sound right to me. Twist the knob a bit further. No, no – not that knob! The one below it. Give it a good twist. Wrong way! That sounds horrible. Try the next knob down.

Oh, man … these sound consoles are so confusing. All those knobs and buttons and sliders and levers, each one doing a whole different thing. And then there’s the analog/digital thing, so a lot of the knobs and switches are assignable, which means they do DIFFERENT things for DIFFERENT people. Holy shit, that’s complicated. My brain hurts.

You see … that’s the trouble when you spend most of your life writing and playing songs and very little of your life learning the complex technologies involved in putting those songs across. Like most musicians, our reaction is … you mean I have to learn TWO things? That’s outrageous! Double duty, indeed. (As you can see, we are truly in the mainstream of American thought and sensibility.) I think about this every time I listen to old tracks from our various albums and ramshackle collections of unreleased material. I remember the hours of pulling random levers, spinning random knobs, etc., that lead to the final product and I ask myself: How? How is it that it sounds like anything at all?

Too damn complex, Mitch ... Must be a reason that sound comes out of the speakers when you play our recordings. All I know is that we make noises, put them into machines, and voila. Maybe Mitch Macaphee goes in there after we’re done and fiddles around with the sound molecules, perhaps in hopes of precipitating some kind of sonic explosion. Perhaps not. (I know that there’s usually an subsequent economic explosion, or implosion, to put the matter more precisely.)

As you know, our process for writing songs is somewhat unorthodox. I’ve described it in these blog pages before. Matt pretty much writes songs in his sleep, which explains a lot. I tend to write best in the shower, but I usually don’t have much to show for it other than some sodden, blotchy shreds of paper.

Do what you do best; that’s what I was taught. Now if I can just work out exactly what that is.