All Punk Singers Eventually Do Cabaret
Of all the screwy ideas I get into my head, wanting to work with an online musical collaborator has always been the most vexing. And you thought I had enough problems.
Both Pete Ankelein and/or Joe Selby are supposed to become online collaborators with me sooner or later, passing music files back and forth though the magic of the internet, until we've written masterpieces completely in cyberspace, but they both somehow come up with lame technological excuses to keep this from happening, like they don't want to change the midi-map settings on their machines, or our sequencing programs are incompatable, or their wives want them to watch "the Bachelor" with them, or they ran out of beer. So, along with hunting down a Russian Bride that isn't mob-affiliated, I've turned to finding a writing partner through web searches. I thought I had found one in PianoSam.
PianoSam, also know as Robert Thomson, is this old guy from Southern California who frequents many songwriter sites. I had taken him to be some "once-was" danceband musician, making a go at it in his later years with a little help from his midi sequencer and a soundcard. I went and pulled an instrumental mp3 from one of his sites, a song called "Promise", which I thought had a unaffectedly cool Tindersticks-Van Morrison feel going on. Accordingly, I gurgled out some raspy vocals and sent him what I had done.
He wrote back very excitedly, saying he'd like to get me to sing on a few more tunes, and I figured I had struck a cool hipster synthesis with this guy. He had a page on mp3.com full of weary off-key singers, and I thought with my Tom Waits-cum-Gordon Lightfoot stylings, I would overtake them all. This was going to be frickin' ART!. Thusly, I took three more songs off his site (he had TONS of them), came up with a few clever lyrics, and sang over them. I thought my prolific return would wow him over.
For some reason he wasn't too pleased, and in my opinion, he suddenly got all anal about how I wasn't following his melodies or how somebody had already written lyrics for those songs or something. I had one more exchange with him, which really amounted to me writing to him for more collaboration and open-mindedness, and him not writing back. I was disheartened.
Hoping to salvage anything from the experience, I remembered PianoSam had mentioned using a software program called Jammer to "help" him write his tunes. I use Orchestrator Pro, a multitrack MIDI-digital audio recorder/sequencer that does simple things like quantizing and transposing, so figured Jammer might have a few extra features worth checking out. Unfortunately, I found out that Jammer was in fact an algorythmic music accompaniment program, and that PianoSam had pretty much "wrote" most of his songs straight from its templates without changing many of the parameters. This is grotesquely evidenced in comparing the "Promise" mp3 I sang to with the example "r+b song" on the Jammer Site. I felt pretty foolish.
I do think my effort still has some worth. As such, I present these songs as "fair-use" commentary, both to complement the preceeding story, and to demonstrate my vocal and lyrical prowness; I lay no claim to Mr. Thomson's music. In the near future, I hope to extract my lyrics and find new musical arrangements for them. Maybe I'll buy a copy of Jammer myself.
You can hear some of the latest stuff the old guy's been churning out at
http://www.songramp.com/homepage.ez?Who=Pianosam.
He's always looking for someone
Let me state here that I don't fault anybody for wanting to "make it" in music... But I am reminded of some remark Dorothy Parker made about how Robert Benchley couldn't walk into a bookstore, because there were too many authors on the shelves spending their lives producing books that weren't ever going to get read, and the idea drove him screaming into the street! I promise you that if you follow any of the songwriter links from PianoSam's page, you will want to break all your fingers and stick a hot poker down your throat, and not because these people are composing better songs than you, but because all that unheard music has to stop somewhere!!!
As another aside, let me just state also that I have an absolute facination with computer-generated music and algorhythmic composition, so I don't off-handedly dismiss PianoSam for using the Jammer program. It is an avenue that I hope to explore more fully myself. My disappointment stems from the fact that I thought this guy was at least pulling off the motifs from experience, and not from a computer cut-and-paste job. I mean, the Ramones work off a pretty tight formula but still manage to show some creativity and variety. Yes, this is discussion for a later screed.
I tried to get real Tin Pan Alley for these tunes, although they all have their "stream-of-consciousness" moments... Tommy Dog thinks this is some of the best work I've done. What that says of either of us, I don't know. Meredith Tenhoor also got a kick out of them, especially the "cheesy MIDI music". So you have been warned.
Promise
This was the first song from Piano Sam that I worked with. It was about a down-and-out character trying to get back together with his woman, after an apparently heavy bout of drinking. I tried to do some Gershwinesque turns of phrases. I live in a forest, indeed!
A Sailor's Tale
This song was supposed to be part Leonard Cohen, part Billy Nayer, part Nick Cave and part Rogers and Hammerstein. Sometimes it doesn't matter how far you go. Like a Sleeping Beauty in a Picture Book...
Rose Marie
This song, about being "rolled" after a one-night stand, is actually a metaphor. Or an allegory; I never finished college, so I'm not sure which. I don't think it will be too hard to figure out what it is an allegory (or metaphor) for. The music brought to mind not good film noir, exactly, but something more like those early television crime story knock-offs. I stopped shaving.
Heart of the City
You can consider this Billy Joel meets Tom Waits strained through a Nora Ephron film. The dishes need washing.
Bonus Material
Love Theme
I had gotten in touch with (then) amateur filmmaker Brian O' Malley, and we had made tentative plans to let me score his film "Bleak Future". I wrote this little ditty based on his theme, and suddenly I wasn't scoring the film anymore. I played this one for Joe and Matt Kilborne while driving them to a toyboat practice. Joe let out a big hoot, and I actually had Matt going for a while... you'll see what I mean.
Click here if you haven't heard this yet. Yes, it's a cover, not that Joe Selby would know.