[Updated] Recap on the weekend

[Updated By J. Majer] - Behold! The Light Of Inspiration!

We got a ton of stuff done this weekend, which was awesome and a relief considering how tough it had been last week for either of us to get any good work done on the songs. "The Rain" is now finished THANK GOD, and it sounds fabu. On Sunday, we were even able to slip in a few hours starting on our next song, "You're On To Me" which we had some basic beats and melodies drafted up from months ago. I even remember exactly how the song transpired. I was walking back from the gym, grooving to my iPod as I've been known to do, and these two lyrical lines just popped into my head. What to do? I wrote it down in my trusty little black notebook intended just for these moments, since often I think up great melodies and lyrics in random places while doing random things.

Then, in one of our early studio sessions John started fooling around on the guitar and I was going through my notebook seeing if there were any lyrics that would fit what he was playing (or that I still liked, because I tend to write a lot of stuff down and then come back to it and cringe at the idea that at some point I actually thought that sounded good). I sang the lyrics and John liked them well enough, so *poof!* a song was born. Or at least, the seeds of a song were planted. We played around with some really groovy beat ideas, and even sampled some 'negative space' in my vocal track that sounded cool. Who knows if we'll keep anything but it's fun to mess around and just see what we come up with.

Oh. And here is our lovely mascot, the broken paper lamp in all its glory is still going strong.

Tag! You're It

The dawn of the tag cloud has come. Behold the right hand rail in all its glory. I laugh in the face of HTML failure. Victory is mine!

Looking forward to getting some work done in the studio tonight. I've come up with some better lyrics for The Rain that I want to bounce off John, and I'm hoping we can finish our last little tweaks and start working on a new tune. Fingers crossed.

Stop Rubbing Off On Me! I'm having an outer body experience

This somehow became the mantra for this weekend. Don't ask me how or why, but it seemed hilarious in the midst of working on our tunes this weekend. After returning to our song "The Rain" on Saturday and playing it for a friend of mine who stopped by to see the space and hang out, both John and I realized that what had sounded rad to us in the studio the night before didn't sound as great with a third person in there (and especially in juxtaposition to the other tune we played her that we finished arranging called '212'). So, after she left John turned to me and said "I think we need to overhaul the song. It doesn't feel right anymore," and so that's exactly what we did. We stripped away bits that didn't add anything to the tune and took out everything that we thought didn't add anything to it. For example, we had this sample that we manipulated to sound like a crashing thunder ball of rain, which we ended up dialing down a lot in volume and just using as a subtle build up to the chorus.
I really think that part of the joy and challenge to making music is being willing to completely disassemble a song you think you've finished, and start from just its barest bones to create something even more cool and bizarre.

Speaking of rain, on Sunday we caught MGMT's show at Mccarren Pool, which--I'm not going to deny it--was even cooler because of the downpour you had to endure to watch the show. Granted, I wore cowboy boots so I was semi-prepared...can't say as much for my friends with flip flops. Too bad we got too drunk to work at the studio after. I guess it was a pipe dream to think we'd be productive after an entire day of imbibing. I blame it on the free shots at brunch. We should have known.

John's Update: After listening to the new track it really didn't snap. I have always stuck to the mantra of taking away rather than adding to make something better. Yeah man, I was exhausted after the show. Should have known: Drinking all day lowers productivity.

Fond farewell to WWW

It saddens me to announce the demise of our other band What What Where, the electronic dance rock band that John and I formed with our good friend Dinesh back in 2006. This week we officially decided to disband the project to pursue our other musical paths. Dinesh will continue DJing and manning the board at his Sweet Sounds Studio in NYC and John and I will continue our hell raising with Syvia.

And just to show that I can also offer visual stimuli on my blog posts, I'm attaching a photo from one of our last shows in late June 2008, when we opened for Mindless Self Indulgence at Terminal 5.

To all of you lucky fans who somehow managed, despite our best efforts to remain somewhat elusive when it came to merch, to receive a rare piece of WWW flair and/or demo, I would hold on to that stuff because you never know what it may be worth in a few years. Someday you may count yourself among a rare breed of music fans who own a piece of "vintage WWW."
I, for one, have already locked mine in a time capsule and buried it under the corner of the new monstrosity of a condo that's being built next door. Just saying.

When sickness strikes, the music suffers

So Sunday was a wash out, not because of rain, which would have been a godsend because I literally melt just sitting in my living room surfing away on the internetz, but because John got deathly ill on Sunday and had to cancel our session in the studio. The upside was I got some chores done that I've been putting off (like...laundry! and...watering my dad's roof plants so he doesn't kill me! and...filing away receipts! Yay!) I wished we could have finished up tweaking "The Rain" tune, but it's cool. C'est la vie and you gotta move on.

What sucks is that I started trying to work on this song that has popped into my head, which I have lyrics for but I haven't quite settled on a melody or figured out the emotion that I want to convey in the song, so it is sort of in music purgatory right now, continually shifting between being a random lyric idea and an actual part of a song. Right when I think I've got the melody that feels right, I try to recreate it or I listen back to it recorded and it doesn't work. I think I just need to spend a little more time batting around with the lyrics in my primo creative spots--which I will someday reveal. Someday. They really aren't that interesting, but I'm trying to create some degree of mystery here. I'm also trying to cut down on the amount that I end up writing in these blog posts, but it is just SO HARD! Once I sit down and write I can't stop, but I am tryi n g t o f i g h t t h e u r g e t o c o n t i n u e , s o y o u a r e n' t b o r e d.

