Luther.

[the captain]

OK, rather than keep posting indefinitely in an old BBs cover tune thread--not to mention rather than posting new threads every time I do anything new--I figured I'd just have a thread I revisit when I have something going on. Makes it easier to avoid me, too!

So, the point at hand:

Firstly, many thanks for your detailed answers/comments, Luther! It was a very fascinating read! Secondly, from all those prestigious magazines, I select Pitchfork, mostly because it publishes very unconventional lists & also it favors The Beach Boys. So, let me be the Pitchfork’s journalist for awhile.

Handful of questions: near the end of your terrific post you mentioned Adam Marsland saying that he played the drums in the group. Am I correct in thinking that it is the same Adam Marsland who formed his own “Chaos band” and, along with the originals, did several covers of The BBs songs, including Wouldn’t It Be Nice to Live Again? From what I’ve seen on YT, he played the guitar.

I should clarify this: Adam Marsland (yes, that Adam Marsland) is available for hire to do any number of things for customers. He's a multi-instrumentalist, singer, engineer, producer, arranger...you get the idea. But let's be clear, never has he been in a group of mine! (Though, I mean, I'm available...  ) He is terrifically talented and did some drumming on several of my songs. I love what he did.

Besides, can it be possible that you like to create unusually structured songs with non-typical chords because of Brian Wilson’s songwriting skills? What artists are your other influences?

While I feel like BW has influenced my musical sense a lot, he's just one of many and he's definitely not the root of my love for unusually structured songs or atypical chords. I was a Queen fan and Zep fan in my teens, so there are plenty of strange structures there. I got into jazz in a formal sense by college, so that had a lot to do with complex harmonic ideas. I studied classical music in college, as well, which of course adds still more. And in that same time frame I became obsessed with Zappa, whose music is far more complex than BW. So it all played a role.

I noticed some classical music references in the songs, which is your favorite composer in that genre? Maybe obscure ones?

Stravinsky, no doubt about it, is the favorite. Not obscure, but hey, it's true. I also really love Ives, Mozart, Lizst, and certain things by many others including Faure, Gounoud, Britten, Schoenberg, Zappa, Tchaikovsky, Penderecki...

And the last. I saw in another thread that you posted the link with nearly 150 tracks for free listen & other Smiley Smilers gave positive reviews to that. Would you mind to post them again? I ask it because I very enjoyed listening to your songs, even those I wasn’t fond of, had grown on me, f.ex., Determined, Chris Riemenschneider (awesome drumming & vocals, btw!), Go Back to the House & Red Shoes. Or if it’s impossible, then at least 50 or so? Thanks in advance, as usual. And again, thanks for your responses to my questions. I hope that I don’t quite bother you.

Bother? It's a lot of fun to do this, actually! Makes a fella feel like a star. 

I'll be glad to upload anything I have. I don't know what exactly it was I shared before, but presumably pretty much everything if it was that many songs. (Though I didn't include any of my old band in previous uploads, as I feel a little weird sharing things that partly belong to others with whom I'm not in contact anymore.) So yeah, I'll pull together a new zip file or two and upload more. Apologies in advance if there are duplicates from what I've gotten you already, because I'm sure we're getting up there already.

[the captain]

"Another Season Song" can be downloaded here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/eexenw

Just wrote and hastily recorded this version of it this morning.

[the captain]

Rough demo version of a new tune, Tick Tock. See the Making Music thread for context, if you'd like. I look forward to getting this one fully arranged and recorded more fully.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/pfdjpk

[the captain]

This morning I took yesterday's song and added a bass part, two acoustic guitar parts (well, one and a half with some parts doubled) and two electric guitar parts (ditto). I am beginning to realize how I want the song to go.  Now, to arrange a drummer. This one (and several others sitting around in similar states of completion) needs it.

Tick Tock (2). http://www.sendspace.com/file/bj6cdo

[the captain]

Meant to totally redo the vocals (including all new lyrics) to a 2008 song I otherwise like, but for some reason I can't open the file at all. VERY annoying: it seems everything I thought I imported from my old laptop, I didn't. Great.

Instead I quick wrote a uke and three vocals (each doubled, so six tracks) for good ol' Tick Tock. http://www.sendspace.com/file/2ar60i

[seltaeb1012002]

Very nice man. The bass, guitar + bg vox definitely take it to the next level. I could hear a double tracked vocal on this one. What kind of mic/software do you use?

