Get Help: Recent Episodes
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We know your New Year’s resolution is to attend every Get Help show in 2012. It’s ours, too. So we’re going to make it very easy for everyone: there will be only one Get Help show in 2012. Yes, as of the close of show January 6, Get Help will be taking a break from our obligations as rock’s only living supergroup of unknown musicians. It has been a magnificent five and a half years being Get Help, and at some point, or points, in the future, we hope we can reform and resume our land-grabbing ways, even if [...]Continue reading The Get Help Series Finale...
This is the easiest 18 cents that anyone ever made. As the proud co-owner of the copyright of this song, I’ve tasted a drop of the adrenaline a con man must feel after he’s bid his mark goodbye.
If there was ever a fear that alien hostiles existed and were looking to invade Earth, I would nominate this video as a pacifier to be beamed out into space. It truly sends the message that there’s not much going on here, and it’s probably just as well to move along.
Hosted by: The BFFGirlsShow
Song: A remix of “The [...]Continue reading Get Help on Youtube #2. Need Video Ideas!...
There were a few monumental events in my life lo this past year, and they include but are not limited to (in chronological order): my running the New York City Marathon, my presence at a “classic lineup” reunion show of Guided by Voices in New York City, my wife and I having a baby boy, and my attendance at the first Archers of Loaf reunion show in Brooklyn. The first two happened on the same day. The latter two, thankfully, did not. I hasten to add that obviously these events were not equal in significance. In each, however, I [...]Continue reading Archangel...
Mike and I did some interviews recently. They were fun to do, and I think they are fun to read as well.
The first is an article by Jen Kelly that appeared in Popmatters.
The second is an interview I did with Brendan Carroll for the Jersey Journal, a local paper.
Enjoy!
Since Tony and I got ourselves into this licensing game, we’ve discovered that a number of our clips get selected by Youtube posters. To make this blog a little more semi-regular, we’re posting some of the vids that feature Get Help songs.
Let’s kick it off with a clip that was sent to us by Dan Howard. Dan was kind enough to hunt Get Help down after finding this photo montage of Heath Ledger on the set of ‘The Dark Knight’.
Link (posted by batmanjokertwoface): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiSASwPi0wA
Song: This is an instrumental, no drums version of ‘All Else Fails’. [...]Continue reading Get Help on Youtube #1: The Dark Knight...
I’m proud to present the newest entry to the Get Help catalog; the first song that we’ve finished since the release of ‘The Good Green Earth’. Now that the media hoopla has faded and we’ve completed our exhaustive 2-city tour, it’s exciting to get back to the simple task of writing and recording songs. I ended up spending 4 1/2 months of on-again off-again work on ‘Weightless’.
This song is as much an exercise as it is a song; it’s influenced heavily by Brian Eno’s “On Some Faraway Beach”, which takes a musical idea and repeats it while building [...]Continue reading Weightless...
You Should Be Home by Now is the 8th track on the 11-song The Good Green Earth. Fourth from the last. The “Deep Cut”. If albums were reefs, you’d have to strap on your snorkel gear and swim underneath to side B where the deep cuts live and thrive. Great, great songs survive for years under there, out of the direct sunlight, accessible to only [...]Continue reading You Should Be Home By Now...
Here is some new music for you, one of our more favoritest tracks from our forthcoming album, The Good Green Earth. This song can be downloaded here and is also a part of the worthy package of free music that is the new Midriff Records Sampler, which can be downloaded at the Midriff Records site.
This is the rare bird that has not made a previous appearance on the blog in some form or another. And there is a [...]Continue reading It’s Only Your Head...
A quick note that we have a live performance coming up this weekend: Saturday, March 26, 9pm Fontana’s 105 Eldridge Street (btw Grand and Broome) New York NY
We will be opening for our buddies in The Fades.
We will be taking the stage at 9pm sharp! Be there, won’t you?
A reminder that you can add our site to your RSS reader, while simultaneously subscribing to our podcast via iTunes, granting you immediate access to all the musical ideas, tire wax jingles and new adventures in reverb we’ve ever felt the [...]Continue reading Get Help at Fontana’s March 26, RSS, blog song on the radio!...
