Who do I have to knife to get things done around here??

Dear Reader, this week I bring you a Very Serious song about a topic near and dear to my heart.

I don't have OCD, far from it. I am just chronically organized. Jamie calls me a "non-compulsive tidier." It's true!

If there is one thing I loathe above all else among my host of #firstworldproblems, it is a sink full of dirty dishes that has been sitting there for a day or two, while the person responsible goes blithely about their day. Friends, if you have time to cook and eat an elaborate meal, you have time to wash the dishes. If you don't have time to wash the dishes, you shouldn't be cooking and eating an elaborate meal. Leaving a sink full of dirty dishes so that your fellow house-dwellers a) cannot use those dishes and b) cannot use the sink is rude and disrespectful. (This is just my opinion.)

"A sponge, motherf**ker, can you use it?!"

I told Jamie that when our new housemates move in, I am going to make it abundantly clear that I can and will write passive-aggressive and/or just plain aggressive, profanity-laden notes when the dishes don't get cleaned in a timely manner. Jamie said, "You should write a song about washing the dishes!"

And so I did. (Jamie insists on being credited for supplying the idea. There you go, Jamie.)

Maybe I will sing my new housemates this song.

I have so many feelings. 

Once, many years ago, maybe at the Old Songs Festival, I heard someone making an affectionately snide comment about songs that only use three chords, and for some reason this stuck with me to such an extent that I do my best to avoid it. I believe that in every song that I have posted so far on this blog, I have used four (or more??) chords. This song, however, breaks that trend: I only managed to work in three chords. It happens to the best of us, and I am far from the best!

I notice that I make eye contact with the camera a lot more in this video. (I hardly ever do that because I usually sing with my eyes closed.) I guess the eye contact serves to emphasize the message that I'm trying to get across!

What are you, new? Go to the first post to find out what this blog is all about!

How To Climb A Mountain

So it's 10:30 at night and I'm very sleepy, and I just remembered that I need to throw together a blog post. I recorded the song this morning, that means I'm done, right??

And now I am sitting at the cluttered kitchen table, the only light coming from my computer screen and the white Christmas lights strung around the ceiling. I am typing to the dulcet tones of Jamie munching on Tuscan white bread spread with my mama's homemade blueberry-maple jam. It's a lovely, comfortable setting, and it occurs to me that at some point I should record a few blog videos from my kitchen, since it's pretty much my favorite room in the house.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much of a hipster that would make me, a disillusioned 20-something blogging from her kitchen.

ANYWAY. This week's song is about mountains, in a metaphorical sense. Whenever I get anxious over having to do something lengthy and difficult--such as working nine-hour shifts through Sidewalk Sales, or completing all my finals at the end of a semester--my mother puts it into perspective for me by turning it into a mountain. "You're at the bottom of the mountain and the summit is a long way up, and when you look all the way to the top, it can seem like an impossible climb. But if you just focus only on each step at a time, each small task on its own, it'll become a lot easier."

Goddammit. 

So I think about each final paper on it's own, rather than the sum of all the pages I have to write. A shift at work is not eight endless hours stretching on into the evening: it is one hour, then the next, then another. In one more hour, I'll go get some tea. In one more hour, it'll be half-way through the day. In one more hour, I can take my break.

Semesters and jobs aside, I've found that this is a good way to look at a lot of distasteful but necessary things in life. Nonetheless, it's sometimes hard to draw back from the big picture and look at it as anything less than the sum of all the parts, rather than each part individually. While I'm climbing that mountain, it's really difficult not to let my gaze get carried up to the top, mentally measuring the distance between myself and the endpoint.

This was one of those awesome songs that basically wrote itself. As soon as I got the idea--less actual words or music and more of just an image of a mountain in my mind--the was essentially already there, fully formed, melody and all. I love it when that happens, but it sort of make me wonder where the song is coming from, since I feel like I contributed so little to it: it simply sprang from the depths of my mind on its own!

I'm sorry for the video quality this week. I feel like the lighting is sort of off, a little too bright and/or washed out. I think what this basically means is that I shouldn't record in the late morning. Early afternoon or evening is where it's at!