[the captain]

Thanks, seltaeb1012002.

I most likely will double-track the vocal (it's a weakness of mine...I almost default to it). The one there now was just done as a guide as I was doing the piano-vocal scratch version. I'll probably do entirely new leads once everything else is done.

I use Digital Performer 7 for recording, through a Motu 8pre to a Macbook Pro. My main mics are ASM MK319s, though I've got a few other things around: a kick mic I barely use because I drum like sh*t, some old SM57s and '58s.

[the captain]

New one today, "Trumpet and Viola." The bulk of the tune was written about 10 years ago, but today I wrote the "whatever happened ... lie stone" bit, and arranged and recorded it. There is some mixing work to be done (as always).

http://www.sendspace.com/file/x60ek3

[EgoHanger1966]

Instead I quick wrote a uke and three vocals (each doubled, so six tracks) for good ol' Tick Tock. http://www.sendspace.com/file/2ar60i

Man, this is such a cool song. One of those..."damn! I wish I had written this! So I could sing it myself and hit the big time!" things.
I'd love to hear it with double tracked vox. If there's ever one thing Bobby Vee taught me...

[the captain]

Instead I quick wrote a uke and three vocals (each doubled, so six tracks) for good ol' Tick Tock. http://www.sendspace.com/file/2ar60i

Man, this is such a cool song. One of those..."damn! I wish I had written this! So I could sing it myself and hit the big time!" things.
I'd love to hear it with double tracked vox. If there's ever one thing Bobby Vee taught me...

Thanks. Feel free to sing it and hit the big time and pay me songwriter's royalties!    As for the vocal, yeah, I'm sure I'll double-track it at some point. But I guess until I line up some drumming, I don't feel in too much of a hurry to get around to finalizing it.

[the captain]

Listening to yesterday's Trumpet and Viola through different speakers and finding through my Bose sound system (as opposed to headphones) it was really bassy and muffled, so I did a little twiddling of knobs, taking down the bass and applying a filter that seemed to help a little bit. Also added an egg shaker because what can't be made better by eggs?

Newer iteration. http://www.sendspace.com/file/xryn10

[the captain]

Thanks again for all these answers, Luther! I'm very glad to know that you like Stravinsky, i.e. our native Russian composer, even though I'm not that into Russian classical composers myself. As for the 150 song collection, I was mistaken - it's 150 MB & about 60 songs. See the latest of your posts - the one which has the larger number of songs:

http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,7461.0.html - many people said how it's good yada yada, so I'm kind of envious. Hope that zip-file can be re-uploaded, nothing wrong with the link.

I'm not going to figure out what was in those files, so instead I'm putting together a few new uploads for you.

The first will be everything I've got that are originals and that I consider more or less done. There are 58 songs on it, I believe. Some will be duplicates from what I've recently given you, but I didn't want to go through and figure out what was posted when, so... Such is life!

The second will be a batch of songs I've got in varying states of incompleteness--maybe as old as 15 years old, maybe as new as this past weekend--as well as the finished recordings of L&K. Some of those songs aren't mine, so I would ask that you be judicious in your use or sharing of them. There are about 57 songs in there, I believe.

Covers, which I know I just gave you all of, are not represented in either file.

Btw, Another Season Song is stunning. Speaking of seasons, it's more likely about winter, at least judging by the mood of the melody. 

The first line is "Another day of winter, here," and it soon says "snowflakes are so distracting," so I guess I'd say you guessed right!    Thanks for the compliment on it. While I didn't intend for it to be a "real" song--just something to keep busy that morning--I might work more on it and properly record it.

One question: what is your favorite instrument to play on? What would you like to learn? Thanks in advance.

That's two questions.  My favorite is probably piano, even though I'm not very good at it. That or bass. As for what I'd like to learn ... I wish I could drum well (and engineer drums), because I'd be more self-sufficient. But I'm really pretty bad and don't have the discipline to practice regularly enough to improve.

Thanks again for being interested. As I said before, this is fun.

[the captain]

File One: all completed songs under the Beau Mondes name.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/bigduv

File Two: a big batch of incomplete songs, demos, etc., plus an old band's songs.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/jna5vl

At this point, the world has got the same songs I have got (unless I upload scans of those songs that exist only on paper).