A quick notice that we’re compiling some live performances in the weeks ahead:
I will be heading to SXSW and performing as a Get Help solo unit at the Midriff Records/Liberty & Union Day Party on March 17. I will also be performing with The Beatings later that same day, all the while trying to resist the temptress that is the $2.00 Texas pint. Hoofa.
But if you can’t make it to Texas, be forewarned that Get Help has a show as a fully functioning four piece unit on Saturday, March [...]Continue reading Upcoming Appearances...
It’s good to be back! We had no plans to let this blog languish for as many months as we did. I hope the time off gave you the impression that we’ve been furiously working on a ever-growing quilt of songs, compositions and structured noise-fray that now bears a slow unfold over the months to come; that our little blog hiatus wasn’t a hiatus at all, or even a retreat, but a mission, a quest to quietly amass. If you didn’t already have that impression, just reread that mouthful of a last sentence until you’re a believer. We’ve been [...]Continue reading Lives we Lead...
Wow, it has been a long time since we posted something new here, but it has been, aside from our Fail Blog addiction, time well spent. We kicked off 2010 with a blizzard of recording at the magnificent Liberty and Union Recording Co., putting together the tracks that would become our second full-length album, The Good Green Earth. We spent [...]Continue reading The Good Green Earth...
The powerhouse of our Incidental Music album has found itself once again on the telly, in a commercial for the NBA’s charity, NBA Cares. Enjoy!
It’s hard to believe this band of ours has been around for 4 years now. That’s pretty frickin’ exciting, if you ask me. To ape a Larry David philosophy, I don’t understand all the fuss about the five’s and oh’s and using their increments to celebrate our anniversaries and set up meeting times. What’s wrong with setting up your lunch date on a perfectly good 12 after the hour? So I’m celebrating 4 years like it was, well, 5 years. It’s more than a perfectly good block of time. It’s an administration.
Get Help has seen a “wild ride” [...]Continue reading Far Away Now...
I had a dream about this song once. It’s a dream I have from time to time, where the song changes, but the effect it has on my psyche I am sure is invariably the same. I will call it a “songwriter’s dream”, although as far as I know, this is the only supergroup-of-unknown-musicians-with-an-mp3-blog blog to mention such a thing: I am in a supermarket, or an elevator, and instead of having no clothes on, or finding out I am a dead fish wearing oven mitts, what happens is a song comes over the loudspeaker that is all but [...]Continue reading The Pretty Boy with an Ugly Face...
We’re proud to announce that two of our songs, Carne Asada (available on our album) and SPF 45 (available above) will be on the TV! Both songs will appear in the PBS series Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth, episodes “Seattle” (airing this weekend!) and “Mexico”.
This elates those of us at Get Help HQ for several reasons. When Get Help originally kicked off, the idea was to sell jingles and cash in. In pursuit of that end, we named all of our songs after Mexican menu items, a market slam-dunk. It was partly self-effacing, partly laziness, [...]Continue reading SPF 45 (Get Help Gets on TV)...
Somewhere in this apartment, on the back of an unused band postcard was a list of 10-12 things to do that I was supposed to do the next morning, no doubt scratched out with a nearby marker found late the night before. Pretty simple stuff. A sample: (1) buy soap, (2) wash dishes, (3) find jeans (4) finish new song.
The first three are confidently crossed-out with a much more indelible marker, but #4 was going to take a little more time. By design, of course–items 5-12 would require some serious effort, and we procrastinators make lists like this [...]Continue reading Yelling Theater...
It’s been a really nice summer. Not too hot. A bit more rain than usual, but that hasn’t hurt anyone. Down in Virginia where my parents live, they finally got the lawn green. I don’t know how the tomatoes came out, but the string beans from their garden were absolutely delicious.
I cat-sat this weekend. He sleeps 18 hours a day, yet can effortlessly jump 4 feet into the air onto a windowsill between the 5″ gap between the window bars. We had a rousing game of shoelace, which he won.
I rode the Cyclone at Coney Island [...]Continue reading Big Mistake...
