My acoustic comeback show TONIGHT!
THE SHOW TONIGHT WILL BE WEBCAST! Tune into http://www.nycliverock.com at 11pm-ish. Or just come down to Otto’s Shrunken Head on 14th st. between Ave’s A and B. It’s free and all ages.
Tonight is my solo rock comeback show! That is, it’s the first time in probably about 5 years I’m playing guitar in public (except for a couple times in retirement homes, but that was folk music). I enjoy guitar, but I shied away from it after I left Paris. One one hand, I felt like playing an instrument distracted me from my singing. I’m a real singer, I have tons of stage presence, and I like to move around- I can’t be weighed down by a clunky guitar, or bothered with trying to hit all the right chords while I’m trying to make music. 
I also found that, no matter what I was singing and playing, people would tend to label me as a folk rocker, a singer-songwriter, or both. I actually kind of hate both those genres. Singer-songwriters bore me to death, whether they’re playing accoustic guitar or piano, and, well yeah there’s some good folk rock out there if you want to go back in time, but in general it’s a genre I don’t identify with. But when I’m playing and singing, me, a pretty girl with a pretty voice (I belt but I also sing legit a lot in my original music), with long pretty hair and an acoustic guitar, well folk rock singer-songwriter is just where people’s minds go. And to be fair, I have written a small bit of stuff that fits into those genres, some of which I plan to play tonight. But I generally like my rock hard and energetic, not laid-back like folk rock or wishy-washy like singer-songwriter stuff. (No offense, many talented musicians of these genres- I know it’s just my perception guided by my own tastes, and that I’m wrong, but that’s my bias and I’m sticking to it!)
But things with the band are just super-lame. I can never get a whole ensemble together, ever. I need a fucking bass player. And/or keys. SOMEBODY COME JOIN MY BAND. And I really wanted to start playing out, but my guitar player and drummer refuse to perform without a bass player, so I’m on my own. And the album is going to be a solo project anyways. And then when the idea came to take myself on tour, just me and my guitar driving across the South, visiting relatives and making friends, I decided it was time to come out of the acoustic closet and present myself as a solo act once more.
When I asked Frank Wood to book me on tour, he wanted me to start off with a show at Otto’s, and had a slot open tonight, so I scrambled to find pieces of my original music I could play alone. Some doesn’t work at all- Toyshop has practically no chord changes. Midnight Bride can be played but only if I capo the shit out of it to the point where it sounds like a ukelele. I can play guitar but I’m not particularly GOOD, so I can’t play fancy chords! Then I have some stuff that was originally written on my guitar and sounds good that way. There’s one that Ross and I played at one of our duo shows- I think the one on my birthday- and I used to play all the time in Paris, that audiences always adore. It has an interesting chord sequence and a fun swing rhythm. And Pull Me Up works great as an acoustic song- that’s how I wrote it, even while intending for it to be a full band song, but none of the full arrangements I’ve tried have really done it justice. But everyone always loves that song when I do it solo.
There are some older songs I could try playing if I were to reach way back, but I’m not willing to go there yet. I’m really not even sure if the songs are good or not, just that I used to play them all the time but that seems so long ago now.
I threw in some obscure cover songs for good measure. Don’t think I’ll get to them, but we’ll see. Some of my songs are really short.
So, two things have been killing me about this show all week. One, I am way out of practice on guitar, and like last time I played out (at the retirement home), this means me having to cram in a lot of practice, and then my fingers get sore ’cause my callouses aren’t up to speed. So hopefully if I don’t play all day today (even though I need more practice), it won’t be an issue tonight.
Two, I decided to print out charts for all my songs, and the cover songs, to bring to the gig so that anyone with instruments who feels like joining in can do so. But I vastly underestimated the amount of time this would take. Largely because I decided to have two sets- one with just the chords and how long to hold them for, and the other with lyrics and the chords filled in above. Of course most musicians will prefer traditional charts, but I wanted to have both and try to lay them side-by-side in the binder, in case someone gets lost following the charts they can find me on the lyrics sheet.
Well it’s taken forever to type up all the lyrics, fill in all the chords, and format everything so it’s easiest to read at a glance. So, I’m still not done. I hope I can finish AND make it pretty in a binder. And I hope people want to play with me, because then they can cover up my mistakes!
And there will be mistakes. Messing up chords is like slipping up on lyrics in a strophic song. You can know them perfectly well, but it’s so easy to start singing the wrong verse, or blank on what comes next. All you can do is drill drill drill until it becomes ingrained, and even then you could still have a brain fart. Basic guitar is so repetitive, it’s easy to get lost. And I have not had time to drill these songs. Most of them I am pretty unaccustomed to playing.
So I hope you get to watch tonight, either by tuning in online or by coming down. BTW I can’t get the webcast to work on my computer, so better luck to you.
Here’s a pic of me at the 2007 Mermaid Parade from the Otto’s website. I was on their award-winning float. Have a look at the gallery, there’s a topless chick.
It’s the “No Time to Update” update!
Sorry sorry sorry I have not been around! I’ve been hoping to have time to blog like every day but the truth is that I’m slammed, all of my own doing. I’m trying to prepare to record my album, I’m practicing for a solo acoustic show Sunday, and I’m planning to go on tour. Agh!
I sent out a detailed email today with information on all the above. If you’re not on the mailing list, get to www.notjustanotherprettyvoice.com and sign up! I don’t always get around to listing everythingon my website or Facebook calendar, so the mailing list is a good way to make sure you don’t miss an upcoming performance.
So is Twitter! Follow me here. Now that Twitter is the big thing. Whatever I was on it before it was cool. I have Twitter on vinyl.
Will try to write really really soon, like tomorrow… but you know how it goes!!!
Writing lyrics
Hi everybody!
I’ve hunkered down the last few days to write songs.
The first day was an abysmal failure, I don’t think I got anything done.
Then last night I made serious progress. I pulled out all my old music notebooks with sketches and old songs in them to see if there was anything I had forgotten about. There was! There were a couple really neat “ideas” jotted down, and a few complete or almost complete songs.
Actually, to step back further, there was one of my songs I recently rediscovered when I came across an old potential track/setlist. You know how the subway sometimes has poems where the ads go? Like, as PSA? For our enlightenment? Once several years ago there was a poem I thought was really pretty and sad, so I made a note of it, went home and looked the words up, and set it to music. The poem is A Broken Appointment by Thomas Hardy, and I set it very simply, like a Spanish guitar folksong. Only one real surprise chord in it. I can even play it nicely- I am moderately capable of plucking the guitar strings to arpeggiate, which produces the right effect. So I saw that song on my old list and I was like, “Ohhhhh!!! Yeah! I remember that one!” I pulled out my guitar and to my surprise I remembered every word and chord with but little mental searching, which is odd considering I hadn’t even remembered the song existed.
So I pulled out my notebooks and made some rediscoveries. There were some old songs that, how can I say, didn’t seem to apply to my life anymore musically. Like maybe a bit too poppy and hooky, or on the other side a bit to dark and twisted. I have tended towards both extremes, and at the same time- even now it’s the same. Compare something shadowy and dissonant like “Pull Me Up” with “Monica’s Getting her Tits Done“- Monica passes the badass test because the lyrics are so quirky. There are others that aren’t recorded. But the rift was wider back then.
One song I had totally forgotten about was this piece intended for piano and voice. It’s simple, the chords change slowly at times, and I played it (back when I played piano sometimes) with just repeated triplet chords, gently. It’s just a song that builds, pretty much AABA(1). The A’s are very gentle, and the B and part of the last A build strongly. It’s actually a pretty cool piece. I would like to use it for something, except it sounds stupid on guitar. It needs a piano. I tried playing the triplets with the side of my thumb, and striking higher or lower strings for variation (as I would play different chord inversions on the piano), but it really wanted for the bass line… Yeah I know it’s just me and my guitar, it would sound different with a band. Anyways. The lyrics. Hm. It’s one of those things where I feel like, the lyrics are so inane… even at the time when I wrote it (these are my notebooks from France and a little from Queens) I kept trying to alter them to be less cheesy/nonsensical, but kept coming back to the originals because they flowed so nicely.
