Futile Horn

04.05.2003 - 4:45 am (whoa am I still here?)

I haven't had a entry in a full four weeks so here goes.

My friends wanted to go to a bar up in Yonkers tonight, but I decided to stay home. I didn't feel like going to the same bar with the same people telling the same stories and the band playing the same old songs. Plus I was working on some guitar stuff which was going pretty well until I fell asleep for about six or seven hours cus I hadn't slept at all the night before. Oops.

I believe I've been watching too much war coverage and playing too much Thief because I dreamt I was sneaking around some sort of complex trying to avoid being executed by Saddam Hussein. Blackjack a palatial guard here, chat up an Iraqi dictator there. No joke.

My grandfather finally came home from the hospital today. I believe he has been gone for nearly two months now. I had to hang out this morning to receive a delivery of some oxygen equipment for him, which made me cranky because I hadn't slept at all. My grandmother kept on trying to throw me out, which was sort of funny at first but degraded to just being a pain in the ass.

My favorite song of the week is Mark Knopfler's "Devil Baby". It goes:

The freaks'll stay together, they're a tight ol' crew
You look at them, they look at you

I heard Mark had to cancel his tour cus he got broken.

Despite the fact that everyone says that his solo albums "pick up where Dire Straits left off" and I never really liked Dire Straits, I like his solo stuff. I am also considering being not so hard on Dire Straits too.

I'm experimenting with fairly heavy flange in my new song, a different flange for the guitar and the vocals, which means I have to record them separately. Just as well, cus I am not too good at either part. I've added um, I'd guess you'd call it an open-lipped humming, which I'm convinced if I do it right won't sound necessarily human with the flange, which is what I am hoping for. The rhythm part, despite being almost too tricky for me to keep up with (not that it takes much), still leaves it sounding kind of hollow, so I'm added lead simply because I don't have any other instruments (Actually I've a kiddy synthesizer which I might be able to get away with if I don't try to be too ambitious and actually try to play it rather than kind of letting it hum like an organ in the background. Surely no one will be able to see on the recording that the keys were made to be small enough for children.). I've no theory on how someone writes lead, so I started by picking out the melody in position in G where it was written and then transposing a small variation on it into D, with the idea that it would be the melodic equivalent of a power chord (I mean, sure, why not). Of course, that might just be called harmony, but it wouldn't be nearly as fun if I didn't think I was making it up as I went. Anyway, I think it has hence departed from that ideal, but still keeps on that it somehow still a fifth interval above. Basically I am just hoping my ear will eventually hear something that doesn't suck.

It's twenty to five in the morning. I think I will try washing up and starting today. I think there is a birthday night out tonight.

NYC is smoke free, baby, did you hear?

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn