New York or Busk!

WTF?

2009-05-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

So.....

Any of my busking peeps out there know of a new ordinance that supposedly prevents musicians from performing on subway platforms? My buddy Dave and I were approached by some officers while busking the other day, and were informed that we were in violation of this new ordinance. They were cool about it. But it strikes me as bogus considering the court rulings on busking in the past, not to mention

THE FIRST AMENDMENT.

It's been a bad week for busking. I went out with Dave and DK earlier this week to play and we got pounced on by some rookie cops who first declared music peformance in subway stations to be illegal (which is obviously incorrect, as any garden-variety squirrel could attest), before finall ticketing us for the only offense they could think of, "blocking pedestrian traffic." You'd have to see where we were playing to form your own opinion. But suffice it to say that only the world's thickest numbskull could interpret is as "blocking" anything.

We're of course contesting the whole thing. Updates to follow.

The new "platform ordinance" is what annoys me more than a $50 fine. If it is indeed real, it's probably only a matter of time until it's overturned in court.

I've been playing in subways for three years now, and have been asked to leave five times ever, TWO of those in the last week! To quote one of the officers who fined us earlier this week, "It's at the discretion of the officer." In other words, it's NOT illegal, because if it was, an officer of good moral standing would ALWAYS ticket the offending busker. I've been overlooked, passed, and given good blessings by more NYPD transit officers than I can count.

Anyone else see a hole in the Transit Authority's logic here?

other pursuits

2009-03-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

So, it's been a while since an update (again), but I swear it's for good reasons. Firstly, I've been worried that that fatal copper-ray disease (from looking at computers too much) that Willem Defoe's character comes down with in Speed 2: Cruise Control might be real -- and I don't look good with leeches, people.

Secondly, I've been starting up a band with some friends of mine. Not the Flagellants. There might be one or two more singles from them, though ;);)

So yeah, a band. Sorry, I'm still reeling from those winky faces, I can't believe I wrote those. Yeah, we have a band. Electric Warlords. Well, not really, more like Acoustic Amateurs, but we ahve high hopes. That's all a band ever needed, or so I thought I'd been told but probably haven't been.

It's actually working out really well though. My good buddy DK is a phenomenal guitarist and songwriter, and his buddy (and mine now too), Dave, plays the keys like he came out of the womb on a glissando. We've been recently supported by the bass master (not the fishing game) Jeff, lord of the Thumper. I call his bass the Thumper. He doesn't know this and I haven't told anyone else either. We also might have an awesome dual pianos thing going with their friend, Eric, whose solos have left craters in my thought process.

Now we need a drummer. Of course. Everyone needs a drummer. DK says we should get a percussionist instead, but I don't know what that means. Except that they play less-traditional things than drum kits, I suppose.

Also, a band name. We're all super inspired by the Band (well, I think everyone is, anyway), and their name is no different from their music: perfect. (Let's ignore the fact that they didn't want to be called that, and didn't even come UP with the name). Something simple, evocative of the music, not pretentious, and not taken already. Yeesh. Come on, I just solved perpetual motion here, people. Don't give me another toughie.

Gigs and other news to follow shortly, if all works out well.

Rob and DK live at Wolf & Lamb!

2009-02-17T19:07:00.000-08:00

It's been a bit since my last post because I've been juggling a new job and working out some details for my first live gig in a while. My buddy DK and I are playing a "bluegrass" (really folk, but management couldn't be convinced otherwise) gig at Wolf & Lamb Steakhouse, tomorrow 2/18 from 7-9. Please come out if you can. Their food is amazing. Our songs will probably be okay too, but don't taste as good.

Wolf & Lamb Steakhouse
8 E. 48th Street (between 5th and Madison)
tomorrow, Wednesday February 18, 7-9
no cover (but you gotta sit at a table and thus, eat)

Meanwhile, this song is plaguing my existence. In the very best of plaguey ways.

felix felicis

2009-01-30T07:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday: got a job, booked a music gig, and had an awesome busking experience wherein I met a kindred busking soul.

I've been looking for jobs for nigh on two months, after being, quite frankly, given the runaround by my former employer, Apple. Unemployment came to the rescue (for the first time....I'm cautious about things that could be mistaken as "freeloader" activities), and I've been busking on the side to get some extra green stamps though it's been too cold to do it often.

After weeks of polite harassment, the Chess Shop in the village hired me yesterday at a rather low salary, but heck man, it's chess! I love chess. And just by virtue of working there I'm gonna become a chess superbrain, right? I'm pretty sure that's how it works. Plus, it's going to be a job that's fairly easy and entirely enjoyable. Me don't do restaurants. Anything resembling soul-selling kinda turns me off.

I auditioned for a performance gig at my girlfriend's restaurant two days ago, and found out yesterday that I booked it! Yes, Rob, there is a Dollar Claus. He just likes to ignore you for months at a time. I'm not sure if this place (a Kosher steakhouse) will exactly "get" my amateurish spin on american folk music, but why not give it a shot? I mean, I LOVE pickles.

As the final move in a day filled with luck, I decided to go busking, presuming my good luck would pay off in spades and I'd make a king's ransom in singles. Instead, I couldn't find an available station anywhere between 145th and 23rd streets. Yoink. I started heading back uptown, resigned to make tea and play video games for the duration of the eve, when I saw a guy playing Dylan songs at 42nd Street. He was around my age, clearly had enthusiasm for the material, and....I dunno. I was feeling ballsy. So, after first going to 59th (no dice), I came back to 42nd and asked him if he'd mind me accompanying him for a little while. He replied that his night was almost over, but he'd give it a shot.

He started up "Blowin in the Wind" and I played along with my mandolin and harmonica, flubbing a little here and there on solos (par for the course). He asked if I knew "Suzanne" ("sort of" was may response), and we went through that and then "SO Long, Maryanne" as per request. Honestly, it was a blast. This is what busking's supposed to be like! Chance meetings. Music no matter what! Woody Guthrie woulda been proud. I think.

Anyway, at some point I introduced myself to Jeff, and him to me. A few songs later he peaced out, but we agreed to meet up again soon and play. It was instant gelling, no denial. I was glad I hadn't wussed out and kept my lip buttoned when I first saw him.

I stuck around for a while and played solo. There were some really nice people who told me I wasn't far from being on American Idol (do they have folk episodes of that? if so, I'd do it), and got an Eric Clapton request. Wish I knew some.

I made pretty good money for only playing around an hour, and I have to say that I musta drank some luckjuice yesterday because I haven't had a day that serendipitous in a long time.

rubbing one out

2009-01-27T22:45:00.000-08:00

I put off busking all day for mini projects, both real and necessary, and imaginary and a waste of time. Planning which variety of tea I'll drink next? Yep, I definitely spent a few minutes on that. Restringing mandolin after not changing them since October (purchase date of mandolin)? Slightly more necessary. But 8 strings doesn't equal 8 times the restringing fun. It equals 45 minutes.

Around 1 am on my way home I decided to step off the train and busk. Luckily, my mandolin found its way into my hand (busking with my skin flute has become increasingly difficult in the cold). However, no one found their way into my station, so I hopped back on a train one and a half songs later.

It was good, though. I was feeling musically pent up, and it was good to sonically ejaculate all over the Museum of Natural History murals in the 81st Street subway station, then dart back into the night cackling and counting my zero dollars.

I'm again struck by the fact that I wasn't invited to my five-year high school reunion. I mean, do these people READ THIS BLOG?!

Erroneous Rock

2009-01-25T22:24:00.000-08:00

This is a random post no matter how you look at it, but it's especially random when you consider that I haven't updated this site since June of 2008, and then only to write an ode to Weezer/my dog.

I was away in CT for a few months this fall doing theater and writing a bunch, and I've busked from time to time since then but haven't felt the need to blog about any of it. A feeling of same old, same old kept me away I guess.

But no more!

Here's a new song that's a collaboration between my buddy Jeb Heil and myself. He wrote the lyrics, I wrote the music (earlier tonight, actually). It's a little haphazard and a lot ugly, but I've been wanting to make something careening and unsightly. My part was written in about fifteen minutes, so I'm not gonna judge it too much.

butterflies, butterflies
beautiful butterflies
chocolate covered and bite sized
a pound of them is the grand prize

skinny men and fat women
walk around holding hands
do they love each other?
well i guess they do, but don't we all?

oh i guess we don't (x4)

advertise, advertise
subliminal advertise
sell you looney tunes neckties
hold back my desire to modernize

shit water, piss water
we'll put through this machine
and we'll drink it
will it make us sick?
well i guess it will, but aren't we all?

oh i guess we are (x4)

seeing red

2008-06-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

On this, the most glorious eve of Weezer's latest release, I turn my gaze back to my favorite band's body of work, which has both inspired and enraged me through the years.

