In The Slowdown (Album Release)

In The Slow Slowdown Album Cover

Last year, on this day, I released an album of nine original songs called Living In The Static. I decided to challenge myself to do the same again this year, and started this project in December with a new song that became the title track of today’s release on Bandcamp.

In The Slowdown‘s song lyrics somewhat capture the murky thoughts of night, and also of the world that we find ourselves living in. It’s spirit sort of moved beneath the other eight songs. The only song I had put out there already was Hoping And Praying Like Hell — a protest song that I wrote and recorded quickly during the early Musk-ridden days of this new/old president, and I put out while I was still angry about what was happening (no worries — the anger is still here).

The rest of the new album is a mix of inner thinking — me, wrestling a bit with myself, and also, reminding myself of the loves we have in our lives.

I recorded all the songs at my computer — with acoustic guitar and vocals live, but all else, played either with a keyboard trigger instrument I have or (in the case of drums) loops. Last year, I paid someone to master the tracks but didn’t this year (no reason but I do wish now that I could have easily evened out the overall volume of all of the tracks on the album).

Listen to In The Slowdown, if you are interested. It’s hosted at Bandcamp, but you can listen without purchasing anything. If you find anything interesting to your ears, then hey, that’s success for me.

Peace (and sound mind),
Kevin

Five Years On — Remembering In Song

I wrote and recorded this song in the days after everything shut down with Covid, five years to this very day (March 13, 2020 – it was a Friday, and I remember talking to my students at dismissal about this virus we had all started to hear about, and one student in particular was quite anxious about what he was hearing, and I was trying to keep him calm, and then we said goodbye as they left the building and we didn’t return to the classroom for the rest of the school year) and when I recorded the song on my laptop, I asked my talented wife to sing along with me. In the song lyrics, I was capturing the sense of quiet and that feeling of isolation — the pulling back from the world — from the shutdown. We then shared this song out to our family, school and friend communities as a musical connection. It’s odd to listen to it now, and think back on those days. Five years. Man.

Peace (in song),
Kevin

Protest Song: Hoping And Praying Like Hell

Here is a song of protest, for whatever it is worth these days. I wrote it one night, recorded it on my laptop the next day, and shared it with family and friends. It may become part of a future album of original songs I have been working on.

I share this this morning because the prompt for DS106 Daily Create is “dark” and things are getting pretty dark in my country right now.

I had this idea of turning the song into an animated text video, with phrases on the screen, but for now, that’s a lot of work and I put the idea on the back-burner.

Hoping And Praying Like Hell

I’ve been on the highway
thinking about the news
every moment of these dark days
come crashing on you

And I ain’t got tales to tell
No road to bring us back home
We’re all lost out here in the world
hoping and praying like hell

You could say I’m angry
at my country and friends
pick apart any moment
Is this how it ends?

And I ain’t got secrets to tell
No voice inside the storm
We’re all lost out here in the world
hoping and praying like hell

I’ve been thinking about the children
and what it means to be
growing up in this country
and thinking you’re still free

What words might ring like bell
to bring us a call for change?
We’re all lost out here in the world
hoping and praying like hell

Peace (in the distance),
Kevin

Music: Nothing But This

Nothing But This (album)

About two weeks ago, on a whim, I created a track for a friend with only cowbell loops (my friend hates cowbell so we often use it as a joke with him). The track came out rather interesting, and it got me thinking: what about a series of short musical pieces where I put constraints in myself.

One constraint would be that each track would have only one single instrument featured (like only grand piano sounds, or only flute, etc.) and the other constraint would be that no track would be longer than about 90 seconds.

Then I got to work, in my own manic music making way, gathering loops and making mixes, and loving the compositional practice of creating these little instrument sound landscapes.

I published an album on Bandcamp of the fifteen small pieces. I invite you to listen, if you are curious.

Peace (and sound),
Kevin

Songwriting Help with The Muse

From FAWN

This website — The Muse — is one I looked at long ago and then revisited again. It has some tools for brainstorming for songwriting. But I think it could work for other projects, too. I am not sure I would use it for actual songwriting, but who knows? Maybe? It might help with generating ideas.

It now breaks things down into different areas:

  • Plot Spline ↔ Framing device for helping you devise plot and setting constraints for your song.
  • Struxxure ↔ A tool for uncovering possible outside-the-box song structures.
  • LyriCloud ↔ Creates a “cloud” of semantically-correlated words which you can explore to spark creativity.
  • Titular ↔ Generates several (potentially awkward) song titles for you to interpret and write about.

Peace (and writing),
Kevin

Blogging4Life: Favorite Posts

 

This is the last of a series of posts answering some questions about a life of blogging that started (I believe) via Tom Woodward, (maybe via this blogger) but that I first saw via Alan L, Sarah H and Martin W through a renewed push to return back to blogging spaces and away from corporate social media platforms. I am breaking down the series of questions into different blog posts.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

How about some favorite posts and not just one single choice?

I wish I had a better way to curate/remember the various projects that I have done, with my blog as an anchor point of reflection. Here are a few posts/projects I’d like to highlight here in this act of personally celebrating and remembering (particularly as I have moved my blog to a new domain here). You will notice that collaboration and music are often key focus areas on these, as I have often tried to use technology and digital media to connect and create with others in my various networks:

  • The CLMOOC Poetry Re-Mixer Machine (a riff off an audio project from Alan Levine, who was so helpful in guiding me through the process of creating this project). This was a real learning experience for me, and I was grateful for the support and the contributions of others, and the time I spent, diving into something new and pretty cool, if I don’t mind saying so myself.
  • My Bird Song Remix inquiry in which I tried to use AI tools and others to learn and use bird songs, including this final project in which I wrote, recorded a bird song song.
  • I’ve done plenty of explorations of AI because I am trying to understand it. I am resisting the urge to demonize or celebrate it. This post about making music took me some time to carve out. I am still not sure where I sit on the issue of what is music and what is not.
  • Years back, I took part in another collaboration, this time off Mastodon, called A Whale’s Lantern, that matched two musicians/songwriters together from different parts of the world, to create original music together. (see a post about deconstructing the process) After the first round, I did a series of interviews with the people, and wrote it up as an Oral History. Here is part one and here is part two.
  • I guess birds are a common concept, too. I once created an arc of poems called Birds In Flight, and this post is my reflection on the process of all six pieces of that project.
  • For one year’s Write Out project, we had more than 100 people contribute lines of poem to a Where We’re From project, and then I had people record audio, which I stitched together into an audio poem. I love how the many voices are woven together here.
  • Here is a post about a poem I wrote for five different voices, with friends helping out with the recording.
  • I often collaborate with Terry Elliott, and here are two that I think are good examples of what we have been doing over the years we have been friends. First, our Liminal Adventures (which led to a picture book creation) and then, more recent, using some of his writing as my inspiration for media, Signals And Noise.
  • On Songwriting — this was the seventh and last of a series of posts about writing songs as I walked through the process of a new song. These process notes are a reminder to myself that all art starts somewhere, but needs focus and creative vision

Peace (pondering it),
Kevin