Getting a new song in under the buzzer, and on the tree of life, it’s a tortoise. Or perhaps, a glacier. Something about the continental crawl of this one resonates with me. It came about from some lazy playing, putting the capo bar all over the neck of the guitar, rambling into the mic, dropping from F to F minor. I really need to change my strings.
Anyways, sometimes you’re a big rush to get somewhere, sometimes, you’re definitely not. Sometimes you don’t think it’s ever gonna see the light of day, and sometimes, it definitely don’t. Once [...]Continue reading Crooked Streets...
Finally, something new for the blog. But we have not entirely been sitting on our buttocks lo these many weeks. As enjoyable as that activity might be, we’ve been working on our live act. Our handful of loyal readers know that Get Help’s recent history saw the induction of Gene and Brian into the band, thus ending our long-distance, illicit affair with Will and Dan from Boston’s Spanish Armada. I also got married to a lovely gal and had a wedding and a honeymoon on a faraway island and all that stuff. Somehow amidst the transitioning of these [...]Continue reading I Guess, But You Know...
Good morning. I was going to start this post with the disclaimer that it’s been way too long since I contributed a post to our site here, but I have the sinking feeling that if I went back and looked at my last couple, they’d start the same way. Instead, let me start by saying it’s been extremely, graciously recent since my last post, and hope you don’t go back and check.
I’m happy to announce that since the last post, things of consequence and good fortune have happened: namely, Tony got married this past weekend. We also introduced [...]Continue reading The First Song On The Next Get Help Album...
Perhaps we’re getting a little too ensconced in the current news cycle, but nevertheless, we’re going to “play the economy card”, as in: “in this economy, who can pass up free beer?”
We’re pretty sure we don’t know anyone who can. So if you are within the sound of our voice, please come see us, as we will be imminently performing in real time amid discounted suds:
Thursday April 23, 8pm Get Help @ Trash Bar 256 Grand Street Williamsburg, Brooklyn $6.00
We will be taking the stage at 8pm. Through some miracle of manufacturing we are [...]Continue reading Get Help @ Trash Bar Apr 23...
A new song for the blog. February and March seemed to go by in a whirlwind: I was busing my butt up to Providence and back every weekend to record with The Beatings during February, crashing on sofas and floors in a manner that no longer suits the mid-30s man all too well. But the good news is that The Beatings have a new album just about in the can, all that’s left is to jump up and down on top of the lid and close it.
But the Get Help machine never stops working, not unlike the Air [...]Continue reading Safe As It Ever Was...
Usually we’re not above the sort of puns that could curdle milk in a glass, but when they’re handed to you like this, even we have think twice. A stale cookie might help, though.
Yes, we’re playing live again, and soon:
Thursday, Feb 12, 9pm Get Help @ Rehab 25 Avenue B New York NY
Rehab, formerly Club Midway, has been our home away from home, even though we really never settled down to begin with. If you’ve seen us play live in New York City, odds are favorable that it was at this fine little joint.
Get [...]Continue reading Get Help @ Rehab Feb 12...
While going through my Garageband folder, I rediscovered this tune. It wasn’t entirely forgotten; it’s been sitting around for a long time, on and off the ipod, and I’m not sure why the reluctance in posting it. One day I didn’t like the lyrics, the next day, I did.
Technically, the genesis for this song came about from noodling on the classical guitar; I did some detuning and finger picking on the open mic, and managed to get the sounds out of it you hear here. I’m not quite with it enough to classically noodle and competently sing, so [...]Continue reading So Slowly, She Goes...
As our handful of faithful readers know, Get Help performed at Andy and Jen’s Flophouse way back in November of ought six. It was an eye-opening performance for us, and was fittingly enough also our first. Their living room and our DNA are intertwined, and I am speaking figuratively, of course.
If you’re not familiar with the Band in Boston Podcast and what they do, you should get over there now and read up. There are pages and pages of great performances, served up in [...]Continue reading Band in Boston, Revisited: Early Hours...
Well thank Prince that year’s over. It’s 2009 and I hope to write more songs than I did last year.