Hmm. If I tried putting a space after every letter it would definitely make it a lot harder to write as much. Hmm... interesting.

Can't talk now! I'm in the studio!

This weekend has been a weekend of catching up on all the music writing that we missed out on last weekend, when John went fishing at some lake and I went to Massachusetts to visit my family. It was a relief to get out of New York, which can be deadly in the summer--something about the buildings trapping in heat and lots of pissed off New Yorkers planning their days around finding their next air conditioned refuge. Oh, and John's car's AC totally conked out on the commute over to the studio on the hottest day ever, so now our commute to the studio in Brooklyn is AWESOME (note my sarcasm). Man, you gotta get that fixed pronto.

In terms of the music, we had already passed what John likes to refer to as our "first hurdle"--namely, arranging our first song from start to finish, which we are tentatively titling "212." In a future blog post yet to be determined I will spend a little more time talking about my own writing process (and John will hopefully chime in with his own personal take on writing music), but for that song, I basically just started with two or three lines that popped into my head with this catchy little melody, which I tried to expand into a larger melody with a story behind it (basically, that sometimes I get anxious being alone in the apartment at night and nothing freaks me out more than weird late night phone calls from numbers I don't recognize).

Anyways, this weekend we arrived in the studio to work on our second jam "The Rain." I had thought up this song on some rainy days in June and we had already laid down some ideas around the verse and chorus melodies I had thought up. Listening back to it the past few weeks in the comfort of my own home, I just wasn't feeling the chorus anymore. It just kind of seemed like the verse was rad, but then the chorus would hit and it was a let down, so I muted the vocals and tried to think of what I heard in the music that we had already constructed for the previous chorus. I came up with some ideas and tossed around some new lyrics for the verse, recorded them at home and sent the mp3 to Johno for his take on the new ideas. He liked them, so this weekend we returned to the tune with the new ideas and started to nail down the entire song.

When we arrived at the studio I was kind of bummed to find that someone had accidentally broken the paper lamp I had brought last time. We try to set the 'mood' when we write, and the bright lights in the Brooklyn space can sometimes feel like we are in a mall rather than a studio. So I brought this paper lamp in to the space--a remnant of my brother's July 4th rooftop party--and suddenly we weren't getting frustrated or antsy about writing music. It's amazing how the little things can effect the creative process. Clearly, I was somewhat attached to this paper lamp. Perhaps you could even say that I thought of it as some kind of mystical good luck charm. Perhaps. Keep in mind that I also consider beer a mystical good luck charm. Whatever works to get the creative juices going, you feel me?

Anyways, we played around with some samples of sounds I had to create this super weird beat that sounds like an industrial explosion of water that runs through the entire song. Basically, we just would listen back to the song after doing each arrangement or test of adding/dropping out instruments or beats and then figure out if we thought it worked, and if not, what it needed to achieve the effect we wanted.

Today we will be back in the studio to finish up arranging "The Rain" and maybe even start on tackling some of the other half tunes that we have drafted up. There is talk of bringing a camera to the space and/or maybe even filming us working on stuff so we can upload it to the blog, so keep your eyes peeled for an exclusive photo of our paper lamp good luck charm, which despite being mauled by some other band's gear, still works!

A stint at rehab

Ok, so technically not "Rehab" a la Lindsay Lohan and others, but almost as entertaining. Our band What What Where performed last night at Rehab in Alphabet City (formerly Club Midway) and had one of our best shows ever. We all let loose and just kind of ran with it, while still staying in sync. Maybe it was the energy we still had from the craziness of our previous show, when we opened for Mindless Self Indulgence at Terminal 5 to a sold out crowd of 3,000 people that made the Rehab feel so intimate and let us just let go and have fun on stage. There is something hilarious, however, about going from VIP rooms and backstage riders demanding hummus and coconut juice for our Terminal 5 gig to waiting on St. Mark's Place, alone, at midnight on a Wednesday for the M103 bus to come. And of course, I'm in that middle zone where I've drunk just enough to be pleasantly buzzed but not too much that I'm going to pass out the minute I see a soft surface, that I adamantly refuse to fork over cash for a cab. Quitting my job in the late spring when I decided to try to become a full time musician means I got zero moolah coming in, and I know I can wait it out until that damn bus comes because it's 'the city never sleeps' NYC so it has to come at some point-- maybe not in five minutes or ten minutes, and I may have to bear the sight of numerous M101 and M102 buses ending their routes right at that corner before the magical M103 emerges like a beacon of hope from the onslaught of traffic barreling down 3rd avenue, but it will come. Besides, at that point I was still kind of high on adrenaline from the show, and lugging around my vocal effects kit, and I sort of wanted that time alone waiting for the midnight bus to think about the gig we just did and watch the late night antics of New Yorkers.
Even though my vocal effects mic somehow didn't turn on when it was supposed to, and we started late due to a missing band member, it was altogether a really sweaty, awesome show. God, I wish I could do that every night.
(And for the record, I drunkenly lost my willpower and gave in to indulging John in his stupid "Knock knock" joke, although I really don't think it is as funny as he thinks it is. John, care to share?)