How Does It Know?

Since I love random praise from strangers (in reference to my music, although if you’d like to praise me for other things, feel free), I Google myself sometimes. Today I found that I have one fan on iLike, some woman in Seattle who says “Listen to CHECK YOUR POCKETS: http://www.myspace.com/sunilsawani - smoothness of Jose Gonzales, fresh peppiness of Beatles, ease of My Morning Jacket…” and “Just a lovey [sic] group of sounds!”… Anyway, I thought those were interesting comparisons. I haven’t ever heard much Jose Gonzales, but I am pretty sure I am nothing like him. But hey, random praise is much appreciated, and I’m always interested in hearing the comparisons. Sometimes people are pretty much right on and I have to admit it (like when an acquaintance, upon seeing The Low Hello perform said “I know what you’re like! A cross between Weezer and Neutral Milk Hotel!”, and I had to say, “Yeah, you’re kinda right, I guess.”)…

Anyway, because of this, I was inspired to actually sign up for iLike and also uploaded some songs at Last.fm… Thank you random Seattle lady, for making me make an effort, albeit small.

The New York Times has a series of blogs out there by various songwriters where they talk about…. (wait for it…)… songwriting.

I’ve only read the one by Andrew Bird, but it’s pretty interesting. Like me, he too has a head swimming with melodies for all occasions, but when it comes down to words, the writing gets tough. Though, this is slightly surprising to me, because I’ve always liked what I could make out of Andrew Bird’s lyrics. But the stuff he says about how the meaning is only truly apparent to him after the song is done rings true for me too. Which is why I often don’t like to talk about the lyrics or print them on the CD/website, etc., or even with bandmates I might be playing with at the time.

I kinda got that from way back when (like 1992) I listened to R.E.M. almost exclusively (along with They Might Be Giants, who always publish their lyrics)… I always liked that you could hear what you wanted and interpret it in the way you wanted. It was always somewhat disappointing when I read the lyrics (and people’s interpretations of them, usually on a Usenet R.E.M. fan group, where I also traded bootlegs) and they no longer fit what I wanted the song to be about.

Anyway, I have gotten off track here, but basically you should read this blog if you’re a songwriter and/or Andrew Bird fan. The insight into his process is fascinating and you can probably relate if you write songs anything like the way I do. I haven’t gotten a chance to read the rest of them (they are by artists I am not really a fan of, but I don’t doubt they have some interesting insight as well)…

Words Will Tell, by Andrew Bird

I totally forgot to mention that on 3/29 we went to East Lansing to see Ira Glass, and it was so good! It was VERY similar to the first I’d seen him (I think in Ann Arbor), but with more funny banter about the failed Michigan primaries.

Both times I’ve seen him, he gave tips on how to be creative and do creative work; one of his main points is that you need to generate and put out a large amount of material before you’ll get lucky and come across the thing that works (be it songs, radio stories, written stuff).

And it makes me happy that I’m still doing music and still generating lots of song ideas all the time. He recounts his beginnings as a tape cutter at NPR 30 years ago, and how he basically sucked at doing radio for the first 10 years, when he did some stories for All Things Considered and NPR News. He played a hilarious story he did way back when about tortillas and U.S.-Mexican relations or something (pausing the playback briefly to punctuate with “What is this story about, anyway?!”). Pretty bad. And hilarious.

As a side-note, I tried to capture audio from the show on the BB Pearl as a voice note. And I was able to get some audio. The BB Pearl stores audio as AMR files, so they’re nice and small and easily email-able, which is fine. I’ve been doing this with song ideas, and then converting the files to MP3s for listening on the computer with this MIKSOFT mobile media converter. So anyway, the quality of the audio is really bad, so I decided “hey, with my audio ‘expertise’, I should try to clean up this file”, and I tried to open it up in CoolEdit to boost the wave and maybe do some simple EQ on it to make it a little more listenable. However, neither CoolEdit (nor FL Studio 7) could recognize the wave for editing. The file PLAYED just fine in WinAmp and iTunes, but I couldn’t edit it at all. I’m totally confused, and the only thing I can think of is that the MIKSOFT program converts it to some wave encoding that isn’t supported by these editing programs, but I don’t know exactly what or why. Anyone got any thoughts on this, or any better programs they use for converting AMR files to waves or MP3s?

(3 days till Paris!)

I randomly came across Project Song during my surfing today… From the NPR Website:

And just as we’ll do with each Project Song artist, we showed Merritt six vivid images, along with six words or phrases printed on white cards.

The instructions: Choose one photo to inspire the subject of the song; choose a word or phrase that will inspire the style.

The “Merritt” they speak of is Stephin Merritt from the Magenetic Fields (a band I am somewhat fond of, particularly their epic 69 Love Songs), and in this episode of Project Song (there only seem to be two so far), Merritt creates a song in 48 hours using the photo above as the inspiration for subject, and the number “1974″ as the inspriration for style (he ends up using the interval I-IX-VII-IV as part of his melody line). You can watch the writing and recording process and in the process learn what a Shepard tone is. (I did.)