You see, my dog died recently. Yogi really was this man's best friend, and she represented both stormy times and painfully new and bright times in the last 12 years of my life. She came to as a present in Christmas of 1996. "A boy should have a dog," I remember my mom saying. We'd picked her out a few months earlier from an accomplished Basset breeder who lived up a precariously steep and muddy hill, akin to the Grinch's peak. At the time, Yogi was too young to leave her own mother, so mine assured me that my present would be present by February. And indeed she was. I remember marveling at how huge and cumbersome her paws and ears were (they seemed to remain at that size while the rest of her struggled to catch up to their advanced growth), and the white question mark etched in her fur, just above her tail. She was beautiful. And mine. The first thing I'd ever had that required responsibility. And certainly the only thing I've ever had that loved me no matter how badly I attended to that responsibility.

I had moved to North Carolina a few months before from Ohio in the wake of my parents' divorce. I've been told that I use the word "miserable" to describe far too many things in life, but I can't quite think of any other term for how I felt then. My dad was half a world away. My friends were that same distance (and later further, when some of them left Ohio, ensuring that no matter how much we said we would, we'd never meet again). I was in a hick town that didn't know culture from q-tips. On top of everything, I had no idea how to express any of the things I was feeling. My brain was throbbing in a hot bath, stoked by my tear ducts, and my mouth had all but sank away into a third cheekbone. Part of me shut down in those days.

As the school year began and I slowly made friends, Yogi was the one constant, however new she was, that kept me anchored and focused. I was never as nice as I could have been (she may have been scolded a bit too harshly for messing in the house a few times, or kept out from underfoot by being locked up in her kennel too often during that first year), but I can scarcely think of any relationship I've had that came close to how much we loved each other. This is good, because I was socially (miserable) during high school. Girls hated me, I confounded myself with how I behaved around them, and my friends were all in the same boat. I needed someone to confide in and be myself around. Yogi was the perfect listener.

I didn't know much about music during the first half of high school, a fact which I lament to this day. However, towards high school's end, I'd picked up quite an eclectic taste of music, ranging from progressive rock to trance, from musical theater to japanese pop. I began writing music and discovering how to externalize the sordid soup of emotions I felt internally. It was my own little renaissance, peaked by my discoveries of Devo, They Might Be Giants, the Flaming Lips, and others.

Finally, as graduation loomed, my best friend Funk spoke of a band he'd mentioned before, only this time I listened to him. They hadn't had an album in 5 years (for a contemporary band, I knew this made them practically off the map of the known universe), but a supposedly triumphant return was to come soon. He loaned me their first two albums so I could try 'em out, presumably in hopes that I'd take to them and be psyched and prepared for their third.

Maybe it was the carefreeness of those last remaining days of high school...feeling those few surviving responsibilities and ties slip away before a summer of assured debauchery and cavorting settled in (seemingly for good). Maybe it was my growing understanding of what makes music good, and what I most enjoy from it. Whatever it was, when I heard the Blue Album and Pinkerton, my mind dug its teeth into the heart of Weezer and never let go; I'd found my soulmate.

Here, in this music, were melodies that paled everything else. Here was emotion that would have blown my heart's mind if I'd heard it two years earlier! Here I was both rocking out and emoting like a loser because I was finally realizing that those aren't mutually exclusive concepts! These guys wrote about Dungeons & Dragons and being an outcast as well as talking like they were King Shit but still admitting that there was no hope for them to ever find a woman. They wrote melodies that sounded like they broke straight through the roof of my little split-level NC home, and built layers of burning guitars that felt like they scorched miles and miles of land in a radius around my stereo. I was alone, in a broken home, listening to music that felt more like it came from me than from 4 guys named Rivers, Matt, Pat, and Brian.

Yogi was in my car recently thereafter for a second listen (coulda been the first, but I'm doubtful). Following the breakup I went through right around the same time, Weezer began to represent my heartache and I found myself writing more and more, and wanting more and more to express all the guts that were swirling around inside me. And Yogi was there.