That’s some of what separates lyrics from poetry. In poetry you want more creative word choices- in lyrics, unusual turns of a phrase can interfere with the flow of the line. In most kinds of writing, rule number one is to avoid cliches. In lyrics, you want to use cliches and common phrases because quite simply they are easier for the ear to catch. If you want anyone to understand what you’re saying, you can’t say “The twilight of deception is upon the Earth,” you have to say “No more lies.” (To quote my own line in Toyshop, which I feel a little embarassed about because it’s such a cliche and so out of place, but you have to admit you can understand it and it flows nicely.) To work with the same example: the former, while bulky, is more lyrical than rephrasing it as “Deception’s twilight falls on Earth’s face.” Where is the rhythm? And look at those awkward consonant clusters!!! It might be a more original sentence, but it’s not singable and certainly not intelligible. As trite as it may sound, “The ____ of _____ is _____ the ______” has a nice, easy, iambic flow to it that is easily set, sung, and heard.
Um, my point was, saying things like “Don’t you come my way” and “Oh my lover” (the latter a recurring phrase from the current song in question, the former another line from Toyshop) may sound very amateurish when examined under the harsh light of speech, but are very convenient for songwriting.
Am I trying to justify my own bad lyric writing? Maybe? I don’t know, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for years. I suppose the ideal compromise is to use cliches within the context of awesome stealth rhymes. But who has the time? No srsly I’m sure I can think of an example on my part if I think of it… yeah: “Monica’s getting her tits done, she’ll be the hottest piece in Boston.” Does Boston rhyme with “tits done”? Maybe- but either way, you totally didn’t expect it to until I said it! Also, “piece” is kind of a surprise word but doesn’t interrupt the flow of the line, and is easy to understand, especially since it gets its own quarter note.
That’s my other trick, that I often use in prose writing- use a cliche but change one word in it to something more innovative. It could have easily been “hottest chick in Boston” which is sooo lame, but change it to “hottest piece in Boston” and you’ve got yourself a song.
So, backtracking, the lyrics to the song in question are very cliched (though sometimes in unusual formations), but they just flow so nicely I have yet to find anything I like as much. So maybe they stay? Doesn’t matter, I won’t be recording it, or maybe not playing it live since I don’t play piano anymore like at all. But I would like to find a use for it… I’d tell you what it is but I really don’t have a good title for it!
Anyways, last night I more or less wrote a whole new song (I think it needs a last verse or something), which seems pretty cool, but would need a lot of production if I record it ’cause it’s a potentially complicated song (like Midnight Bride or the one really cool song that’s been in the works for years that you haven’t heard yet because we never finished the arrangement, which I really really wanted to do but I don’t think Ross can do it now but it’s like my favorite), so we’ll see… And I finally, finally FINALLY after all these years worked out the “Having sex with you is like pulling teeth” song that I have hummed to so many people in passing. I finished the first verse last night (you don’t even understand how long it took me to write one verse) and then today on the subway to my class I finished the second verse and part of the bridge (I liked it without the bridge but it was BARELY two minutes and I have too many short songs already) and on the way back from class I finished the rest of the bridge and the last verse.
Yeah, so I write a lot of short songs, huh? Maybe not- Toyshop has somehow made it to 3.5 minutes (only with a guitar solo though), and Midnight Bride and Pull Me Up are both pretty long- but only because they have long, repetitive, build-up endings! I guess you’ll have to hear some of my stuff that’s not recorded yet. But I tend to be like, “There, I said what I had to say- why do I have to write another verse???” Really I’m just lazy about lyric writing. I like it, well I love it when I get a good couple lines, which I often do in the end, but it’s such a process- because like this entire post implies, I feel embarassed when the words come out limp.
So good progress in the end. Hope to have something to play for you, eventually!
