Obama project Chapter 8 - Restoration

Here's a first take on the music for Chapter 8 of the Obama Project. In this chapter, our hero Stanley realizes that he has the same ability to create as his father, and decides to rebuild the post-apocalyptic world and resurrect all the people who were killed when the world ended. However, he finds himself unable to keep the story simple once people are involved.

Some spaghetti western music

This just sort of happened while I was trying to write some music for the seventh chapter of the Obama project. It really didn't fit the story, though, so I decided to nix it. It's kinda neat-sounding, though, so here it is. The intent was to change the melody up a bit more, but I basically abandoned it and moved on to something else before I got around to that.

Obama project chapter 4 - The Decline

I've finally gotten words and music together for Chapter 4 of the Obama project. This chapter begins shortly after Stanley's mother leaves him. He spends a few years wandering the world, and sees that the world is a violent and unhappy place. Then he hears the sound of the horns and drums that mark the coming of the final war, and is confronted by a cult of children that are desperately trying to put the world back on track before it is destroyed. Stanley fails to take any action, though, and at the end is left standing there waiting for the world to end. In Chapter 5 (already posted), it does.

For no particular reason - some 60's sci fi music

I spent a few hours yesterday playing around with Reaper, and I'm pretty well hooked. I think I'm going to slowly migrate away from Sonar for my multi-tracking, which is great. Sonar's nice, but Reaper's more flexible, has all the features I need, and costs literally 1/10 as much. Anyway, enough of the advertisements - in the process of dinking about with Reaper I produced this little snippet of music, which sounds a bit like something that might have shown up in one of the sadder scenes of the old Doctor Who TV show.

Santa Claus Lives Alone

This is a song I made for a Christmas compilation a few years ago that never actually materialized. The peeps from Left Handed Radio asked if I had a Christmas song laying around, so I went ahead and dug this one up and dusted it off. It's, uh, a little dark...

The Smoker

This one's missing a guitar solo, but it's close enough to show to people now. It's a song about becoming famous for something utterly trivial - in this case, holding the world's record for smoking the most cigarettes at once. Underlying it is the idea that the ephemerality of fame makes it a sort of unsatisfying way of gaining immortality, but it also touches on the idea that it's the struggle, rather than the goal, that matters. The fact that the battle can't be won doesn't diminish the nobility of fighting it, and all that.

Stanley Meets The Turtle

Here's a new chapter in the Obama project. The project as a whole is now called "Son of Strelka, Son of God", for what it's worth. In this chapter our hero tries to intervene with a giant turtle god to restore the earth after the apocalypse, which the turtle actually participated in. The turtle isn't particularly helpful, to say the least, and just takes the opportunity to bitch about the space program.

The Golden Age

This is Chapter 2 of the Obama project. It tells the story of the rise of civilization, from pastoral simplicity to crowded cities.

The first part of the song is built around field recordings of birds that Teresa and I made in New Zealand and Australia.

Son of Strelka

This is chapter 3 of the Obama project, entitled Son of Strelka. A previous version was posted as Birth of Anubis, but I decided (a) to change the title and (b) to refocus the end of the chapter so that it concentrated more on his parting with his mother.

The story is fairly simple: our narrator is born fully-formed, but with the head of a dog. His family and village had counted on his birth to help them out of their troubles somehow, but instead they are freaked out by his general dog-headedness. His mother is forced to leave him to wander the world alone for reasons that are somewhat obscure.

The name Strelka comes from history. Strelka was a dog, one of the first two animals to return from space alive (Laika died in transit). When she was brought back she was bred with another dog in order to determine whether there were permanent side effects due to the radiation she received in space. One of the pups from that mating was then given to the Kennedy family, and when he grew up he sired puppies with one of their other dogs. JFK apparently called these puppies "pupniks".

The suggestion from the title is not that the narrator's mother is the actual Strelka - she's human, for one thing. It's just that the whole radioactive space dog connection makes that the perfect name for his mom, so I decided to go with it. In fact, I'm renaming the entire project either "Son of Strelka, Son of God", or maybe just "Son of Strelka". Haven't decided yet.

Barackalypse Now

Following on my last post about the beginning of the world, I now also have some music for the apocalypse chapter of the Obama project. In this chapter our hero is witness to the end of the world, and is left wondering what the point of it all was.