When the Green Album was released, summer was just beginning. Funk and I whisked around parking lots in our cars, blaring "Don't Let Go" as if it was just as good as "Why Bother," though I think deep down, we knew it wasn't. Yogi was there, in the back seat, slobbering on my window and getting knocked off balance when I made a turn too sharply, and listening along (albeit perhaps begrudgingly).

Then college. Maladroit came out at the end of my first year in Boston, and I was on cloud 9. When I went home for the summer, Yogi and I spent even more time together than usual, the weight of all those lonely months crunching us closer when we were finally together. We swam together in the river off the field in my neighborhood, and spent daylight hours chilling out at home while I waited to go to my dreaded night shift at the axel factory (4 pm - midnight). My friends all worked other jobs that had decent, human hours, so we rarely brushed shoulders. When I switched to the morning overtime shift at the Volvo plant (6 am - 4 pm), I was too tired to see my friends, so Yogi would curl up beside me on the futon as I drifted off to sleep. In the few waking hours I had at home, we would play together and I'd ceaselessly excavate the internet for Weezer videos and interviews from their heyday, as well as download bootlegged tracks and outtakes from their more recent work.

Around this time, I realized that my thing with Weezer was never going away, and that it was so strong an attachment that it made me sad...someday, Weezer would cease to make music, or otherwise cease to exist in some form. Their music had had such a profound effect on me that I couldn't bear to imagine what it would be like to know that there would never be anymore of it.

Bookending things as they seem wont to do, Weezer released Make Believe around the time I graduated from Emerson. I remember joyfully drinking in "Perfect Situation" and "Hold Me," and having rabid conversations with Funk and my friend Matt about how much better this was than anything on Maladroit. I had recently begun seeing a girl named Molly, and I distinctly remember cleaning my apartment before she came over, "Haunt You Every Day" thundering all the while. I brought the CD home with me to North Carolina when she came to visit, and we spent several afternoons taking Yogi around Hendersonville with Make Believe serving as a soundtrack. It was all too brief, however, as I had to stay in Boston for the summer to make money before beginning Urinetown and the impending move to New York. We had a few days with Yogi.

Rivers released his solo album of home recordings just in time for Christmas this year. I flew home Christmas Eve (Work not being very understanding about granting time off for this particular holiday), and left the morning after Christmas. It was my shortest trip home yet, and therefore my shortest stint with Yogi. My 12-year old Christmas Present, though as beautiful as she was all those years ago, was visibly old, and, I think, visibly sad that I was not around for long. We spent as much time together as I could manage, and I even put off listening to River's album until I got back to NYC. I sometimes regret that...I think she should have liked, "Superfriend," most of all.

When Weezer released the "Pork and Beans" single two months ago, my mind very nearly suffered a cardiac arrest all over again. It was a single that harkened back to everything I loved about Weezer's golden age...a beautiful melody, blistering guitars, hilariously goofy but sincere lyrics, and a general mood that doesn't match anything else on the radio. I called my friends immediately to see if they'd heard it, and followed up with each pre-album single release they had. When the Red Album was officially announced (and pushed forward), I freaked out. All I wanted to do was have it in my hands, feel the jewel case...read the liner notes and the lyrics..and cruise around North Carolina listening to the album, a cream soda in my hand, and Yogi in the passenger seat, her ears flailing out the lowered window like muddy comets.

But I got the call from my mom on wednesday. Geez, almost a week ago. My family's out of town in Europe. Yogi's cancer seemed to accelerate overnight. The kennel owners tried getting her to the vet's to put her down. She didn't even make it in time.

Yogi died without me there. Without me telling her how much she meant to me, how much I care about her, and how good a dog she'd been. Without me singing, "Longtime Sunshine," a song we found together, to her. She died. And she died alone.

The days immediately afterward were a dark blur. I was so overcome with guilt that I rapidly descended a path of depression that I knew wasn't called for, but that didn't steer me off it. Yogi was gone. My connection to overcoming those 12 years of pain, awkwardness, loneliness, as well as my tether to the good times, was gone. I was cut loose, lost in some frothy sea that bore no resemblance to the waters I'd been sailing only hours before. North Carolina began to sound less like my home. Everything began to sound less like my home.

