The Nutcracker Buck Sessions

Facebook is weird.  That’s really all this song is about.  It takes the most random group of people from your past, puts them all in one room together, and expects you to have something relevant or at least inoffensive to say to all of them.  I usually fail on both counts.  I don’t talk the same way around my granny that I do around Larry.  Larry gets his feelings hurt very easily, for one thing. 

Many of you wouldn’t like each other.  Many of you probably don’t like me.  But I love you all.

OCCASIONAL REJOICING

The Song.  Jazz is not my first language.  If jazz were a language, for me it would probably be like Norwegian:  I can pretty much recognize the alphabet, but every once in a while, for no reason I can figure out, they’ll do something like put a big diagonal slash through their O.  So I’m pretty proud of this one.  Because it’s a jazz song, and because I wrote and recorded it just this past weekend.

The Performance.  I’m just grateful it sounds as listenable as it does.  I spent most of the recording time on the main guitar part, and when I finally called a truce on that, I accepted the first take on the other guitar and the vocal—not because they were perfect, but because I was tired and knew any improvement would be marginal.  The second guitar covers up the most egregious mistakes of the first guitar.  I wish Buck had gotten the words right and paid a bit more attention to the meter, remembered to breathe, etc.  I’m happy that the song started and ended in the same tempo.  That wasn’t the case the first several takes.  Those “p’s” are brutal.

The Video.  The video sucks, redeemed only by your beauty.  I thought a slideshow of still photos would be easy, but it’s not when there are a hundred or so of them.  And when you do the overlay track with Buck and the smoking thing, it just got out of hand.  Buck is smoking because this is a jazz song, and jazz and smoking are both cool.  I wanted to have some finger-snapping in the intro, but Buck doesn’t have any fingers.  (He doesn’t like to talk about it.)  This program I use has a feature that will automatically create a music video for you, but I needed either a longer song or fewer friends for the program to be able to do it.    I’m lucky I have so many friends.   Everybody’s lucky that this song isn’t longer.

At least one person got dropped from the video, and I can’t figure out who it is.  (Ailise, you are not on my Facebook page, I just realized, and I thought you were.  Why?)  I know somebody got dropped only by counting the frames and seeing at least one missing.  I don’t understand my editing software well enough to know when, say, adding a clip or frame advances the music track with it, adds onto the end, to the beginning, etc.  There were only a few places where I wanted a particular photo to match a particular place in the song (there are no inside jokes, so if you’re in the video and wonder why you got shown at, say, the “Holstein cow” part [Monique, I think that’s you], it’s just because that’s where your picture came up when it was all over), and anything I did to the video part screwed that up over and over again.  I’m sorry to whoever got dropped.  If you know who you are, identify yourself and I’ll try to fix it.  Unless you’re one of those people I just don’t know at all but who still wound up on my Facebook page.  I left you out on purpose.  Nothing personal, but I couldn’t even tell from your photos page which person was you.

I bought a pack of cigarettes for this video.  They won’t sell you just one cigarette.  Six dollars!  I’ve never smoked, but damned if I’m going to waste six dollars.

Dedication.  This song is for you!

Next Week.  Nutcracker Buck sings “87 Kinds of Shaving Cream.”