So I have this now:
Part Time Songs

Visit for the full post, but basically it’s a way to release music all in one place, without regard for band names or proper projects. Basically a nice sense of freedom to do whatever I want.

In a similar vein, I will probably be migrating this site over to howdoesitknow.com, since that is now the title of the blog, and I’ve always felt just a SLIGHT bit silly having a blog whose URL was my full name. So we’ll see when I get that done. I need to back everything Wordpress related up (including the mySQL DB) before I do anything, I suppose.

So I mentioned previously that I’m obsessed with Scrabulous on Facebook. Here are a few more things I am liking right now.

1. Flight of the Conchords - This is probably totally old news to most of you, since the first season has been on DVD for a while already, but this show follows a couple of New Zealand musicians and their novelty band as they try to make in the NYC. This is perhaps the funniest series I have seen in a long time. I am obsessed with it in a way that I haven’t been obsessed with other things since, like, high school. I am even into the silly parody music (which I am generally not a fan of), because they do such a good job of it and the lyrics are excellent.*

2. I got a Blackberry Pearl 8130 recently, and I am really enjoying it. At first I thought maybe I had made a horrible mistake and that I would never need or use any of the fancy features I was paying for. But after a week, I’m enjoying receiving email on it while away from the computer, reading my Google Reader RSS feeds while, let’s say, on the toilet, and syncing up my task list and notes (which can be exported to various organizer programs, but I am just using Comma-Separated Value files) with my laptop. I also am going to get a microSD card for it, which will turn it into a limited-space MP3 player and photo/video storage. You can also just dump text files, etc onto it for viewing. Very versatile. And I got a $50 rebate on it.

3. Phosphorescent - I know nothing much about this guy, but this track (by way, again, of You Ain’t No Picasso) has been bouncing through my head on and off since I downloaded it last month… It’s such a simple song… The bridge-y/breakdown/slowdown portions with horns remind me a bit of Neutral Milk Hotel, and the actual meat of the song is a simple repetitive (what is that little instrument in there that’s playing the constant subtle high notes in there? Is that just a guitar?) structure with few lyrics. But dammit if I don’t love it. I should check some more of his stuff out.

* One that comes to mind is a song that starts off about all the evil and bad things in the world, but includes this gem:
They’re turning kids into slaves
just to make cheaper sneakers.
But what’s the real cost,
cause the sneakers don’t seem that much cheaper.
Why are we still paying so much for sneakers
when you’ve got little kid slaves making them?
What are your overheads?

It sounds, and is comedically, a lot better when it sounds like anything (and you’re not reading it), and with Jemaine’s emotive soul-style singing.

So I was digging around my hard drive and FTP space for old songs and things to make sure I kept safe in a pile of stuff to eventually become the first Part Time Songs EP. The regular EP is going well, too, but now that things and ideas for that are falling into place, my mind is starting to wander towards future songs.

Anyway, I thought I’d post these couple of songs… They are the Low Hello related… One was a demo I made for the band and the other is jam at the beginning of a practice (while I’m not all that great at freeform jamming, this one sounds pretty all right in certain parts):

File Under Sole (uses my melodica in an actually pretty nice way)
Jam (ROCK!)

I’ve really been enjoying this set of covers done by Of Montreal (by way of You Ain’t No Picasso, a great music/free-and-legal-MP3 blog I read regularly)… I’m not a big Of Montreal fan lately*, but these covers are pretty cool. Of particular note is the cover of the Shins Know Your Onion, because it’s a great song already, and the cover sticks to the original’s great vocal melody, but changes the instrumentation enough to keep it interesting as a cover.

* (I loved their early album The Gay Parade because it was so absolutely unlike anything I’d listened to, with it’s show-tune catchy melodies and piano, and the amount of chords Kevin Barnes would shove in there and yet have it sound absolutely natural and good. But they’ve evolved and have become quite a sensation in the indie scene, and unfortunately I don’t care.)

I mean, who wouldn’t love a family band, consisting of mom, dad and 11 year old daughter drumming, dressed in thrift-store chic, and singing songs about slides they’ve procured at flea markets and yard sales, while said slides are being projected on the wall behind them?

Sadly, I’ve never witnessed them do their show live, but last night we watched their DVD Off and On Broadway. It was very good, if a little short. But it included documentary-style footage showing them in everyday life and on tour. Jason Trachtenburg is hilarious in general, and it was cool to find out that Tina Trachtenburg was the brain behind the whole concept, even though she doesn’t normally perform on stage (she’s the one projecting the slides). The onstage footage was also very well filmed and really fun.

Hopefully I’ll get to see them next time they come through town.

In blog news, I cleaned up the Music and MP3 page so stuff isn’t as cluttered and unappealing.