Tripecac - College Collection

This is a remake of a song I first recorded in 1990 (see Trex's "You Run (demo)"). The verses are straight from an ex-girlfriend's break-up letter. It's the same "joke" that I used on "All My Love", although this time the words are more vehement (and self-important). The music isn't as gleeful and melodic, so it's not as funny and memorable (in my opinion).

I still think it's interesting, though. Here was this "scathing" criticism that was supposed to humble me and martyrize the girl... but I added a little poppy background music and suddenly her letter becomes a joke. If anything, her words (in the context of this song) make me look like a strategic studmuffin and her a gullible, melodramatic, yappy-dog. To a 17/19 year old boy, this power to "deflect" someone's words through music (turning punches into punch-lines) was extremely appealing. It still is, but nowadays, I'm a little more sensitive. A little.

For this 1992 version, I got my friend Sachin to read the letter. I sped up his voice to make him sound [more] like a girl. I wrote and sang the chorus. The distortion is pretty bad, but I'm guessing that it's the lyrics that'll make you wince more! :)

This song was written for guitar, but I didn't get an electric guitar until 2000. My poor-geek's solution was to simulate a distorted electric guitar on my keyboard. You can't hear it very well, because the organ and drums ended up dominating the song.

This music half-mimics and half-mocks avant guarde jazz. I think I was getting into Frank Zappa at the time. This was the first post-IPECAC song on which the lyrics were completely improvised.

This song was written during an experience that cost me some friends, screwed up my grades, and made me fiercely intolerant of liars, cheaters, and closed-minded people in positions of authority. On the positive side, I developed an obsession with leading a life where no one could ever doubt my integrity or honesty. It's like I became a monk... Well, sorta.

Notice the punk-like beat. I was just then getting into into UK punk bands like The Clash. I certainly felt like an angry young man too!

This is a remake of the Master Anchovies' theme song.

I wrote most or all of the music. I used to think Jon Friesen wrote the sax part, but I'm no longer sure, since the first recording of "Anchovy Rock" was with Allen Foster on sax rather than Jon.

I like this solo version a lot. It doesn't have live drums, but it has a tight energy that the Anchovies never captured on tape.

Long, rambling intro to "Ten Thousand Dogs". This contains some musicial false starts at the end. I was being annoying.

Well, at least you can see tht I wasn't taking myself seriously. That's a good thing, right?

I think this my idea of a joke. There's some false starts (which I moved to the "intro"), and a repeating section near the end. It's annoying, I know. Sorry.

The juvenile lyrics were improvised. I don't know what I was thinking. Probably didn't then, either.

I used a [fake] baritone sax improv as an intro to "Pillary". I left it off the initial version of the CD. Can you tell why?

This featured my roommate Christian reading an article from our college newspaper (called the "Pillary"). The article was really boring. I don't know why I (or Christian) selected it. Maybe it's because involved in tabulating a lot of surveys back then (for school and fun)?

The music isn't much better; it's a moody stadium ditty. If such a thing can exist.

Man, I could be annoying back then. This was supposed to be a joke. I was procrastinating the start of the next song ("Procrastinate") by babbling aimlessly. Get it?

I've left the [mild] profanity in there because, well, I haven't gotten around to censoring it yet. Get it?

Sorry, these liner notes suck. I need to clean them up a bit. Tomorrow, perhaps. Get it?

This continues my then-habitual use of profanity. Fortunately, the vocals are muddy enough that you can't hear it very well.

The music's okay.

I felt bad about the profanity on "Procrastinate", so I recorded this instrumental version. It doesn't really add anything to the album. Maybe I hoped to one day recorded a cleaner set of vocals on top?

I liked this peppy instrumental so much that I put it on Songs to Sleep By 2. It's the only Tripecac instrumental that made it on there.

Two words. Two seconds. And now it's time for my two cents.

In case you haven't heard it yet, this is just me saying "hit it". There's no music here, just those two words. There's not even anything special about them.

Why do I represent them as a "song", then? Why didn't I just either delete them or add them to the beginning of "Better Off Live"?

Well, the answer lies in two words: completeness and flexibility.

When I first digitized this album for CD in 2001, I deleted the "hit it" intro from "Better Off Live". For whatever reasons, I didn't like it there. I might have been struggling to keep the CD length to a minimum. Nowadays, however, CDs can handle up to 80 minutes, so space isn't an issue anymore (for this album at least).

My current project (as I write this) is to restore my old albums to as close to their original (tape) format as possible. This means extending songs to their full length, warts and all, and putting them in their original order.

The "hit it" intro was originally considered a "wart" (although it's not as bad as, say, "Procrastinate Intro"), so I snipped it. Now I have to add it back. It needs to go somewhere between "Not a Day of Rest" and "Better Off Live".

Therefore, my options are to either:

• add it to the end of "Not a Day of Rest"
• add it to the beginning of "Better Off Live"
• treat it as a separate song (between the other 2)

What's the smart thing to do?

Well, on the one hand, if I add it to an existing song, I keep the track count low. I don't have to create a new XML file for the "hit it" part, and there doesn't need to be an entry for it on the songs page. I save effort and ink (when I print out the album cover).

On the other hand, if I keep it separate, then I can more easily delete or move it later. I won't need to touch the adjacent songs' XML (e.g., remove "hit it" from their lyrics). I won't need to edit any mp3s, either. I can just move it somewhere else, with the least possible effort.

So there's advantages to both, but what's best for the user? Well, the user probably doesn't expect or want to see "Hit It" as a complete song. If usability is priority #1, then I should probably add the "hit it" to an existing song.

