Get Help

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Perhaps interesting only to me: one of my new year’s resolutions was to organize and compile all the random Garageband tracks I have, born from moments of inspiration, appointed nights of impassioned hackery, and the all-time favorite: drunken, sloven doodling. My filing system is horrid, usually a series of numbers to indicate the date — from which I have discovered my own mild numeric dyslexia — or a “keyword” in the title that I’m sure meant something at the time. As I offload more and more of my brain into my imac, google account, cell phone, and what have you, it is striking how much one can completely forget.

Case in point, this ditty right here. After compiling my list of tracks, I found this one, with a working title of “xmas song”. I spent about four days working on it in December 2006, at my parent’s house in my old bedroom with my laptop and my father’s guitar. I remember my utter frustration that for all my efforts and self-pity, it went absolutely no where. I believe this was the unconscious genesis for another instrumental born of frustration that was to emerge some time later. Either way, I promptly forgot about the “xmas song” completely, much like a squirrel burying a chestnut, until miraculously unearthing it a few days ago.

Upon giving it a new listen circa New Years Eve 2008, whaddya know: it ain’t that bad. It goes somewhere, and it takes its time. It mows the lawn, it has a beer. Over repeated listens on my commute I realized it also works well with most ambient noise one might encounter without noise-canceling headphones: conversation, train whistles, car whooshes, etc. A bit John Cage-esque, I guess, but my attempt to load it down with sound effects was a non-starter. It works better in the natural world, amidst the noise, man-made or otherwise. Give it a go, won’t you, faithful reader? Happy New Year.

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As usual, when you start something with a minimal amount of thought and have no idea as to how it will end, it takes on a life of its own, sinks its claws into you, and won’t let you walk away. This one started as a Yamaha experiment, just cycling through the sound dial and learning what this thing can do, and four days later I’m all looping and panning and eq’ing until two in the morning. It would have been very easy to loops three chords, mess with some knobs, and call it night. But once you save a life, you’re responsible for it. Invest enough time in something, say like a three-legged kitten, for instance, and all of a sudden you have to feed it, keep it warm, and make sure it gets into college. So it goes with these open-ended doodlings. You can’t just drop it off at a Nebraska hospital when it starts needing solid food.

If you need to know, it’s a lullaby with a time-traveling theme. We have a painting from the MOMA that pops up on our random header, a little girl running from a bunch of animals, the name of which currently eludes me. Anyway, I like to think that they’re the band on this one. But, if you don’t want to think too much about it, then that’s fine also. Forget what I just said and let it relax you right off the road. As I said to Mike before he heard it: “It’s either very soothing, or extremely annoying. It depends on what mood you’re in.” He said, “Then it’s probably extremely annoying.”

Tell me about it.