Probably the crown prince of the short ’08 pile was this Labor Day track, which grew out of an obsession with ‘Les Yper Sound’ from Stereolab. Off Emperor Tomato Ketchup, it’s the perfect example of their catchy sound + Marxist lyrics. This here track is instrumental, so you’ll have to come up with your own Marxist lyrics for the time being.
The real draw for me lately is to write songs without guitars playing power chords. I feel like [...]Continue reading Labor Day...
Perhaps interesting only to me: one of my new year’s resolutions was to organize and compile all the random Garageband tracks I have, born from moments of inspiration, appointed nights of impassioned hackery, and the all-time favorite: drunken, sloven doodling. My filing system is horrid, usually a series of numbers to indicate the date — from which I have discovered my own mild numeric dyslexia — or a “keyword” in the title that I’m sure meant something at the time. As I offload more and more of my brain into my imac, google account, cell phone, and what have [...]Continue reading Warm Gray, Submerged...
As usual, when you start something with a minimal amount of thought and have no idea as to how it will end, it takes on a life of its own, sinks its claws into you, and won’t let you walk away. This one started as a Yamaha experiment, just cycling through the sound dial and learning what this thing can do, and four days later I’m all looping and panning and eq’ing until two in the morning. It would have been very easy to loops three chords, mess with some knobs, and call it night. But once you save [...]Continue reading Reminders...
I am happy to announce that Get Help is now in possession of its very own Yamaha PSR-E413. What this means to the world at large is probably insignificant, but I find these instruments to be a great source of fun and inspiration. And it keeps me off the streets at night.
This particular tune was written during a drunken jam session with E.R. from The Beatings, a session which also produced this entertaining variant on one of our live favorites. I’m working on getting the synthy [...]Continue reading The Pedestrian Song...
Since the album came out, I have found little time to make music. Life kicks in, and months pass by.
A sedative is to take a beloved song and reexamine it. This song is from arguably the best indie rock EP ever released — Archers of Loaf, “vs. the Greatest of All Time.” Will from Get Help told me this was one of the 5 best covers he’s ever heard. How could he be wrong?
Come to think of it, the mid ’90s produced the greatest of all time glut of indie rock EPs. I don’t know what was [...]Continue reading Freezing Point...
It is with much pride, conceit, vanity, and egotism that we announce our debut album The End of the New Country will be available on the mighty Midriff Records come Oct 14. Much to our astonishment, The End of the New Country was picked up early by the extremely, extremely intelligent and all-around-awesome Robin Hilton at NPR, who gave it a pretty positive review. Thus spake National Public Radio:
September 8, 2008 – A self-proclaimed “supergroup of unknown [...]Continue reading The End of the New Country, the album...
One of the greatest listening experiences in the world is We’re an American Band by Yo La Tengo. There are days when it is, without question, the greatest listening experience in the universe — even without headphones — and nothing else, not even Dave Atell’s “Skanks for the Memories”, comes close. Tied for first is Visions of Johanna. If Jimi Hendrix did to Visions of Johanna what he did to All Along the Watchtower, there would be no need for a top 10 songs in the world, because it would be all ten. Probably more. Top twelves would need [...]Continue reading Little Symbols...
The building I work in is about the size of a city block, and we share it with a lighting design company. While venturing into the beeping nether regions of our castle in my quest for snail mail, I heard through the walls a repeating bassline from some mix tape one of the lighting design people was playing. Through walls, the guitars, bass and vocals of familiar songs can take on quite enjoyable alien forms, especially when combined with unseen motors, roaring exhaust fans, and the continuous renovation of a workplace’s life-support system. Whatever the song was, I went [...]Continue reading A Brittle World...
We recently got a nice couple of mentions from Ryan of Ryan’s Smashing Life. He plugged our recent Boston show and posted Red Jacket Orchards (from our upcoming record) as, well, a song to listen to, over at his recent guest spot at The Plugg.. Thanks, Ryan.
I’m a big Fugazi fan. Not because of the $5-$7 show thing; that was just an excuse for men who were 36 to keep dressing like 18-year olds. Believe me, I’m 36. Those baggy shorts and 20 year old t-shirts prolong your life.
In this song’s case, I was drawn [...]Continue reading A Plug & a Song...