Then I thought back to Pinkerton. Nothing comes close to the way I feel about that album...I don't think there's anything more cathartic or perfectly crafted than Pinkerton, and the fact that this type of music has since been absent in Weezer's output has made me depressed, no joke. But just because it hasn't continued doesn't mean it's gone. And even if Weezer dies off, or becomes a poppy abomination that no self-respecting Morrison or his dog would listen to, their older music is still alive. It really is. When I listen to the "god damn" mental breakdown of "Across the Sea," I feel just as anguished yet full of hope as I did when I first heard it in 2001. And although I wish I had discovered Weezer sooner, it doesn't matter when I came into my own with them. It's music. It behaves the same if I listen to it ten years ago or tomorrow. It's unconditional. It's me who isn't built that way.

But I did come to treat Yogi better. She was the best friend I'll ever have, and nothing can take that away. Even when her dogbowl is thrown away, and when we take down the length of red zipline she ran along, and when the last bit of her remaining fur is swept away; when all the last traces have been erased of the first thing I had that required responsibility and that loved me no matter how badly I attended to that responsibility; when all that's gone, she won't be. I love Yogi, and she loves me. She knows how much she meant to me; I could see that even in our brief moments together this past Christmas. She was loved, and she recognized me as clearly as the long, wet nose that hung down below her brown eyes. She represented a huge chunk of my life, and just because she's left doesn't mean my connection to those days is gone. At midnight, when the Red Album downloads into my computer, she'll be right beside me listening to it. I don't feel silly saying that...it's just the way it is. I can't imagine it any other way.

Life is a mystery, as the question mark by her tail suggested way back when. But she wasn't. She was beautiful. She was my friend. The mystery is what did I do to deserve such a present?

"I've got your letter,
you've got my song."

i've had her, she's nothing

2008-04-20T22:31:00.000-07:00

So. Tonight.

I spent an hour or two memorizing a few songs at home, then busted out to busk at the good ole 23rd Street Station. There were a few Phil Ochs songs in attendance, as well as some fragments of my own that are in progress, and I was really pleased by how well-received they were. I made a couple bones, always a good thing given that my college loans are a little past due. But aside from the obvious boon of a roll of singles, it was really great to see people enjoying the music. Some poorly misguided by very kind lady told me my voice was "angelic." A cluster of women who I presume were tourists videotaped me from across the platform on the downtown side. And there were the usual nods of recognition when I played a Dylan or Neil Young song that someone approved of. I'd forgotten how nice it feels to do this.

I wasn't feeling the harmonica much tonight, so in place of it, I guess I ended up scatting. Not sure what else to call it. There's some scat-stuff in "Hands & Knees" anyhow, and I guess I've been going more and more in that direction. There are just some vowels sounds I'm obsessed with, I've realized. I couldn't probably explain it, but there are sounds that I'm big on, pet sounds, and whereas most people might cite clarinet licks or backwards-recorded guitars as pet sounds (not that I don't), I've become increasingly obsessed with the shapes of these vowels, and with letting loose on them, abandoning words. I think these particular vowel sounds are prevalent in folk music, too, which is maybe where this comes from.

Still working on my new song. There are of course several now, as I can't ever pin down one version of what I'm feeling, so inevitably it family trees outward into too many bits that risk incompletion. I think I'm gonna have at least one pretty nice one in a few days.

In the meanwhile, here's a great Phil Ochs song. The last stanza's chilling.

The night air is inviting you to walk out on the trail
You will not fail,
You will not fail
And by the beach, a lady sails a ship without a sail
And you reach out for her,
And you reach out for her
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

Down the cliffs you clamber and you tumble to the shore
The warm waves roar,
The warm waves roar
And on the reef a mermaid siren screams, "one perfume more"
And she shouts to you,
Through the foam, she shouts to you
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

The players at the party are prepared to take a chance
They drop their pants,
They drop their pants
In the corner, she's so crystaline no one dares to ask a dance
And she calls out to you,
And she calls out to you
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

In the prison of your broken bed, you dribble in a dream
And find a queen,
And find a queen
But your sleep is sadly stolen by the face that is a stream
That's flowing out to you,
She's flowing out to you
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

