The Yearnin'

[theyearnin]

How my band writes and records songs: The Demo

Let’s take a look at my band Little Victories latest song “Sunk Costs” as an example. Let’s Pulp Fiction this story by listening to the final product.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-1aqLrigvo

Music First

My memory is fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure I came up with the verse chords first (D, A, B). Then came up with the chorus chords and lick pretty much at the same time. When I say “came up with” I thought of other chords in the key of D and since I hadn’t used G yet, I went to G for the first chord of chorus.

Then I came up with the bridge chords: Dmaj7, D7, G, F#/G, Emin7. Again this was just based on experimentation, what sounded good, and using chords in the key of D minor. I also just really like major 7 and minor 7 chords.

Melody and Lyrics

Then was time for vocal melody and lyrics. I’m still an evolving lyricist. This is the only song I’ve written lyrics for. I can created whole songs with no lyrics, but everything else. I have a whole Evernote notebook with random song and lyric ideas. So I went there and saw Sunk Costs. It’s an economic term but essentially means cut your losses when something isn’t working out.

So with the theme of the song in mind I did some brainstorming. The first thing that came to mind was a seven year relationship that I ended. So the first verse is about that.

Can’t stop

already seven years in

Never ready

Guess I’ll do the right thing

Then I thought about the second verse. At the time I was watching American Horror Story. It was about a haunted house, which was a perfect example of a Sunk Costs situation: it’s really just better to leave your haunted house, even if you spent all your money on it, because you’re going die if you don’t leave.

Spent all my money on a haunted house

If I leave I lose my money

If I stay then I lose my life

The chorus is essential advice on how to handle Sunk Cost situations.

Oh no don’t think about sunk costs

have no worries about the time you lost

Get the courage

to change it up

starting over, starting over again

The bridge is a series of rhymes off of the word “low”.

These sunk costs sink so low

Should I stay or should I go

They get right into my soul

Recording The Demo

Now with a basic structure I recorded all the elements of the song on Garageband to get a demo, which you can hear below. I use the computer generated drums then lay down my guitar parts for each section. Then I’ll go back and add in lead guitar parts. Then I’ll add in some bass parts, played on my guitar just using virtual bass amps. Then I’ll sing each part with just the computer input microphone.

https://soundcloud.com/camplommer/project-15b

The next step in the process toward a final song is starting the collaboration with my bandmate Dave and our producer Matt. I’ll write about in a future post. 

[theyearnin]

Sun

[theyearnin]

While we should sympathize with God’s poor—that is, those who cannot help themselves—let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of some one else. It is all wrong to be poor, anyhow.

Russell Conwell Explains Why Diamonds Are a Man's Best Friend

[theyearnin]

“not drinking, treating people well, working hard, and so forth, requires a lot of willpower when you didn’t grow up in privilege. That feeling–whether it’s real or entirely fake–that there’s something divine helping you and directing your mind and body, is extraordinarily powerful.” Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-politics-poor-whites/ via Instapaper

[theyearnin]

“But in a lot of ways, what elites see as blunders people back home see as someone who–finally–conducts themselves in a relatable way. He shoots from the hip; he’s not constantly afraid of offending someone; he’ll get angry about politics; he’ll call someone a liar or a fraud. This is how a lot of people in the white working class actually talk about politics, and even many elites recognize how refreshing and entertaining it can be!” Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-us-politics-poor-whites/ via Instapaper

[theyearnin]

In our culture today, marketing often is the message. The vast majority of information that we’re exposed to is some form of marketing. And so if the marketing is always trying to make you feel like shit to get you to buy something, then we’re essentially existing in a culture designed to make us feel like shit and we’ll always want to overcompensate in some way.

How Your Insecurity Is Bought and Sold

[austinkleon]

Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing

It’s funny to think about how outrageous I found Kenny’s ideas at first, and now how unbelievably obvious and level-headed I find them.

Re-reading this, my favorite chapters are “What Writing Can Learn From Visual Art” (like Brion Gysin said, writing is always 50 years behind painting — KG used to be a visual artist, and edited a book of Warhol interviews) and “Uncreative Writing In The Classroom.” More favorite bits:

Poetry is everywhere.

John Cage said that music is all around us if only we had ears to hear it. I would extend that to say that, particularly in New York City, poetry is all around us, if only we had the eyes to see it and the ears to hear it.

We’re mashups.

I don’t think there’s a stable or essential “me.” I am an amalgamation of many things: books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, television shows I’ve watched, conversations I’ve had, songs I’ve sung, lovers I’ve loved. In fact, I’m a creation of so many people and so many ideas, to the point where I feel I’ve actually had few original thoughts and ideas; to think that what I consider to be “mine” was “original” would be blindingly egotistical.