Get Help will be performing soon, and also imminently:
Saturday, June 28, 9pm The Church 69 Kilmarnock Street Boston, MA 21+, $8.00
We will be performing with our label mates, The Spanish Armada (12am), as well as the fine fellows in Shadwell (10pm) and The Daily Pravda (11pm).
We will also be annexing some ships from the Spanish Armada for a few songs. It has worked quite well in the past, hopefully soon we will have some evidence of that to post for you. Keep the faith.
This song was originally conceived one day on the Light Rail when I decided I was going to go home and write an entire concept album in one sitting. If there is anyone left still reading after that sentence, let me just say that I didn’t even come close to achieving this goal. Not even an EP. It was a complete disaster, both in terms of matériel and morale, not unlike the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It was dead on arrival. Fortunately there were no witnesses and I had an alibi. Possibly, I might be exaggerating. Let’s [...]Continue reading General Winter...
Mike and I have finished recording an album. Our friend Eric is mastering it, and doing a superlative job at that. His enthusiasm for the record, thus far, has only been matched by Chris and Ted, who engineered it. I’m not sure even Mike and I are as excited about the welfare of this album as these guys are. Anyways, I was headed over to Mike’s apartment one night when Eric called to discuss his first roughs of the album, and vent about some technical difficulties that [...]Continue reading Eric Lang...
Months ago, I saw a motorcycle cop wipe out on First Avenue here in New York.
Ever been walking down a street with your iPod and heard some city sound that infiltrated the song, and weren’t sure if it was a part of the song? This happens to me all the time. Usually construction noises, as my east village turns into a skyscraper Epcot, but on this day, I distinctly heard the Doppler siren in my ear as I walked up. It turns out that some sheepishly-dressed maggot on a cellphone didn’t, and was crossing the street as this [...]Continue reading Eyes Swim...
About 8 or 9 years ago, while on tour in the wilds of Tennessee, The Beatings met a young drummer named Robby, who was performing with us at the Pilot Light in Knoxville in a band called Pontius Co-Pilot. Through some miracle we kept in touch and met again on the next major Beatings run, where he opened for us in Louisville and I think was the first person to do a live cover of one of our songs (certainly the first to do one solo). Since then, the Beatings have made (and lost contact [...]Continue reading The Fanged Robot...
Another product of goofing off at the Yamaha station with a recently purchased RC-20 XL (now with loop fade-out!). This was mostly done using a finger bass setting, and overlaying the same part multiple times through an RV-3 pedal, which generated that weird scratchy sound I find so spooky. Mike swears he’s going to put words to this one and when he does, he can change the name. I don’t think it’s finished by a long shot, but still, people seem to like it. Then again, those people are my friends. Anyways, along with Early Hours this song [...]Continue reading Tumbleweeds...
Clearing out the backlog with a good old instrumental. After moving to Jersey, I went through some withdrawal from being separated from the 500-channel Yamaha. I compensated by learning Garageband’s software instruments, the musical typing feature, and how to edit its digital “notes”, which increases the amount of potential instrumentation by at least, oh, six hundred bazillion. I spent a few weeks getting nowhere with all the beeps and blips and hip-hop beats and synthy violins, but from it comes some self-made morning-commute music, if nothing else. Only time will tell. To some people, synthy violins are cheesy. [...]Continue reading The Good Green Earth...
Hello, one and all. We have returned from a (gulp) 8-month exile from the blogosphere. ‘Exile’ might be a bit harsh, as it was more of a sabbatical. A sabbatical where, instead of engaging in travel, study, and/or the betterment of ourselves, we recorded an album. Well, two. Sort of. Whatever it was, exactly, that we did do, it prevented us from posting to our beloved blog, a situation we intend to rectify, right quick. We are, after all, a ‘blog band’, and to our bog, we must bland. We have not been sitting idly on our hands these [...]Continue reading …and we’re back!...
We have yet another summer performance on the horizon:
WED AUG 15 BASEBALL TAVERN BOSTON, MA
Mike and I are about to begin recording the first Get Help album, right after our first annual home run derby picnic. But before that, ten push-ups, and a garage sale fundraiser. How about this deal on an old bathroom scale? Wow. See you there!