The vision of the seven veils are racing down the road
Signs are slow,
The signs are slow
But beauty is the mistress and the beauty you've been told
You'd speed the route for her,
You'd speed the route for her
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

The fog has changed the city to a friendly frightened fawn
The shades are drawn,
The shades are drawn
To posess her misty madness, you would gladly duel the dawn
And fade out to her,
And fade out to her
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

The circus clown, he hides a tear beneath his pained smile
And charms a child,
And charms a child
While the dancing girls and prancing horse blows kisses down the aisle
You'd roll about for her,
You'd roll about for her
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

All alone, the flaming field, your fairy love is spread
Your time has fled,
Your time has fled
Now the only way to touch her is the gun beside your head
Now there's now doubt for her,
Now there's now doubt for her
But, I've had her
I've had her
She's nothing

planets are getting demoted

2008-04-17T17:58:00.000-07:00

How do you get over something that's eating at your brain? Nevermind that it's something stupid, something that is taking up your time in a most frustrating manner, something that doesn't give a hoot about you no matter how much you invest in said something. (Yeah, you probably know what I'm referring to by now.) Nevermind those things. It's buggin' ya, and ya gotta kick it.

So you write. Well, at least I write. I've been spending my free time the last few days writing the first song I've really been able to get enthused about since Novemberish. In fact I've been writing so much that the song is way too long. I've been almost literally sleeping on it (the old trick where I reread it right before bed so my dreaming brain can hopefully continue working on the weak stuff). On my break today, I purposely left the lyrics at home and attempted to rewrite them from scratch, hoping the stuff that counts would reappear and the bits that could stand to improve would get lost in the shuffle. Not sure if it worked; now I like both versions.

Ah well. Brian Wilson says that a masterpiece is something you water daily. Not that this has much chance of being one of those things. But I do intend on tending to it as such.

Lyrics and recording to come.
Mucho Oblique Strategies and risks happening currently.

feeling gravity's pull

2008-03-28T22:24:00.000-07:00

Technically, this another post that doesn't involve me busking. However, seeing as this is the third night in a row that I've stayed up playing out my thoughts for myself and scrabbling crappy lyrics on just about any surface I can find (this is why I try to have blank post-its on my walls), I'm going to count it.

This was my much-built-up week off from work. Unfortunately, tiny commitments here and there whittled away most of the break, so I was glad that I'd left the last two days to myself to trek down to DC. The aim of using this as time to get out of my head and chill my body out was achieved, but I also think I accomplished the exact opposite. So:

Yesterday, when I hopped the train, I was listening to R.E.M. Never having got into them (mostly because of the unfortunate coincidence with my initials...), I'd attempted a few of their early albums in college to try to do the requisite, "yeah, these guys aren't any good now, but college kids back in the day loved them, and if there's one thing education is showing me, it's to respect an artist's overhyped past" kinda thing. It didn't click. This time it clicked. The depression I've been feeling for the last two, three weeks was immediately and thirstily breast-feeding from Michael Stipe's glorious vocal nipple (follow that?), and off I went into the deep end. The second the train left the station and I saw the least bit of scrabbly vegetation, my mental floodgates were self-sabotaged and I word-vomited all over my notebook. Tons of lyrics. I'm sure they sucked; that's why I stopped writing a few months ago. I'm embarrassed by how bad my ideas are. But I stopped caring. Why?

I guess because I was out of my comfort zone. Much as I hate how habitually stupid work has grown, and how habitually alone I feel, and how habitually unartistic I fear I've become, these things make up my routine, and, over time, have come to define my comfort zone. So, Rob, just get out of the city, and voila, you've got a couple shitty ideas. Sweet. Why don't you do this more often? Just go all over the place.

Then it hit me: is this why people travel? Maybe not all of them, of course. But maybe a lot of them do so for this reason. I dunno.

But after a nice, semi-relaxing (the semi- because it was rather brief) stay, I found myself getting all grumped up again on the train. Where I'd been feeling vulnerable, creative, sad and lonely only a day before, I now felt angry, stupid, sad, and lonely.

I just got more upset by the time I got home. Actually, enraged would be a good description. The reason? None, really. But I think I'm going to stop generally apologizing for that stuff. I'm a cool guy, and I'm gonna emote with confidence, yo. My dog is dying, I've managed to lose a significant number of friends in the last two years because I'm a stubborn moody schmuck, and here I am secretly griping about a few silly people who find silly ways to piss me off. This is seriously out of whack.

