Next on the remix docket was Crush, a song I’d never been happy with for a variety of reasons. By all rights, I should have cut this song from the album long ago and consigned it to oblivion, but I couldn’t. It meant too much to me.

So yeah, I remixed it using what I’d recorded at Michigan. The middle section has always given me grief because it’s an orchestration of virtual instruments that was always meant to be played back when (if) I ever played the song live. I don’t remember which instruments I used originally and of course I didn’t make notes of it at the time, and I can’t just splice in the original 2010 version because clever old me had to bring it up a whole step when I re-recorded it. I could use the version I made at Michigan, but I never liked that version anyway.

This is a whole bunch of words to say that here’s the first two-thirds of the song, remixed. I should probably re-do the midsection at some point.

As the first “good” song I wrote, Break My Heart was the obvious next choice to be remixed. The simple fact is that I’d never gotten a good recording of the damn thing, for one reason or another. In high school, it was because I didn’t know how to sing; in college, it was because I still didn’t know how to sing and didn’t know much about audio editing either. Working with the same audio as I’d had access to two years ago, I was able to throw together something that sounded better.

There’s one exception. I loved the sound of the midsection that Mr. Haggard had been able to produce at Thacher and could never get one that I liked, so where the song enters that part, I spliced it together with the 2010 original.

This is closer to the song I always had in mind.

I occasionally revisit songs and remix them. First in this series was Make it Right; then Break My Heart (which I didn’t post because Windows Movie Maker absolutely freaked out on me), and now Back With a Bang. It’s quite fun. I also find that I can barely listen to the old version now.

Same audio files, same notes, same sounds, same everything… but a different experience. Less mud. More brickwall. Woohoo!

Sometimes in life, there is a question that needs to be answered, something that you simply can’t go any further without knowing.  Such is the nature of the question I’m about to post.

How old is this guy, really?

In every Star Trek canon I’ve heard of, Kirk’s birthdate is listed as 2233. The plaque in Riverside Iowa, however, which proudly proclaims itself to be the “future birthplace of James T. Kirk”, gives his birthdate as 2228, which is… wrong.

Nobody on the Internet is talking about this discrepancy.

Do the poor Riverside residents realize this fact? Which one is correct? What does it all mean? What is life?

Somebody please clear this up for me.

All the cool kids were doing it, so I did too. Here’s a Soundcloud.

Clicky

I was reminded of this the other day when talking with various family members. In the modern world it can be quite confusing and easy to forget. Everyone on Facebook has a cause to advance. Opinion articles pop up on Buzzfeed or whichever is the site du jour of the week, concerning what it means to be such-and-such or so-and-so. Politicians butt heads. Well, maybe that’s not so new.

Regardless, I was reminded of one very important thing: what it means to be a gentleman. What it means to be masculine.

It’s nothing to do with perception of “bad-assery” or machismo. It’s nothing to do with not crying being you don’t think it’s manly, or how big your muscles are, or how many chicks you’ve gotten with.

No, the meaning of a gentleman is only this:

A gentleman is someone who makes life a little bit easier for those around him. Everything else falls into place.

Let’s not go too long without forgetting this.

Before I left Boston I began the process of creating my own website. Hopefully this acts as a more centralized, easier-to-navigate site than this was. I’ll still keep this one around, of course, and update it with whatever I’m doing.

Anyway.

Until then, I’m creating a bunch of soundtrack-themed songs where I start with nothing – not even an idea, really – and spend a while seeing what I can come up with. This one, The Thing, I created last evening. Start in G minor, modulate to D minor, and from the dark triad of D minor modulate to Bb minor.

As ever, the name means nothing at all. I only get philosophical with song titles and lyrics when I’m writing for an actual album.

Shaking it up a bit with Guns n Roses. Axl Rose may be somewhat insane but he’s a hell of a songwriter, and this is easily my favorite off Chinese Democracy.

Again I think I might have rushed it a little bit (I only attempted two serious takes after not much practice) and didn’t quite achieve the majestic final chorus that I was going for. I also had no idea what I was doing in the midsection (suddenly realizing after the second chorus that I had no idea how the middle bit actually went) and so, naturally, improvised.

As usual, this is part of the “Month Challenge” where for the month of May 2015 I will be covering as many songs as I can.