The Nutcracker Buck Sessions

Hmm.  Not so sure about that one.  It’s supposed to be hypnotic.  You don’t look so hypnotized.

It’s short anyway.

It’s not really called “Plow.”  The real title is “Tractor Song.”  I’m still hoping to hit each letter of the alphabet on song titles and this was a chance to get a p in there.  [Update:  I forgot about “Pocket Mouse Moon,” which is now the second shortest song on the site.] So I guess the real title is now “Plow.” It doesn’t really make any difference.  It’s the same song either way.  Or maybe not.  That would be an interesting topic to avoid.

This write-up will also be short.  I have to get that opera libretto done.

This song has  been hanging around a long time, the lyrics over here, the guitar over there, and this is the first time I’ve tried to put them together.  Which is to say that this song exists at all only because I liked that guitar part and needed to get some lyrics for it. We’ve had that discussion before.  I’m not good at writing songs that way.  The lyrics and the music have to come together for me to have any confidence that the song is actually a song.  I wrote the lyrics for this one back around Christmas, when I was in Scotland and didn’t have a guitar with me, and never tried them out together until this week.  You probably wouldn’t set out to write a song about plowing, or tractors, unless there were extenuating circumstances.  Here the extenuating circumstances were I needed lyrics, and the only thing the song reminded me of was sitting on a tractor.  I do hear this in my head as a song, but it doesn’t sound like this.  I wanted ghostly, overlapping, panning voices crossing each other and arguing with each other or supporting each other as the song goes on, kind of like spooky voices taking over the guy’s head while he plows, because people who plow very much are crazy.  I tried that, but it wound up just sounding like somebody mumbling in the background, so I took off that vocal track.

Sad Day at the Carnival.  On a similar topic, yesterday I thought I’d impress everybody by doing a song that was written and recorded just yesterday in a matter of minutes.  I couldn’t sleep Saturday night, and I got up a little after midnight and wrote a song that I thought was pretty good.  I also figured out yesterday that just recording directly into the computer’s built-in microphone sounds about as good as the way I’ve been doing it, without all the wires and knobs and stuff.  So I thought I’d just sneak off into the bathroom while the kids were watching TV yesterday morning and record the song right there, no mixing or panning or effects-noodling, as lo-fi as it gets, and go with that, in the spirit of why the hell not?  But I found that I had the opposite problem with that song:  the lyrics were there, but the melody wasn’t. I thought I’d heard a melody along with the song when I wrote it, and I probably did, but in execution the song can go a lot of different ways, and I couldn’t decide on which one to go with.  None of them really worked. The song’s called “Sad Day at the Carnival.”  It’s about a bunch of stuff that goes wrong at a carnival.

Lies and Damn Lies.  Last week’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” was the highest-viewed video since way back at Week 13 (“Miracle on the Hudson.”)  Who watches those things, how they find them, how the view-counts are tabulated, are all still mysterious to me, as are my site-statistics.  According to Awstats, September turned out to be the third-highest month, viewer-wise, despite being only a half-month in nutcracker time.  You could look at that a couple of different ways.  It’s good that people are finding the site, but it also leads to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter whether I show up or not.

Anniversary.  Today is my second anniversary of self-employment/unemployment.  The lights remain on. Whether anybody’s home depends on a lot of other stuff.

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In other news, Rona got a new haircut, and we’re all looking forward to Halloween.