Tripecac - Convenience

This kicks off the album with fury, wit, and wild vocal effects, much as "Millions of Monkeys" did for The Hermit. It's far more "rock" than anything on Renewal. It tried very hard to inject raw passion and drama into the music (particularly the vocals), and it shows.

The lyrics are about (you guessed it) my dependence upon convenience. I wrote a couple verses and choruses, and then adlibbed the rest. There's often multiple vocal tracks at once, which makes it hard to understand what I was saying. I therefore decided to transcribe the main improvised vocal tracks serially instead of trying to interleave them. Hopefully that'll help add some clarity!

I finished the song exactly a year after I had started "Memorial". It felt like I had come a long way. Sure, my songs were still too long, but at least these were starting to rock.

Shortly after recording "Convenience", I decided to complete all my unfinished songs before starting any new ones. I began with the most recent project ("Respit") and methodically worked my way backwards, for the rest of this album and the next (Back Up).

"Respit" was a simple jazz/pop/reggae ditty. Stylistically, it's a step back into easy listening from "Convenience". I tried to toughen it up by giving it a [keyboard] guitar solo and effect-laden drums, but overall the song still comes off pretty light.

The title is a play on the word "respite". I could have been referring to a respite from the aggression of "Convenience", or from the pressures involved in starting new songs.

Inspired by a recent trip to Vancouver, this was an attempt to make "modern" sounding jazz. It had synthy instruments and an "artsy" time signature (6/4) which for some reason reminded me of "prog rock". I was trying to see what would happen if I didn't aim for a "live band" feel.

Meanwhile, my dad had told me that although he liked a lot of my new (post-2000) music, most of the songs sounded muffled. I decided to work on making the sound more "crisp", and used this song as a guinea pig (hence the title). My engineering strategy was to:

• reduce the amount of low-frequency reverb
• increase the master treble
• separate instruments via pan and pitch
• mix with speakers rather than headphones

In the end, the song does sound "crisper" than, say, "Walkman", but it's still a bit messy. Instead of low-frequency reverb, there's now a lot of distracting high-frequency "swishing". Also, it sounds like I pitched all the instruments higher; they're just as much collision in the highs as there used to be in the lows. So now, instead of low-frequency mud I have high-frequency sleet. :)

The music itself is okay; not awesome or anything, just okay. I generally don't like "synthy" music, so my heart wasn't in it. Also, I wasn't sure how to solo in 6/4, so there's not much variance. It was an interesting experiment.

This is a simple, catchy EP ditty which I set to a blues progression. It was inspired by my friends Peter and Haakon, whom I had recently visited in Vancouver. There's actually two EPs: one low and one high. For the main melody, they play together harmoniously, but then they drift apart and "do their own thing". In a way, this is a musical portrait of life as a couple.

The title predated the actual music, so no, I wasn't implying that married life is stifling. It's just a bit of wordplay a combination of "stifle" and "stiff". I don't remember why I picked it. It doesn't really fit the song.

I started this mellow jam the evening before a trip down to Seattle. I was envisioning driving down the highway at night in the rain. The auto-panning, strings, and sound effects (thunder, rain, zooming cars) are a bit overkill, but some of the solos are nice. There's no "hook"; the song is basically solo after solo after solo, none of which I wanted to throw away. The end result is soothing background music.

Get funky! This is a simple, bouncy dance/trance loop with lots of solos thrown on top. It also features my first wah-wah-powered guitar!

My wah pedal is actually a MIDI foot controller plugged into my old SY55 keyboard. I connected the SY55 via MIDI to a second PC running SoundDiver, which controlled my Pod Pro (also via MIDI). In SoundDiver I mapped foot controller events to the Pod Pro's wah level. I then recorded output from the Pod Pro on my main music PC. This elaborate setup let me press down on the foot controller and hear the wah effect. I used the same strategy to map a sustain pedal to the Pod Pro's delay toggle.

The title is a play on "config.sys", a DOS configuration file. I was tweaking my studio configuration by setting up the wah-wah pedal. The "sissy" comes from the fact that I wasn't using a real wah pedal, but was instead taking a geeky (MIDI) approach.

I never get tired of listening to this 15-minute monster! I love the slow, funky groove.

"You're doing everything wrong." How many times have I heard this? How many times have you heard this?

This song is about a friend (Ann) who had a habit of making "bad" life decisions. Several of us thought her decisions were "bad" but she may have felt differently. I'm sure people thought (and perhaps still think) that I made "bad" life decisions too: hermiting, moving across the country, exercising excessively. My occasional use of "we're doing everything wrong" indicates that I was including myself among the people who have moments of apparently self-destructive cluelessness.

I had just gotten into the band Suicide. If you've ever heard their music, you'll spot the influences: deliberately "cheesy" sounding drum machines, synths, and nasty, distorted vocals.

The title is a play on "anniversary" and "Ann's universe". I don't remember whose anniversary it was.

This instrumental version of "Convenience" is shorter, cleaned up a bit, and has more emphasis on the solos. I decided to throw it on the end of the album instead of putting it on a separate CD (a la Re-treat). You can think of it as a "bonus track".