[the captain]

I was fucking around through old CDs and came across several of mine: songs I'd recorded back around 1999-2001 somehow intended as albums (though only burned and handed out that way to a dozen or fewer friends). Eight songs into a 10-song concept album--a concept album, for f***'s sake!--all I can say is that I envy those of you still in your early 20s. I recall being so seriously passionate about those songs, about recording, about the people I had in mind when I wrote and sang and played. It's good to be 23, 24, 25.

[the captain]

As always, thanks for the nice things you've said. Hopefully I'll have more coming before long: I have several songs in process now and am thinking about getting someone to do some drumming for me on several of them.

I do have some Danish roots. Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and German, in fact, though I was born in Minnesota. But the surname is from the Danish component.

As for my signature...I don't recall. I think "genius" was thrown in as a play on the Murry Wilson "I'm a genius, too" line, and demon-fighting was probably the product of some spat on this board.

Oh--and no need to apologize for liking older versions to more recent ones! The guys playing on those recordings were (are) great, I just wanted to do some different things in later years and had no resources except myself.

[the captain]

I have to ask, where are you from?

Regarding Minnesota, it is a varied place, with great and scenic river valleys along especially the Mississippi, very good farmland in the southern third or so, one true metropolitan area (the "Twin Cities," Minneapolis-St. Paul), a great port city, Duluth, on Lake Superior, and plains and forests in the north. Scandinavians settled here apparently in part because it was so similar to parts of their homeland (though much bigger, obviously), though I'd imagine the cheap and available land and available work logging and mining at the time had something to do with it... The climates are very extreme, similar to western Russia and Eastern Europe from what I understand. Winters can be very cold (-40F at the coldest, but very often below 0) with a lot of snow, and summers can be very hot (100+ F). This feels funny to talk about on this message board!

As for the songwriting, I don't have a method. Sometimes I force myself to do something one way or another as an exercise, but otherwise there is no formula for me. I may sit at piano and just play, I may pick up a guitar and play, I may think of a melody or a lyric. Every starting place is a good starting place.

[zachrwolfe]

‍

[the captain]

Speaking of where I am from, I'm from the biggest country in the universe - as they say - called Russia (actually, I already wrote about it when you named Stravinsky as your favorite classical composer). I know that many people from other countries don't like Russians, their politics & all that stuff, but trust me, there are many good people/residents who live all over its territory.

That's right, I had forgotten.

As for liking or not liking people from other countries, I think that's an unfortunate result of a country's nationalism, its media, its leadership, its armies...people are people and their cultural differences are the most interesting thing in the world, and those from Point A are not better than Point B, and so on. I'm a bit of a sucker for Russian culture, in fact. I don't know why, but I was attracted to some music and especially its literature. Dostoevsky is my favorite novelist ever, with three of my favorite works of all time (Crime & Punishment, the Brothers Karamazov, and Notes from Underground), and I also really like Gogol, Tolstoy, Nabokov, among others.

Regarding making music, I'll continue doing it as long as I have ideas, but I never intend to give it any serious attention (as a career, for example). That relieves any pressure and lets me just enjoy it.

[the captain]

Finishing up an uptempo country kind of tune I had started a couple weeks ago. I think it'll be called something like "Let's Get in Trouble." I'll try to get a quick version of it recorded and posted within the next day or two--just acoustic and a voice or something. I don't love it, except I really think it's a strong pre-chorus and refrain (if I do say so myself).

[hypehat]

As always, thanks for the nice things you've said. Hopefully I'll have more coming before long: I have several songs in process now and am thinking about getting someone to do some drumming for me on several of them.

I do have some Danish roots. Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and German, in fact, though I was born in Minnesota. But the surname is from the Danish component.

As for my signature...I don't recall. I think "genius" was thrown in as a play on the Murry Wilson "I'm a genius, too" line, and demon-fighting was probably the product of some spat on this board.

Oh--and no need to apologize for liking older versions to more recent ones! The guys playing on those recordings were (are) great, I just wanted to do some different things in later years and had no resources except myself.

Ah, I remember where the signature came from - it was how some plucky journalist referred to Brian in an interview piece (not to his face, sadly).