Just a reminder that we have an imminent live performance on the horizon:
FRI JULY 27 @ 8:00 PM CLUB MIDWAY 25 Avenue B (btw 2nd and 3rd Streets) New York, NY
Another early show. And we are getting very excited about this one; it looks like we will have Shifty Dan and Lazy Thumbs Bill coming down from Boston to join us; they’re gonna make some noise and flesh out the bare bones set Mike and I rehearsed during our recent sightseeing jaunt through Connecticut. Usually Get Help practices via email, so when we can get a [...]Continue reading The Summer of Help compels you...
We conclude today’s Sasquatch sighting with a new track, ‘New Low’. This is the Get Help wheelhouse of distorted reverb guitars, this is a back-to-base guitar anthem, something you might have heard on a mid-90’s Matador sampler.
This was my first blow-through with my shiny new Pod, a wonderful tool for making music late at night in an apartment with paper thin walls and, uh, thinner-than-paper floors and ceilings.
Everything about this track was invented from finding the guitar sound. I’ve noticed that once I get a particular sound, in this case the distorted-reverb rhythm track, song ideas [...]Continue reading New Low...
It’s hot in the city streets, and the city streets are hot. Help yourself to two flavors of Get Help this month:
Tuesday July 17, 9pm PA’s LOUNGE (Band in Boston Residency) Somerville, MA
Our very first show was at the Band in Boston Flophouse, and its necessity mothered some invention; invention which has left an enduring imprint on how we go about writing and playing our songs. So while we may not exactly owe them our first born…um, no. We owe them our first born. Moving on, this concert will feature the full experience: Bill, [...]Continue reading The Summer of Help continues...
I haven’t shown up in these parts for a few months; treat a post from me at our little page with the same incredulity you would a Sasquatch sighting. But there’s some housecleaning to do… In this post Tony introduces the new, (and instantly afterwards) latent feature of the Get Help Remix. In the past few months Tony and I have come to the realization that we never play the same version of a song twice. The typical GH track changes too quickly to call it evolution; mutation is a better way of putting it, or better yet, [...]Continue reading Get Help (v2)...
Compression is a (the?) wonderful beast. Used incorrectly, it’s a weapon; it’s the metal spatula, squeezing the bejesus out of the already tired-looking chicken about to be laid to rest in a grave of yellow rice at your local Halal truck.
When overused, it’s also a weapon I guess, but something more along the lines of the Death Star. It makes drums sound like surface-to-air missiles. Listen to this version with headphones.
Get Help has long studied Japanese “just-in-time” management techniques as a model of efficiency. This slightly updated version of It Begins Well grows leaps and bounds over its predecessor, it’s the 15,000 cars in a month that Hunt Stevenson had promised us; all we’ve done is throw in three gallon-drums full of drums and a tub of fuzz guitar. A new song is born, and damn if this isn’t the definitive version.
I had intimated in the previous posting that this song borrowed generously from an already commercially released recording, and all of our listener calls have [...]Continue reading It Begins (Well, Again) (v2)...
Every once in a while I still manage to delude myself into thinking I can encapsulate, in a single song, my obsession with the mnemonic redshift that comes with “growing older”. Once the earth has cooled after such an attempt, I consider myself lucky if I have scraped off something akin to lemon zest. But there are worse places to start from. I think this tune has a lot of zest. It is a salty salute, soundwise, to REM and the RockATeens, the former a part of my DNA; and the latter one of the bigger muses to [...]Continue reading Early Hours...
Mike and I have an imminent, super-secret Get Help performance on the horizon:
Friday June 8 Club Midway 25 Avenue A (btw 2nd and 3rd St) New York, NY
We will be taking the stage at 8:00pm in a dusky, twilight performance.
Unfortunately with the short notice we weren’t able to get Lucky, Lefty, and Will to join us, so it will be just Mike and I bringing the noise, in Get Help’s first New York City appearance. Not bad for a NYC band that’s been around for a year. It should be interesting. And if it isn’t, [...]Continue reading The Summer of Help...
