Category: original covers

you were meant for me

It started out as sort of a joke. I figured if the art I make is never going to touch anyone I don’t know in any meaningful way, if it’s never going to make me any money, or get me health care, or keep me from having to work a shit job, well, then who cares how it’s received by strangers, right? No point worrying about it. So I started making bespoke voice memos for people I care about, covers of songs I knew they would enjoy, in a lo-fi, bootleg medium I enjoy. Sara and I sang snatches of this in her old driveway, last year, before she got in her car and moved across the country. It was another sad parting in a long line of sad partings, and that little bit of joking Jewel made it a bit more bearable. So when she reminded me of that moment, many months later, I recorded this for her on my phone, texted it to her phone, and that was that. But it turns out I like it, this flawed joke, earnestly and unironically. Embarrassing, I know. So I threw my embarrassment into ableton, slapped some compression on it, some light chorus and reverb, and now we’re here. What do I do with it? No fucking idea. Who’s it for? Sara, initially. Me, eventually. And now, if you’re reading this, you. Hey you. All my wondering about where these things belong was a backsliding waste of time. Silly. It belongs right here.

a Jewel song

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’90s child

Well crap. We’re now 6 months and 6 EPs behind on posting oldmanboy to the bindle. Sorry bindle. Let’s get you sorted.

These songs are from the end of last summer, before winter hit, before I could no longer get out and read in the park in the afternoons, before everyone left and utter isolation and involuntary confinement precipitated the return of anxiety attacks, emergent negative thoughts, and all-around darkbad times.

There’s none of that in this. This is just a summer night in Ithaca, New York.

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reality is what you make it

After making that first EP out of voice memos and laptop synths, I realized I had a pretty serious input problem.  So I went on a targeted consumerism spree and dropped a ton of money on a beautiful keyboard (w/ a MIDI pad for drums) a hyper-cardioid microphone for playing live, and an audio interface to capture it all directly into Ableton.  After much failure and quitting and naked wrestling with Windows’ sound drivers (WHY, WINDOWS?  WHY!?) — now, when I make loops in my room, I find myself at the helm of a fully functional death star.

Please, for the love of god, do not listen on phone speakers.  I mean, I can’t stop you, but you’ll be missing entire frequency bands.

Cover art is by Salavat Fidai (check him out), appropriated and altered by me without consent.  My bad, dude.  To be fair, it’s all sort of stolen from Rodin.

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i’d like to stop talking for a while

At the beginning of quarantine I finally got into Ableton seriously, went into a fugue state, and woke up ten days later holding an album made out of voice memos I’d had on my phone.  The art is a picture I found in the philosophic collection I’ve been working on these past five years.  There’s no real identifying information, but presumably that’s a shot PB took in Tibet or Mongolia in the early 20th Century.  Or somewhere else, who knows — it really doesn’t matter.  I’d like to stop talking for a while.

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cool beans

A couple weeks ago I sat down with my telecaster and pedals, and Steph got set up on a midi pad, playing drum samples through pocket guitar amps.  We made a pair of one-take, improvised voice memos in my bedroom.  Then Rose drew us some beans.

life is beautiful after all

riptide

We are my new favorite band.

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i was the one worth leaving

“…Farewell happy fields
Where joy for ever dwells: hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what should I be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater?
Here at least
We shall be free;”

–John Milton, Paradise Lost

a Postal Service song

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the cage it called

Whatever he was asked about Zen, Master Gutei simply stuck up one finger.

He had a boy attendant whom a visitor asked, “What kind of teaching does your master give?”  The boy held up one finger too.  Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife.  As the boy ran away, screaming with pain, Gutei called to him.  When the boy turned his head, Gutei stuck up one finger. 

The boy was suddenly enlightened.

a Phosphorescent song

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pyotr

The story goes like this:

During his first marriage, Peter the Great (Pyotr Alekseyevich) took for his mistress a peasant woman named Marta Helena Skowrońska.  When his first wife died, he married Marta in secret, she changed her name to Catherine, and would go on to bear him twelve children.  Peter spent much of his reign rooting out corruption in his government, and Willem Mons, Catherine’s secretary, was accused of peddling access to the royal family through his position.  Catherine supposedly knew, but chose to ignore the offense out of affection for her secretary.  After Peter ordered his summary execution Catherine was furious — the couple didn’t speak for months.

The story also goes like this:

At some point during their marriage, Catherine took for herself a lover, a man named Willem Mons.  When Peter found out, he had Mons beheaded, and his severed head preserved in a jar of formaldehyde.  Then he forced Catherine to take time each day to sit and look at it.

So… Yeah.

Andy Hull’s song tells the second version, from the alternating perspectives of Peter and the head.  It’s almost pornographically gruesome, yes.  And there appears to be no evidence for any of it.  And I absolutely hate when art requires extensive contextual explanation, or a background in obscure esoterics, before it makes any god damn sense.  But this obtuse erotic torture fantasy somehow won me over, because despite all of that, what it really is, is a love song.  And it’s just brilliant.

“Oh Catherine tell me, was it worth it for him?”

a Bad Books song

Also, it’s worth noting here that when Peter died he had no male heirs.  During the succession crisis, the “new men” whom Peter had raised to prominence, for merit rather than birth, pulled off a successful coup against the return of the old aristocracy.  For the face of this new government, they chose Peter’s popular widow.  So this peasant woman, born Marta, now known as Catherine, would succeed Peter to the throne of Russia, and rule for two years as Empress Catherine I.  As the first female to sit the throne in her own right, she would set a legal precedent for the position that would come to include her own daughter, Elizabeth, and in time her great-granddaughter-in-law, Catherine the Great.

So?  How’s that for a happy ending?

Yeah, still pretty dark, I know.

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on failure and sadness and beautiful things

“…and the man goes walking, I go walking, through the forest and I run into five hundred thousand Galicians who are walking and crying.  And then I stop (a kindly giant, an interested giant for the last time) and I ask them, why they’re crying.  And one of the Galicians stops and says:  because we’re all alone and we’re lost.”

Joshua Clark Orkin

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Weird Thomas and The Galactic Escort Service

“Blessed are the anonymous and obscure,
for they shall be least interfered with.”
–PB

It was a weird time in my life, populated by weird people.  Winter had come to Ithaca, and with it the world of my walking life had shrunk to tiny proportions.  Mostly I worked from home, cooked and ate at home, played music at home, felt guilty about not writing at home.  I had been sober now for a couple years, and nobody had told me that this move, while in most ways intensely positive, also carried a cost:  I’d always had a hard time fitting in, making connections, joining the common current of human interaction, and sobriety had become just one more factor setting me apart.  Bars and drugs and drinking had been something, at least, that I always had in common with someone.  So it was winter, and I was alone — Except on Monday nights, when I walked down to a little venue by my house where the Galactic Escort Service played.

Continue reading “Weird Thomas and The Galactic Escort Service” →

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riptide

“A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded, for he shall be going out on a day when he shouldn’t.  But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.”

-John Millington Synge (1871-1909)

Joshua Clark Orkin

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it was the nature of things

“His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.

All were in sorrow, or had been, or would be.

It was the nature of things.

Though on the surface it seemed every person was different, this was not true.

At the core of each lay our suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end.

We must try to see one another in this way.

As suffering, limited beings —

Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.

His sympathy extended to all in this instant, blundering, in its strict logic, across all divides.”

–George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

a Townes Van Zandt song

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