(Why the hell do I remember this stuff, of all the stuff)

[the captain]

I very well remember that you like Russian literature, you wrote about it in the "The What Are You Reading? Thread" thread & discussed it with SurferGirl7, Landlocked & some others. As for me, I'm not that much a fan of our literature but I'm very glad to hear many people from abroad love it, especially those who are the BBs/BW fans. Quite an unusual combination imo. That said, I like Gogol's horrors, Radii Pogodin's children's books (I know it sounds ridiculous but I very enjoy reading quirky fairy-taley stories with kids as the main heroes), already mentioned "Crime & Punishment" & some adventurous sea short novels by Alexander Grin. However, my all-time favorite book is of British origin: Ch. Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop" with fave character being that ugly dwarf called Daniel Quilp. I immediately liked him after reading his description: crooked legs, one big evil eye, big teeth with bulldog smile etc. - he scares everyone just by his appearance! Jolly cool! Sometimes I prefer villains over heroes, there's sth. very intriguing about them.

I can't stand Dickens, myself! In fact, I can't think of a single British author I'm an especially big fan of. Not counting Russians I've already mentioned, I'm a big fan of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Knut Hamsun, Saul Bellow, JM Coetzee, Richard Ford, Leif Enger...I'd say those are my favorites. And I just finished John Steinbeck's East of Eden for the first time, and really loved it.

One on-topic question: do you take ideas for the lyrics mostly from reading articles & so on or from personal experiences/stories? As I recall the words, Church Pot Luck Supper is about your 5-year-old self, right? While, Ikaria, for one, was inspired by an islander's story & his survival from cancer. Or maybe you like to create sth. false from the top off your head? What is the most interesting of those 3 options to you? I bet the 2nd? Anyway, thanks for this conversation, Luther!

That is tough to say without actually going through all those songs and counting. But just off the top of my head, I'd say most songs are combinations of real experiences or thoughts and fiction that goes along with them. Very few are of actual people or events outside my experience--that is a new phenomenon for me, just as a way to find new ideas. (Ikaria and a few I haven't recorded yet fit into that category.)

[the captain]

Yesterday I came across another NY Times story that got me thinking of some musical ideas, so I spent a few hours working through this piano-and-voice song. Not really a pop song, more something between a musical and an art song. It's called Stavia.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/byo34w

And the link to the story from which I got the initial idea is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/magazine/the-spice-is-right.html?ref=magazine&_r=0

[the captain]

Thank you again for the answers, Luther!
Re new song: when I first played Stavia, I immediately recollected Mr. Webber's musical snippets. Sth. about those suspicious chords, I think. So you're right, it isn't just a mere pop number, it's a mixture of classical music sounds.
 Much as I like your full-band compositions, the piano-and-voice formula exactly works for you and this song isn't an exception - it has beautiful short intro & chorus. Thanks for this little wonder track!

Thanks. I am actually considering carving out the "where were you then, where were you ever" part and making a new song from it (unrelated to this little song). But we'll see.

As for the story, I have to admit that I'm not that interested in spices & other culinary things, but anyway I got a question, do you read various articles specifically for receiving ideas for your songs or just because you like to know what's going on around the world & learn sth. from, since (I'm sure) almost every article has its benefit?

I am interested in spices--I love to cook!--but in this case as with the previous article-driven songs, it's just a coincidence that I decided to write something. I am not going in looking for songs, but rather trying to be disciplined enough to recognize and act on the thought "oh, this could be a song" whenever I think it.

Another insignificant ? - how did you audition people before letting them enter your band? How it was started, I mean The Beau Mondes? Did you write an ad in a newspaper or whatever? Thanks in advance for the info. It's jolly interesting.

Nothing so formal as any of that. And that band barely existed at all it: it was going to exist but only got into rehearsals before the keyboardist moved across the country and I just didn't feel like doing anything at that point beyond recording (mostly on my own) under that name. But when it was going to exist, it was the same drummer and keyboardist as my previous band, plus a new bassist who was a friend and band member of those two in yet another band.

[the captain]

There is no career: I just write and record songs and sometimes post them here. That's all.

[the captain]

No, no problem, sorry if I sounded harsh in my response. And your English is better than my Russian. (Especially since I speak no Russian at all).