A considerable upgrade to the original, done entirely by Mike on live guitar and drums. I had always been quite satisfied with the original guitar lead, which tickled my one-take-takes-all, leave-in-the-dropped-wine-glass, GBV mentality. But Mike apparently had bigger and better ideas, which have since left said mentality under the bookcase with the old Tascam.
Another instrumental. I moved into my friend Damon’s place in Sunset Park for a while this year, and as a result gained access to his Yamaha DGX220. I think I became as much a piece of furniture as the keyboard itself for a while there. There are about 500+ sounds on that thing, and I am pretty sure that when I moved out I had only five or six more to go.
The strings and the beats are samples from Garageband. Everything else is from the trusty DGX220. The main inspiration was to have something easy on the ears [...]Continue reading Student of Philosophy...
We are happy to announce that Get Help will be performing live very soon, in our hometown away from our hometown, Boston, MA. We will be joined once again by a talented cadre of Midriff Records recording artists in the spirit of community and punctuality that is the ethos of our existence. The details:
Tuesday, May 8, 9PM Great Scott Boston, MA
We will be appearing at the CD Release for Scuba, the newest addition to the Midriff Records family. Be sure to visit their website, which has a bunch of downloads and a great [...]Continue reading A very special Get Help...
In the midst of frustration with a long-premeditated idea that wasn’t coming together, I recorded a D to G transition with a hip-hop drum beat, just to hear something pleasant to my ears. Lo and behold, two weeks and about 40 tracks later, numerous lessons have been learned, about songwriting, computers, panning, and yes, myself. Like we are constantly reminded that the foremost predator on earth is … man … I find it pounded into me time and again that the most spontaneous and least conceptualized ideas usually lead to the most fulfilling results. Also, drop-D is slowly becoming [...]Continue reading Cool Gray Oscillating Sequence...
The Loop Station is a great tool for making a Get Help song, which features layers and layers of sound, like so much paint on a 50 year-old building in the East Village…say, mine. Paint so thick that you know the building will never fall.
Starting with a harmonic track that you can kinda hear in the back of the left side of your head, I built all these sounds rather quickly and then set to give them a decent recording. When I was most of the way through, I realize why it came so [...]Continue reading It Begins Well...
We have revised the site from its last incarnation. If you are one of the forty or so people who saw it last time, you might notice a slight difference. If you’re new to the site, please proceed in blissful ignorance of our hideous past. Download, share, and enjoy. Comments are welcome.
I was spending a Saturday in, preparing mentally for New Year’s Eve, determined to finish Light in August. I did. Makes a guy want to populate a small fictional world with gamblers, reluctant widows, and old folks full of quiet mystery. Not to mention hills and valleys of tremelo. Enjoy.
This one brings a smile to my face for some reason. A strange coming-of-age tale, full of unbridled enthusiasm. A regular three dollar bill. Started one night while insomnial.
Bought some delicious juice at a local farmers market from a place called ‘Red Jacket Orchards’. Growing up there was a 8-foot fence that separated my backyard from an expansive orchard, and all I could see were the tops of trees. I always wondered what it would be like to live there.
As is often the case, the lyrics don’t mean anything, but it’s always nice to have words prepared when there’s a microphone in front of me. The music does a pretty good job of describing the terrain on its own.
Mike wrote the music, I wrote the words. The fair-trade deal with Carne Asada. He sent me the original audio while he was undergoing some gastrointestinal distress, hence the title. So of course after you look at something for a few weeks you can’t imagine it being called anything else, and you’d break the legs of someone who would suggest such a thing. Fortunately, it never came to that. I think Mike is much better now. The lyrics to the song have nothing to do with being physically ill. Something to do with yo-yo-ing bus rides from Boston to [...]Continue reading I Don’t Have the Stomach...
The aftermath of Punishing Good Deeds. Took about 1/8 the time. I originally amused myself by thinking of this as the fallout of an 80’s style-conflagration, sort of like Nightranger, Loverboy, and REM going up in a hot air balloon and getting plowed into by Def Leppard in a Lear, but now, I’m not really sure what it is. But then again I had very little idea what was going on in the 80’s when I was actually there. Listen closely and you can hear Sonny telling Michael to try and get Luca Brasi on the phone.
