How Does It Know?

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!)

On Wednesday night, Dan and I headed to the Royal Oak Music Theatre to see our ex-band-mate Adam’s band (Murder Mystery) play a show. For those of you who haven’t heard of this place, it’s a pretty big venue where pretty big name bands play. I found out that on Wednesday nights they do a local band lineup, which I think is pretty cool for such a large venue (considering some upcoming acts are George Clinton, Steve Vai and D.L. Hughley). That’s what this was, and Murder Mystery was headlining with a couple other bands and a solo artist.
For those of you who haven’t BEEN there (like neither Dan nor I had), the place is really big, and the crowd that an indie rock show draws on a Wednesday night isn’t all that great. Even when personal favorites Canada are playing in the penultimate slot. So the place did look pretty vast and empty in most places, but it was fun nonetheless, and had the venue been say, Lager House, the place would’ve been packed. Dan and I agreed that had we played this type of gig, we’d have done a decent show, but drawn no kind of crowd at all. That’s just how we rolled. Not on purpose, though.
Anyway, the sound was kinda bad due to it being pretty empty and the ceilings being high… really bassy and boomy and echo-y. Kinda reminded me of the Morrissey show I wrote about earlier in this fine blog. I mean, everyone played fine, it was just the acoustics of the place. Overall, it was pretty cool to see Murder Mystery on such a big stage (which probably was the size of my high school auditorium’s stage, which I got to play on for Battle of the Bands ‘96 and ‘97) and still maintain the energy they have whilst being spread across many feet.

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Some upcoming topics: a real explanation of the “How Does It Know?” title; news of me finishing the partially complete tLH EP myself in a Song of the Month fashion; vocal booth progress.

This basement we played in. In retrospect, kind of a cool venue.

I added some new videos at http://thelowhello.com (’Summer Insects’ and ‘I Got Carpet’)… I am pleased with the FLV format the videos are posted in. I found a plugin that lets you convert an AVI file into an FLV file, which makes it play in a little flash player, rather than having to download and watch a 150MB AVI file. The quality is crappy, but that’s because the source video’s quality was crappy. But this effectively lets me get around the YouTube limit of 100MB without having to cut a single song into two parts, so I’m happy.

Other than that, not much new to report… What’re you up to?

So yesterday, I was lighting up the grill to grill up some chicken and sundried tomato sausages from Trader Joe’s*. We have a gas grill, so I turned on the gas valve at the tank as usual, and turned on the gas on the grill control knob. The electric starter doesn’t work anymore, so we light it with long wooden matches. So I did that as usual, and the flame LEAPT up in a giant ball and singed me! It was freaky. It was just a split second and I didn’t think anything had happened. But then I eventually looked down at my hand and the hair near my wrist was half white… I brushed it and the bits fell off. I realized I had been singed by the flame and ran inside to check my face. It actually got a bit of my beard on the chin and got my eyelash tips (despite my glasses). But luckily, there was no permanent disfigurement or anything, and you can’t really tell anything happened. I’m not sure why the grill did that this time when normally it just lights. Now I’m going to be kind of scared to use it again…

There are some photos of the last show at Jacoby’s at the Low Hello website.

Well, it’s time for bed. Tomorrow’s work. I would like a week where I just hang out at home. I’ve never really done that as a vacation. If I’m taking prolonged periods of time off, it’s always for a trip. I wonder if I’d have fun at home for a week. Or if I’d get bored. It certainly would be conducive to working on the solo EP. Anyway.

* As far as the sausages are concerned, I wasn’t thrilled with them. I was really hoping for a much more seasoned, flavorful sausage, with a stronger sundried tomato taste. But really they were mainly plain chickeny tasting, which was disappointing. I put ketchup on them and they still weren’t as satisfying as a good Hebrew National hot dog.

Pretty good show tonight at Jacoby’s! Chris Bathgate opened, and I really really like him. I know I’ve been talking a lot about shows lately, and nothing else, but tonight’s makes 5 that we did just in the last month. Crazy. But now we’ve got not a whole lot going on in June because Adam’s going on tour with his other band. So Robb and I were talking about concentrating on the new recording in June. That’ll be good. I can’t wait for it to start taking on a shape of its own; right now it’s just rough drums and guitar and me singing badly. I’m really going to work on the vocals for this one — I’d gotten reviews that say the vocals sound thin, etc on my other recordings. But I think some creativity and technical savvy can solve that problem.
Anyway… it’s pretty late right now and I should probably get some sleep. Talk to you later.

Last Monday, a couple friends and I went to see Morrissey at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor. F lives in Ann Arbor as it is, so we met up at his house. The show was fairly good, but not as good as when I saw him in 1997 after Maladjusted came out. This time, since I’ve fallen out of touch with any new Morrissey albums since Maladjusted, I didn’t recognize a lot songs. It was still fun to hear the hits he did play, though, and the old Smiths songs. One complaint I had was that the drums seemed to be really overpowering a lot of the other players and Morrissey’s singing on the more rock-type songs. I’m not sure if that’s due to the acoustics of the theatre or the drum mics, but they tended to be really bassy and thud-y.

In Ann Arbor, we walked around and had dinner at a food co-op. And it kind of made me want to live in Ann Arbor. I did live there as a student, but it’d be a great place to live as a homeowner and professional, I gather. I love that everything is walkable (for the most part), though it could get rough in the winters. And there’s just so much good stuff going on all the time. I used to LOVE living in Ann Arbor in the summers, when campus was kind of empty and I had an easy job at the Space Physics Research Lab. Ahh, memories.

Anyway… Last night the Low Hello played a pretty successful show at Mac’s Bar in Lansing. After some initial song tuning difficulties (my tuner was telling me my G string was in tune, but for some reason, it was tuned like a half step lower than G. So we ended up playing the entirety of I Got Carpet that way, but no one seemed to care. Once again, the crowd was great and appreciative and seemed to enjoy themselves), everything went nicely. We actually made a little money this time, too, which is nice to offset the cost of giving away free CDs.

Today I pretty much chilled. We have these parts for the dryer that got mailed to us (so that the repair guy can just use them when he comes), and I attempted to see if I could just do the work myself and save the trouble and cost of having him come out. Turns out the job is a bit more than I envisioned and would involve taking too many things apart to make it worth our while.

Oh, has anyone been watching Human Giant on MTV? I have and have been really really liking it. Damn that’s some good sketch comedy. And it’s nice to see a brown bearded man be so awesome on TV.

…and I have not much to say. Tonight, I’m working late! Trying to get ahead or catch up or maintain equilibrium. But the weekend was excellent and we (the Low Hello) played two great shows (in Hamtramck and Lansing)… I think we played well at both of them and both were fun in their own ways. The Lansing show was an interesting experience, because it was in a used record/comic book/video game/movie store. Videos were projected on the wall behind the performers. We were paid in store credit. We got several copies of our CD placed in the local rack.

Next show is the 18th at Mac’s Bar in Lansing (which I am excited about because we’re playing with fairly well-known (well, as well known as you can be in the local indie rock scene) and good bands), and then we have another weekend of shows at the end of the month (5/31-6/1) in Detroit.

Tomorrow, the dryer man comes over to give us an estimate on the squirrel damage. If it’s not worth it, we’ll get a new dryer. I hear they have fancy new features these days (moisture sensor?)…