Get Help

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It’s hard to believe this band of ours has been around for 4 years now. That’s pretty frickin’ exciting, if you ask me. To ape a Larry David philosophy, I don’t understand all the fuss about the five’s and oh’s and using their increments to celebrate our anniversaries and set up meeting times. What’s wrong with setting up your lunch date on a perfectly good 12 after the hour? So I’m celebrating 4 years like it was, well, 5 years. It’s more than a perfectly good block of time. It’s an administration.

Get Help has seen a “wild ride” in its first term. Mike and I went from emailing songs with half-assed titles to each other in near-seclusion to creating this blog and a podcast; putting out a well-received debut album; and getting some of our half-assedly titled songs onto television. We also have kept a revolving door of 8 band members, although now we seem to have cooled into a new geological epoch with our new bassist John Van Atta. Gene has made it through a few shows without his drum stool exploding, so we’re pretty sure he’s permanent now. Round of applause, take a bow. And we will begin recording a new album at the end of this month.

Which reminds me: now we also have, at least semantically, a new decade. So what could be better to mark such a momentous, celebratory occasion than a downbeat, somber song about old memories? This one started out as a bunch of strumming and humming, and at first I thought for sure I was going to change the chorus lyrics, but after a while, it was impossible to sing anything different. Everything else just fell into place, and lord knows that doesn’t happen all that often: Mike sprinkles a bit of organ on there, whisks in the bass, and I ground in some cavernous distortion. Let it sit for a few weeks until you’re sure it’s not total crap and presto. A moody soufflé.

Belated happy new year!

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I had a dream about this song once. It’s a dream I have from time to time, where the song changes, but the effect it has on my psyche I am sure is invariably the same. I will call it a “songwriter’s dream”, although as far as I know, this is the only supergroup-of-unknown-musicians-with-an-mp3-blog blog to mention such a thing: I am in a supermarket, or an elevator, and instead of having no clothes on, or finding out I am a dead fish wearing oven mitts, what happens is a song comes over the loudspeaker that is all but identical to a song of mine, either finished or in progress. The lyrics are the same, the melody, the chorus, etc., but something is just a little bit different, so the tune is slightly askew in that patented dream-like fashion. I am stunned and left to wonder how I could have heard the song before and stolen it note-for-note without even realizing it. I continue to wander the aisles of the supermarket, or depths of the elevator, feeling like a fraud. I imagine the Freudian analysis of this scenario need not go too far.

Upon waking, however, I am imbued with an odd confidence in my “stolen” melody or lyric, usually just the push needed to get something past the half-assed stage of recording most of my projects founder in. And so we have this song. Mike made the excellent suggestion that I capo this in order to improve the vocals, but for now, the unconscious demands its publication. The dream police shall get their respect.