deeje studio: Recent Episodes
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After regularly playing this song for about six months at the Sacred Grounds Open Mic, I came back to the recording feeling like it lacked something. I decided to add an acoustic guitar track to match what I play live, and I completely redid the vocals. The coda still needs a lot of work, and the break still needs some solo-like texture... perhaps I can expand on the horns to give them a larger role in the song.
(I've included two older versions of this song, at about six month intervals, for your comparison. I'm sure there'll be newer versions, too!)
(I tried to use Feeder's enclosure upload feature, but it didn't work the firs time, and I've been struggling to get the feed file to appear new to my aggregator... :-(
In this second version of this song (from earlier this year) I worked out a set of verses that spoke to growing up, becoming a parent, and growing old. And I started playing this song at a regular open mic event at Sacred Grounds Cafe in San Francisco. The song itself is really working for me, and this recording was good for a while...
(I've included at least two other versions of this song, at about six month intervals, for your comparison.)
I found a chord one day, a funky A where I bar the 5th fret, and only put down my middle finger on the seventh fret. I'm so unschooled I can't even tell you the name of that chord... but I'd strum it with my thumb and clamp and release my fret fingers to create IMHO an interesting rhythm.
I started to build a song around this chord as well as an irregular chord progression that leads up to it. In this first version of the song from last year, you can hear that I didn't have any verses, but had a good idea of how the melody should go. The chorus was fairly clear in my mind. I played the same chord progression with a strongly distorted guitar, which produced an even stranger texture... I like it!
(I've included at least two other versions of this song, at about six month intervals, for your comparison.)