Entering the acoustic phase. Mike and I recorded what seemed to be about ten hours of guitar lines, bass lines, tremelo guitars, solos…Jesus. I think we had an oboe player come in off the street at one point. We were incubating a Bohemian Rhapsody Jr. And we didn’t even get to vocals. Anyways, point is I took home an intimidating mass of unsynchronized audio files that we probably could have labeled better, and did the intelligent thing and let them sit on my hard drive for about two months so I would forget everything about them and lose all [...]Continue reading Punishing Good Deeds...
In preparation for our first gig ever, Get Help performs our first gig ever. Out of the approximately 36 hours Mike and I spent in Boston this weekend, I would say 28 of them were probably spent either rehearsing or performing one of the six songs we ultimately recorded live at Andy and Jen’s Flophouse. Mike also got to meet Bill for the first time, which I think is very important: Get Help members should have a vague idea who other Get Help members are. The setlist: Traveler’s Shaving Kit, End of the New Country, Carne Asada, Temporary [...]Continue reading Get Help’s First Live Show: The End of the New Country...
I am disenfranchised by the New York City music scene, and it’s fun to use a footstep sound effect as a snare drum. That’s all it takes to write a song. I found the music on my 8-track from a year ago, recorded as part of a project where Tony and I drunkenly agreed to write music specifically to sell cars and rug deodorizers. Get Help may still be that project, but as of this date I have no car and dirty rugs, so maybe not.
When this whole project started, we were just building instrumentals, little nuggets that would waft towards the country’s collective brain. Like pie cooling on a window sill, you know? And we needed a way to keep the instrumentals sorted; so we named them after one of our favorite things in the world: Mexican foods. It was a brilliant idea at first because naming instrumentals anything when you’re making so many is a bit, well, self-conscious. And after 10-12, well, it looks like a menu.
This music’s Tony’s and the lyrics are mine in case you’re interested, or a royalty [...]Continue reading Carne Asada...
I built a silly drum beat in Pro Tools and the music came 15 minutes later. sent the idea to Tony and he sent it back a day later with the ‘teardrop’ guitar and noise wash, and I realized how satisfying it is to collaborate on a song with someone who works on your idea when you’re doing something much less worthy of collaboration. Like in this case, there was a pretty good chance I was watching ‘My Name is Earl’ and drinking box wine. Also, a tip of the hat to Lou Barlow for the lyrical theme.
A [...]Continue reading All Else Fails...
A song about songs, I guess. Recorded with Pro Tools at Mike’s apartment. A riff that was laying around for a loooong time and a lyrical idea about random radios. All coming together thanks to red, red wine and the egg of rhythm.
I had some serious writer’s block so I sat down with the opening guitar line and just slogged through it until it was over, determined to get something done. The guitars, drums, and vocals were done in Garageband. Mike and I added the bass and the keys at his apt the next week in ProTools. I was so in love with the modulated organ sound I would have formed a civil union with it if such a thing were legal. Upon repeated listening this song strikes me as more of short story than anything else.
Started out with an odd drum beat, dueling leads, big hair; a lotta foofaraw that just didn’t cut the mustard. It has grown into a big sweaty rocker when played live, however. Good boy.
I feel a bit the tawdry whore because I came up with the verse structure while soundchecking on stage with The Beatings. One of my earlier Garageband experiments. Mike and I have played this tune live in various incarnations, and have re-recorded it in some high-fidelity environments, but this version, sonically akin to seeing a person through frosted glass, still does it for me.
Originally intended to be a big, acoustic, reverby ghost of a song. Not quite how it turned out, but if it wasn’t for happy accidents you just might get no happy at all. You may need to jack up the volume on this one, the recording level is a little low.
And with a clink of beer bottles in the East Village, Get Help was born. Our initial intent was to craft gossamer wisps of irresistable dittiness for commercial licensing. So of course our first composition together must have a refrigerator compressor as a backing track. Glastender still has yet to call. And we were titling all of our songs after Mexican menu items at the time. As we both evidently order the same thing every time we go to Taco Bell, our naming practice died out soon enough.