The music is a collaboration with EBA, who I've mentioned before. EBA is a really excellent turntablist from the Atlanta area, and he and I have wanted to do something together for a while. This one worked out really well - I threw in some noises and played drums, he threw in a lot more noises and some crazy-ass scratching, and the end result sounds like The Dust Brothers destroying the world. That's exactly how it should be. There's going to be some tweaking on this before it's finally done, but what we've got already is too weird not to share.

By the way, EBA has a podcast at shapelessmass.com, which you should totally check out.

Creation

I finally got some music done for the first chapter of that weird-as-shit Obama project I'm working on. Even better, Ainsley Seago agreed to do the art for this chapter, and judging by the concept sketches below it's going to freakin' RULE.

This chapter tells the story of the very first man, who was born as a fruit of the only tree then in existence. He finds himself in an empty, barren world, and so he climbs to the top of the tree and summons the rest of the world into existence just by speaking the names of the things he wants to create. He gets a little over-eager, though, and accidentally creates a monkey in midair which promptly plunges to its death. Embarrassed by this, he resolves to do a better job and creates many of the positive things in the world before he disappears.

Click on the second picture to see the whole thing.

Remember Me

File this one under "rednexistentialism".

It's Unfair

Here's another one that's in prep for the new solo album. This is a song about a young lady whose mental problems and religious guilt compound each other to make her life hell.

New Love Button recording - Me And My Dog

The old Okie band is working on putting together our first album in well over ten years. We spent about a week just laying down tracks a few months back, and I've been slowly but surely laying down vocals and whipping them into shape. Here's one of the first to reach something resembling "done", a beautiful tale of a man's dying fantasy as he succumbs to some sort of insect venom.

It Sounds Weird When You Say It Out Loud

Another one I'm working on for the new album. This one's just about a guy with a very weird inner life.

Whore!

Here's one of my favorite songs that I've written. I've gone through about twenty iterations of this one trying to get the right feeling out of it, and I think this take does the best job yet. Which is not to say that I won't change my mind in a month and start again from scratch.

Boy howdy do I sound like a redneck when I say words that end with a hard R though!

It Always Happens

Here's one from Crush The Infamous Thing. It's a poem about a man whose fetish keeps ruining his relationships, and it's assembled out of snippets of dialog from a vocabulary-building record from the 60's.

Mole

Here's a rough take of a nice little swing/reggae song about insecurity.

Rough - This Isn't How It Ends

This is a rough take of a new creepy-cute-stalkery song I've been playing with.

Wannabe

This is very much a first draft, but I think it's kinda cool. It's mopey fuzz-rock, but with ukulele. Be warned: massive volume jump approacheth.

I'll be doing a show with Love Button this Saturday (April 24th) at the Norman Music Festival. We'll be playing the Brewhouse Stage at 10. Come see us!

Have You Thought About Suicide?

This is a track from my unfinished-and-never-to-be-finished album Crush the Infamous Thing. It's basically just a big ball of weirdness.

By the way, I have a new home page up at www.danwarren.net. It's basically just a simple Wordpress page because I'm perennially lazy and busy (which is a great combination) and so don't have the time to update anything more sophisticated than that.

Listen to me on A Low Class Conspiracy with Chad Brock

Hey urrbody, I'm going to be on KVRX's internet radio thingy this afternoon for a while with Chad Brock. His show is called A Low Class Conspiracy, which I think suits me nicely. We're going to play some of my stuff, and then just some random shit from my music library. It's 1-3 Central time, and you'll find a link to listen here:

http://www.kvrx.org/

His show is on weekly and rules, so you should probably listen to it on a regular basis.

What Entropy Does to the Heart

Here's one off of Departures. The funny thing here is that I originally recorded this song as a fairly fast rock song, and just hated it. On a whim I decided to country it up, and it came out surprisingly well.

Love Button - World Came In (Acoustic)

Now that I'm in Texas, Love Button may finally finish recording the album we've been trying to do for over a decade now. We've made a really good start over the past few days here at the International House of Dancakes, and I think it's going to sound really good.

This is just a little side track we took for fun - an inappropriately upbeat acoustic version of our song "The World Came In".

Rough: For My Antiparticle

This one is still very much in progress. The song is currently entitled "For My Antiparticle", and it's based on the idea of quantum foam. The general gist of quantum foam is that in the emptiest regions of space, there are particle/antiparticle pairs constantly popping into existence out of nowhere and then almost instantly annihilating one another. One imagines that if a fundamental particle was capable of thought, its last thought would be something like "what in the hell was the point of all this?", and that's exactly what this song is about.

