rockstar rick

So I decided that my life does not currently have enough going on, and that I need to add some other commitment, like, I don’t know…recording an entire album in the month of November. I must’ve enjoyed it so much last year, that I decided to put myself through it again. I’m talking about National Solo Album Month (NaSoAlMo), and it was actually quite a fulfilling project. And some listenable music came out of it–at least for me. And just for the hell of it, I put it up on last.fm. Like anyone else will want to listen to it.

So I cleaned up the studio a little, and started messing around with some beats in Reason. The password is: Experimentation.

I finished! Now I can get some sleep. No, but it was a lot of fun to just play, and let the tape run. And every once in a while something sounded good.

I didn’t manage to include any lyrics in these songs, but I hope to continue developing these songs and some of them will probably get lyrics and melodies and stuff. If you’d like to download all of them in one big zip file, you can do that here. Otherwise, pick and choose them from this list:

The Incoherence – Destructio Absurdum

What I Wish I Knew
Metaphor Not Reality
Under Oceans
Prison Repeated
Freestyle One
Freestyle Two
Slow Me Down
Space Trance
Sealed With A Kiss
Close Encounters
Theory Of Motion

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

If you’d like to burn a CD and you care at all about sound quality, you can download the uncompressed .wav files here (zipped). [soon!]

Thanks and love to my wife for putting up with me when I stayed up too late working on the album. She’s the reason I have music in my head. And thanks to my brother Jacob for playing bass guitar on tracks 5 and 6. He really plays bass, but I just pretend to.

Also thanks to Greg for letting me borrow gear from his studio, and keep it for months on end (MBox!). Thanks to Brian for letting me use his bass guitar, and thanks to Tom for lending me his Stratocaster (again!). The album wouldn’t exist without them.

So far I’ve done a lot of brainstorming, and that has yielded lots of unorganized raw material–and not much of it worth listening to. Tonight, however, I managed to put together an almost coherent three minute song. Right now it’s just two guitars and a drum loop, but I hope to develop it more before the end of the month.

What I Wish I Knew

I think I’ve decided on a name for my little solo project: The Incoherence. I’ve also done some work on the album! Maybe not as much progress as I would like, but progress is progress.

I’m going to bed. I still have to work!

So, I have managed to gather up enough courage to record a solo album. Why would I do this? Well, with the help of National Solo Album Month, I’ve found some artificial motivation to get over some of my self-critical tendencies. I’ve always felt enourmous difficulty writing lyrics that I didn’t think were cheesy. And then putting those potentially cheesy lyrics to a (potentially silly) melody seems like putting a monkey in a dress. Not that the monkey wouldn’t be cute, but no one would take him seriously. Certainly not his monkey friends. Definitely not the monkey board room.
As I have been building up my project studio at home, I have been learning the ropes of digital audio recording. I think I may have just enough equipment to put together a decent little record. I will post it here to share with anyone who would like to take a listen. Tell me I’m great, or tell me that a monkey could write better lyrics. Either way, I’ll have a good time, and if someone else like a song or two, that’s just icing on the cake.

So look for more posts as I display my horrifyingly-bad-monkey-lyric-ridden songs. Maybe I’ll post some intermediate song files while I’m at it. And pictures.