An artist is mostly defined by his or her choices:

What becomes important is what you — the author — decides to choose. Success lies in knowing what to include and — more important — what to leave out. If all language can be transformed into poetry by mere reframing — an exciting possibility — then she who reframes words in the most charged and convincing way will be judged the best.

It’s impossible to not express yourself.

The secret: the suppression of self-expression is impossible. Even when we do something as seemingly “uncreative” as retyping a few pages, we express ourselves in a variety of ways. The act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves as our story about our mother’s cancer operation. It’s just that we’ve never been taught to value such choices. After a semester of forcibly suppressing a student’s ‘creativity’ by making them plagiarize and transcribe, she will approach me with a sad face at the end of the semester, telling me how disappointed she was because, in fact, what we had accomplished was not uncreative at all; by not being ‘creative,’ she produced the most creative body of work writing in her life. By taking an opposite approach to creativity — the most trite, overused, and ill-defined concept in a writer’s training — she had emerged renewed and rejuvenated, on fire and in love again with writing.

By worrying less about self-expression, we may surprise ourselves.

No matter what we do with language, it will be expressive. How could it be otherwise? In fact, I feel it is impossible, working with language, not to express oneself. If we back off and let the material do its work, we might even in the end be able to surprise and delight ourselves with the results.

Copying is one of the best ways to understand a piece of art.

Quoting Walter Benjamin in Reflections

The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, where as the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.

And Gertrude Stein:

“I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading it never can do.”

Celebrate not just the extraordinary, but the ordinary-ordinary.

In a 1963 interview, Warhol asks, “But why should I be original? Why can’t I be nonoriginal?” He sees no need to create anything new: “I just like to see things used and reused.” Echoing then-current notions of eradicating the division between art and life, he says, “I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don’t try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary.”

And maybe my favorite sentence in the book comes when KG is talking to his lawyer cousin who spends all day putting together boring legal briefs:

Why don’t you think of what you do all day as art?

Thumbs up.

Filed under: steal like an artist

[theyearnin]

“It’s one 7-minute summation of the experience of the millennium, the sense of wanting everything all at once, having access to everything all at once, and ultimately not feeling so much freed as paralyzed at the inescapable weight that comes with carrying all that with you.” Deconstructing: LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” And Trying To Define The Best Song Of The Millennium http://www.stereogum.com/1469481/deconstructing-lcd-soundsystems-all-my-friends-and-trying-to-define-the-best-song-of-the-millennium/franchises/deconstructing/ via Instapaper

[theyearnin]

"As I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong," Ryan said. "Most people don't want to be dependent. And to label a whole group of Americans that way was wrong. I shouldn't castigate a large group of Americans to make a point."

Ryan: No mention of Trump but warns of 'ugliness' in politics - CNNPolitics.com

[theyearnin]

some studies suggest today’s young people are suffering more than previous generations did.

Why Your Late Twenties Is the Worst Time of Your Life

[theyearnin]

Namely, being in your twenties is often confusing and lonely, as two independent studies published this year found. When young adults get their first jobs and move into their own apartments, they’re going it alone, usually for the first time. Moreover, as they attempt to establish their status as adults, their environment sends them mixed messages: regardless of their professional or personal achievements, they are still considered by others to be “kids,” especially before they marry and have children.

Why Your Late Twenties Is the Worst Time of Your Life

[theyearnin]

Everyone deep down just wants to get fired

[theyearnin]

Between everything giving you cancer, or making you fat, globalization, poverty, and all sorts of other shit going on, it’s really tough to find a place in this world to carve out. Even though I enjoy my job, it’s hard to not feel like life is compartmentalized into the weekends. Lately, I’ve been trying to find something different every day that makes it worth getting up in the morning. Maybe it’s helping out a friend in need, making a really great joke or just holding the door for the elderly couple when others don’t give them the time of day, my search for meaning in life is crucial to keeping sane.

Post Grad Problems | Start Mixing It Up To Keep The Grind Fresh

[theyearnin]

GDP was adopted during the Cold War for the sake of adjudicating the grand pissing match between the West and the USSR. Suddenly, politicians on both sides became feverish about promoting GDP growth. GDP growth became a sacred rule. And for some reason we remain in thrall to it today.

To Save The Economy, We Have To Break Its One Sacred Rule | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

[theyearnin]

In this case, the accepted reason for Americans’ suffering was just how awesome they were. This widespread depletion of nervous energy was thought to be a side effect of progress: The U.S. had evolved beyond the rest of the world, and the demands on its citizens just proved to be too much sometimes.

‘Americanitis’: The Disease of Living Too Fast

[theyearnin]

Instead, they are seeing service as something that everyone should be involved in. It’s part of the well-lived life

How to Serve

[theyearnin]

If you come up with a list of many reasons to do something, Nassim Taleb once wrote, you are trying to convince yourself—if there isn’t one clear reason, don’t do it.

10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: What I Learned