The recording is rough, but it captures most of what I want to get out of this one. I'll probably just do a bit of tweaking and maybe redo the vocals and drums at some point, but I think it's bearable as is.

Parallel Universes

Now that the podcast is back to full functionality, it's about time to start repopulating it more regularly. Here's an old favorite from The Scientist.

I'M APPARENTLY SOME SORT OF MORON

I've seriously been struggling with getting my podcast to show up on iTunes for months off and on, and had basically given up. Turns out Blogspot's "Link" and "Enclosure link" functions are two completely different things. God dammit.

Anyway, this song goes out to whoever designed the Blogspot interface.

For Teresa, on our 17th anniversary - The Problem With Love Songs

My lovely wife and I are unfortunately stuck 1500 miles apart for a few months, so we don't get to spend Valentine's day together, which is also the anniversary of the day we started dating. In 1993! Hard to believe, and yet so, so, so awesome.

Anyway, this song is her present. I guess it can be yours too, although I don't really feel that way about you. Sorry, but it had to be said.

Hoopity POW!

This is easily the goofiest piece of music I've ever written, and in my case that's really saying something. This was originally written for a Shmorky cartoon a couple of years ago, but by this point I think it's safe to assume that it's not coming out. Alas.

I have sold us all for food

Here's a quick and dirty thing I did about a year ago and completely forgot about. It's delivered as a presidential address.

The End of the Good Life

I've finally gotten enough crap reinstalled after my computer fried to record a bit, and here's the result. It's pretty rough, but some of that is intentional. The song is so simple and straightforward that I decided to really mess about with the arrangement, so it's basically a little loungey sad song composed of record pops, guitar line noise, and ukulele. I think it could use a better vocal track, but then I could use a better voice. We'll see if Santa provides either this year.

Sasquatch!

In honor of this lovely study of sasquatch distribution patterns, here's an old Love Button song. I haven't listened to this in like a decade, but here it is!

For what it's worth, yes I am the same Dan Warren quoted in that article, and it's hilarious to me that in literally minutes someone had twisted my words to call global warming into question. I feel like a real scientist now!

Jagadish Chandra Bose

It's been a while since I recorded something for a Musician's Lounge contest, but finally I'm back at it. A power surge (I think) killed both my studio computer and my MOTU recorder a few weeks ago, so I recorded this one using a temporary setup that's a bit wonky in many ways. If it sounds a little off, that's why.

Anyway, the contest was to write a song about this guy Jagadish Chandra Bose, who was quite an interesting Indian dude. He worked in fields as diverse as botany and physics, helped with the development of radio, and is considered the father of Indian science fiction.

Motivational Speaker

Here's one from Crush the Infamous Thing. The music is a combination of samples and me playing instruments. The vocal track is this really weird motivational speaker from the south named Glenn Turner. He put out a bunch of albums in the 70's telling people that they could be awesome like him if they'd just focus. He was a really weird guy - strong southern accent, harelip, and a moon landing conspiracy theory nut to boot. I've obviously chopped up the samples to make him say what I wanted him to, but it's really only a very incremental change from how weird that record was to begin with.

Ska version of Lovefool

Here's an old one from an SA cover contest. It's my take on a ska version of the Cardigans' "Lovefool".

French song

Here's one I made for my homie AltF4's Time Traveling Bears cartoon. He wanted something very French, and this is what he got. Lyrics by me and AltF4, translated into broken French by my sister Wendy. It's been a while, but if I remember correctly the lyrics mean something like:

The Americans always steal French culture
All French hate traveling in time
Stay out of France, yankee scum
Go, eat the shit, eat the shit


Check out the cartoon at newgrounds if you get a chance!

Work in progress - The Birth of Anubis

This is part of a much larger project I'm working on, and will probably change substantially before it's done. I don't want to reveal the whole story yet, but this chapter deals with the birth of a boy with the head of a dog. He's unnaturally intelligent for a child, but violent and unpredictable. Because of this, he is kicked out of his village to roam the world.

To be continued...

Oh yeah, it's also the first song I've ever recorded where I play banjo. Super-ultrathanks to Thomas Anderson for giving me his old beater banjo to fix up!

Surrender

Here's one off of Crush The Infamous Thing. All of the words are Jim Baker. The drums are sampled from a Steven Drozd solo thing, everything else is me.

The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

Still reposting the most popular songs from the old podcast - this one is my remake of Leonard Nimoy's "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" from a few years back. White guy rap!

Heroin

Here's my cover of the Velvet Underground song "Heroin". It's completely inappropriate, but so are most good things in life.