Y’all might remember 2020 a novel virus had been unleashed on the world, shutting down civilization as we know it. We were all locked away in our homes twiddling our thumbs watching live streams and lots of Netflix. well almost everyone I knew was focused on Tiger King. Remember that? Ha ha well, while my friends were watching Tiger King. I was in my studio creating things that would bring me joy. One of my favorite things at the time was to share my recorded output with my good old friend Mike Stewart, former Gourds producer, manager, Shinyribs bassist, percussionist and all around Buddy for many years whom I like to call StewBall. This nickname after the old folk song about stew Ball the racehorse. I think I learned that from Peter, paul and Mary originally. Unfortunately, Peter Yarrow turned out to be a real POS. And for the life of me, I’ll never understand why Jimmy Carter pardoned him in his last day in office.
But I digress, we’re talking about StewBall Mike Stewart, and his fun time getting to remix my late night TV gold stuff. Some of which I’ll play for you at some point. This time also he had sent me remixes of older Shinyribs stuff as an experiment we were thinking about going forward with. It died on the vine so to speak. I do love the idea of remixing old songs, but without them being on a Time grid which is locked into a drum machine basically it is very hard to remix with any precision. Because the timing is human,Fallible, not perfect, natural you might say. And most music these days is locked in to a time grid. it’s perfect. It’s not human. It’s not natural and yet in my opinion still fallible. I think to some degree when people bemoan the homogeneity of today’s pop music it is this element of being in perfect time that exacerbates the experience of listening to perfectly boring music. Not all of it is boring, of course, and if I mention Peter, I must mention What’s his ass. The dude who married Kim Kardashian… Yeezy Yagi Yaga what’s his nickname Kanye Kanye Twitty that’s it. Anyway yeah his early 2000’s output is some of the best of this genre. What I call computer music. I don’t know that anyone’s been as creative as him since. He kind of defined the genre in my opinion like the Eddie Van Halen of artificial music. It’s fun stuff. It’s ear candy. It’s very creative, full of layers, and worth listening to absolutely if you never have. Anyway, this is sort of the idea of me and Mike had is take my music and remix it just see what would happen. We were just sitting around not watching Tiger King so what else were we gonna do? This song is from that time. Early 2020 maybe summer of 2020 I can’t remember exactly. I do have a dropbox folder filled with this kind of stuff that I’ve never known quite what to do with. So I think dropping it here would be a good place to start. See what y’all think about it. And is it worth sharing, selling on band camp or whatever? It largely feels unfinished to me and mostly experimental sounding. Though interesting to real fans like you I don’t see that it has value generally in the Music marketplace. But what is the Music marketplace anyway? nobody knows anymore what that is. It’s largely whatever we make it out to be. I’ve been thinking a lot about that issue how to go forward as a music creator, serving my fans directly from the tap, fresh juice right off the vines like lemons and limes, songs, and rhymes for all my friends.
Lately I’ve been playing around with video ideas. I do lots of layered collage stuff that in my Photoshop work. I wanted to capture that in video form. So I’ve been doing funny little videos with the idea that I was going to layer these different videos into one collage video. With music added, of course. I finally sat and did this with some of the video I shot on the tours this year of landscapes and other odd things I’ve come across. Like this video of multiple disco balls at the venue we played in Reno Nevada. Layered over some redwoods and some grass blades and the random open bookoutdoors on a shelf of a dilapidated building. Just sitting there. The book was too high for me to really see what it was. But I got as good of a video as I could from it, and the wind helped me out by turning the pages like a ghost hand at just the right time. I love that shit when random things happen just as they should happen without being aware of it till later when I watch the video and begin combining it with other elements.
When contemplating music for this video, I wasn’t sure which way to go. Part of me felt like I should use new music from my new record and use it as a promotional tool to promote more my new record. But let’s face facts, records die after three months commercially, if they were ever alive at all, we don’t know. So Leaving Time is pretty much a done deal. And I won’t go into it too much, but this is one of the great discouraging facts about making records as an independent artist. I don’t have well connected agents and managers or publicists who are working to make me famous. I haven’t given huge chunks of my publishing or rights to my image to any conglomerates to place me in high profile positions on major festivals or late night tv talk shows, to grow my professional career to a star status. I rather find this avenue of music career growth to be offensive, uninteresting and dishonest. But that’s just me.
Then I remembered the Stewball remixes. This morning‘s night remix you’ll hear a different person singing what sounds like a vocal, but it’s merely a harmony with my lead vocal taken out and that harmony vocal brought to the fore. The voice you hear is a great Singer songwriter named Michael Fracasso. A very good friend to me and to George Reiff who produced Well After A While. The album that Mornings Night is off of. There are some other harmonies as well on this that I am not sure who those singers were. It could be Brandy Zdan or Sally Allen. It could be The Mastersons. I don’t know. Jorge had carte blanche to add things as he felt necessary if I was there or not. Then if I didn’t like it later, I could nix it, but we would still pay the musicians. Which reminds me somewhere, I have my friend, Nick Offerman doing a recitation of a bit I used to do at the end of a song called Somebody Else. When we did it live, I would go into this bit about the drunken piano player at the end of the song and tell a story about something that happened. It could vary in its details. I thought when I recorded this song, I might add that, but I didn’t want to do it. I thought it’d be cool to have Nick Offerman do it. And he sent me a recording of it cool guy that he is. But in the end, I felt the bit, not because of Nick‘s performance, but because of the part itself, I felt cheapened the song and made it more of a novelty than it should be. I have a lot of other thoughts about that song and about this weird in-between place it sort of inhabits, where people giggle because there’s so much space in it. It makes people nervous and they don’t know if it’s serious or if it’s funny. I love that. I love that people don’t know how to feel when they hear the song. I love music really when it gives one multiple feelings that conflict or contradict with each other and confuse one. Tony Joe White is a great example of this. The first time I heard him, my friend Ingmar, who worked at Munich records gave me a copy of one of his first records. When I search for it now all I find online is a record called simply “ Tony Joe.“ So this record may have been a European version of his first or second record. It has a song called Stud Spider on it, I found to be a really bizarre song then and still now. It’s great. It’s one of my favorite things, but I remember at first not being sure if Tony Joe White was serious or not. Like was he for real or was he tongue in cheek? Maybe I should make a playlist now that I’ve referenced Peter, Paul and Mary and Tony Joe White in the same post ha ha. That’s right we’re going to listen to songs about a spider man playboy And a famous racehorse
So here it is without further ado my highly indulgent art film, Reno Disco Bal