What are you, new? Go to the first post to find out what this blog is all about!

And now for something completely different.

Dear Reader, this week's song is VERY SILLY.

No, seriously. It's probably simultaneously the best and worst song I have ever written. Best, because it's awesome, and worst, because it's profoundly stupid.

It was inspired, as most brilliant things are, by cheese. Specifically, a study carried out by the British Cheese Board about how cheese affects our dreams. (Sweet Dreams Are Made of Cheese, September 2005)

(By the way, how awesome is it that such a thing as the British Cheese Board exists? How do you get on that board, because it sounds like the best job ever. I am so delighted. Is the chairman of the board called the Big Cheese?)

Pictured: British cheese

The study found that peoples' dreams were influenced by the type of cheese they ate before bed. (Read the link, it's impossible to make this stuff up.) I was particularly interested in the dreams people, specifically women, had when eating Stilton:

A massive 85% of females who ate Stilton had some of the most bizarre dreams of the whole study – although none were described as bad experiences. Highlights included talking soft toys, lifts that move sideways, a vegetarian crocodile upset because it could not eat children, dinner party guests being traded for camels, soldiers fighting with each other with kittens instead of guns and a party in a lunatic asylum.

This week's song is not about cheese, however. What inspired this song was the subject matter of one of the dreams described above.

More on that later. This song was also the most "technical" that I've done so far, meaning that it initially took more than just noodling about on my guitar for a few minutes to get the chords just right. The original melody was very sort of jazzy, a very different sort of music than what I'm used to playing, and on my own, I simply could not find any chords that sounded good--at all! It was quite frustrating. I sought help from a friend (who turns out to know way more about music theory than I realized? Thanks, Eric!) who offered some very helpful advice, which I sort of followed. I worked out the notes of the melody on my piano (which I have hitherto used almost exclusively to tune my guitar and expand my dust collection) and then tried to use those notes to find chords that didn't sound awful.

It almost worked. I was able to find some chords that fit the attitude and personality of the song, but it was still overall...messy. I didn’t like it, and felt that by and large, it still didn’t sound the way I wanted it to. There were also a ton of 7 chords (C7, G7, D7) which might actually be okay, but for some reason it felt Wrong to me to have them all in there.

So I completely changed the melody. It’s simpler and more repetitive, still essentially conveys the same attitude I was going for originally, and was MUCH easier to find chords for. I am actually SO PLEASED with this song, largely due to how goofy it is.

So without further ado, I bring you the story of the vegetarian crocodile!

I just want to register my pride that this video required all of ONE TAKE. It helps that it was just two lines repeated over and over and the words were right in front of me.

I also like the idea of a war being fought with kittens. I think there would probably be too much cooing and squealing going on to get any actual fighting done.

No idea what next week's song is going to be able. Y'ALL WILL JUST HAVE TO WAIT AND SEE.

What are you, new? Go to the first post to find out what this blog is all about!

In which an apology is offered.

Whelp, sorry about that. I guess seven weeks was a good run for not missing a single Thursday, yeah? I tried recording this week's song after work yesterday but my microphone was acting wonky so I kept having to re-do takes and then I was tired and hungry and just decided to leave it.

Look at me! I'm so ashamed!

I'm in a lot better mood today, and have managed to put together what I believe to be an acceptable take. This is kind of annoying because while I'm pleased with the song, I don't really like how I sound singing it.

But I tried to capture how I feel about summer, and how beautiful and short it is, and how I try to make the most of the season as possible. (And sometimes my arms get all scratched up from picking blackberries, and I look like I've been wrestling with a pallas cat or something...)

I have a few ideas for next week: either a song I've been wanting to write for a while, or one that I just got inspiration for today. I'm sure they'll both turn up eventually, it's just a matter of which comes first. I suppose it depends on which one I get the most inspiration from.

I keep meaning to write a post on inspiration. I keep meaning to write posts on a lot of things. Maybe I'll actually get around to doing that, one of these days.

An inspiration to us all.

What are you, new? Go to the first post to find out what this blog is all about!