But I won't. Not for "hit it", at least. If I did, then these notes would have no "home", no reason to exist. And that would be a loss, a much bigger loss than "hit it".

These notes have value. The web site has value. Sometimes, the site and writing are more valuable than the music.

This "song" is an extreme case. But there are other instances out there, too, where the commentary and presentation (the "garnish") are more interesting than the audio (the "meat"). If this encourages you to hunt out more interesting song descriptions, great. If it makes you want to abandon my site and check out some "real" music elsewhere, well, that's great too.

Personally, I think there's a lot of enjoyable music buried in this Tripecac site. You've gotta dig for it, though. Explore around a bit, and you might find something truly valuable to yourself...

Tripecac is not for the lazy.

I liked this song's funky bass line, but thought the drums sounded too fake. I wished I could perform it with live instruments instead. This is the first hint that I was starting to feel constrained by my keyboard.

The title has a second meaning as well. It's a warping of the term "better off dead". My college (William and Mary) had been famous for its high suicide rate. I think I was making (very subtle and light) fun of people who took things in their cozy academic lives so seriously that they'd actually kill themselves. Suicide is a topic that I explored with greater depth (and humor) on my next two albums (College Collage and The Hermit).

This is another Master Anchovies remake. I wrote the music, but the lyrics were written by people in our English class (for whom we performed the song).

This is tighter than the Anchovies or IPECAC versions. The keyboard sax sounds a little fake, but it's not too bad.

I was checking my voice mail. These two messages are from Beth.

This isn't really a "song" but it helps set the mood for "The Dairy Poops".

I wrote this for my then-girlfriend Beth, who was lactose intolerant. The voice in the beginning is from the end of the Voice Mail that she left me. The music is catchy and the lyrics are funny, if a little gross.

The title suggests that I was getting ready to return home from college for the summer.

It sounds a little empty. Perhaps I planned to add vocals at some point. I probably recorded it to tape in order to "save" it in case there was a problem with the keyboard during the move, and then never got around to adding vocals.

I loved "No No No" from my previous album (Archives), but had by this time become uncomfortable with profanity, partly because my then-girfriend Beth never used profanity.

I found the sequencer data for "No No No" still on my keyboard, and recorded this short instrumental version. I may have been planning to re-record vocals later, but got distracted by some new song ideas and decided to get this off the keyboard ASAP.

Sleepy spoken intro to "Fireflyz".

This was my most serious attempt at writing a standard jazz song. I think I was trying to entice Jon Friesen (who went to the same college) to rejoin me in music making. My plan didn't work, but I like the song.

I wrote this for my sister Jessica, who had started smoking. She eventually quit, but I don't know if this song had anything to do with it.

I like to pretend that the chimes in the intro symbolize "time passing". It was now my next semester of college. They probably mean nothing, but let's pretend they mean Time Passing, okay?

This is the first Tripecac song on which I used my Roland TR-505 drum machine. I synced it to my Yamaha SY55.

This was a love song for my then-girlfriend Beth. I recorded it on her birthday. I included some clips of some voice mail messages she left me.

Musically, it sounds miles more mature than the other music I had created up until that point. It almost sounds like classic rock. With a fake keyboard guitar. And a drum machine. And a reggae beat. Okay, so maybe not classic rock, but it sounds mature. Or at least ambitious. Or pretentious. Take your pick.

This was originally the opening song of my third solo album (College Collage). I recorded it (and the next 3 songs) at the end of 1992. I've moved it here because there was more room, and it makes sense to put all the 1992 recordings together on one CD.

"Early Release" introduces my reverb box. It also has one of the longest intros of any of my vocals songs (2:17 out of 4:31). I think I was aiming for an "epic" feel. The mix isn't that great, but neither are the writing, lyrics, singing, or solos, so it all evens out.

This starts off cool and kinda "ethnic" but ends abruptly. I don't know why I didn't complete it. I doubt I was anxious to free up keyboard memory, since the next song wasn't recorded until a couple weeks later.

My friends said they really liked this song, and that I should finish it. I ignored them, prefering to concentrate on new ideas. This has remained my habit, for better or worse. Once I commit a song to tape (or CD), I consider it "off limits" to further editing. Perfectionism clashes with Tripecac's shotgun approach, which is to "record lots of songs, at least some of them good".

I wrote this for the Dead Anchovies, who recorded several versions of it. The lyrics are about Jon, who had left the Master Anchovies in 1990. The "aren't you sorry" bits are a reference to a different Dead Anchovies song: "Aren't You Sorry".

I really like this solo version. It's tight and peppy amd funny (though a little mean). There are some musical (and spoken) references to IPECAC that no one gets except me (and Jon if he ever listens to this).

This is musically unrelated to "Christmas in Cancun", which I wrote for the Master Anchovies. The only thing they have in common is that I wrote them right before (or after) trips to Cancun.

I had emailed the Dead Anchovies that I was going to write a second song about Cancun. These lyrics are directed at them (Allen, Anand, and Luke). I was just basically bragging about going to Cancun while they stayed home. Pretty simple[minded] stuff.

People liked it. A lot. This was my first "hit" song (among my friends). I got tons of positive feedback for it and many people actually requested copies of it. It was a nice dose of encourage, a good way to end the year.

This started a tradition of speaking at the end of each album. It's not very interesting. I got better at it over the years, though.

It's funny how I wasn't thinking of the long term. "Newer stuff" and "newest" stuff are really short-sighted album titles, if you think about it. What, you don't want to think about it? Neither did I, back then.

This is a backwards recording of the drum machine.