Anyway, I wish I could say I'll have at least some lyric updates to put up here, but seeing as how I'm turning slightly green looking at what I wrote, I doubt that'll happen.

"Fables of the Reconstruction" is amazing.

Insect Angel

2008-02-16T19:46:00.000-08:00

I'm so tired of being sick that it's actually managed to get me depressed. Rather than stew in bed all night, I decided to finally record Insect Angel, albeit in quite a sickly fashion.

A lot of the lyrics are almost embarrassing to me, but I operated under the "no apologies" approach for this and didn't make any lyrical adjustments. Same thing for the vocals...I probably sound godawful, but this actually goes with the subject matter.

The words are pretty inaudible, so if you don't feel like scrolling back to the post that included these lyrics a few months ago, here they are. Lo and behold, six months later, Insect Angel. Okay. Bedtime attempt.

By the way, as mentioned, this was written a while ago (September 23rd, it would seem), and I have even less of an idea of what it's about now than I did before.

insect angel.

tarred and feathered
by request
ten years of blood
vitamins and microchips

they gave me lights
so I could see in the dark
and cut me like a diamond
so none could see me

break my skin
plant a pill
they smell your smarts
before you think of the end

dread Gilgamesh
left ancient dragons boiling in me
I’ve written it on mile markers
but no one believes

through fishflesh eyes
look long, look long
see the indiglo dials
see the secret codes

eraserburn
I checked their hands
and saw the spots
they’d tried to forget

blood from the sky
smells sweet
but they’ve torched my files
and now I can’t reach what I need

what will I be?
all the televisions burst around me
at the symphony
I hear different things

obsidian
are the laws and the liturgy
radars cannot see
the fiberglass coming out of me

this insect angel
is still fixed on the starball
bulbous and stuffed with light
hideous, hideous

I’m classified
and stuck in time
like a sugarmelt
I could swear I once was good

roy g biv
in an oil slick
manta rays blot out the sun,
blot out the sun
think of the end

I'm returning your wings.

2008-01-03T19:07:00.000-08:00

Today found me making, several times, a familiar pilgrimage to SoHo that I haven't really made since the summer, in turn, found me full of self-deprecation and -pity, but empty of funds for train rides. I'd made a mix to end all mixes on my shuffle; a collection of songs to chronicle the palpitations of a warped heart trying to understand if it had been dug out from fossil matter, a complete anachronism whose struggle would then only make sense, or it was simply doomed. Gradually, things actually did change. I met other people. I got promoted. I got an MBTA card. Finally, the shuffle was laid to rest on my shelf, replaced by something larger and cooler. "The world had moved on" as they say in the Dark Tower. Things had finally changed. And I hadn't really noticed it.

So I popped my shuffle on as I made my rounds today, cycling through the songs less for the purpose of listening to them and more to hear what songs were in the mix; to see what I'd assigned meaning to all those months ago. It was weird...there were clusters of songs that were clearly me indulging my own inner pity, followed by waves of embarrassingly cheerful songs aimed at perking my chin up to the very clouds that the CareBears pay overpriced rent for (I don't care what you say, BrightHeart, it's NOT centrally located). None of them meant much now, but it made me think a lot. I had been downright pathetic. Granted, no one could have jarred me from my funk by telling me that, including a future, well-informed version of myself. It was just something I had to go through.

I've been overhauling my apartment the last two days in order to cleanse myself of 2007 as well as make way for some significant changes 2008 has already exacted upon my tiny, carbon-based footprint on the world. In so doing, I found a horde of asian mustard packets from chinese takeout across the city. I forgot: I was obsessed with chinese food this summer! And I've got enough extra condiment packets to live off of for two weeks, should I dare. To salute the most morose of summers and the loneliest of falls, I made the tea that came with a long-since devoured tray of ho fun, and consumed the hermetically-sealed fortune cookie whose contents were likely intended for Rob Morrison circa July 2007.

"The guilty one is hidden in the misty copse.
Are you ignoring the signs?"

Oh right. The fucking History channel infiltrated my dessert of portent over the summer to promote The Lost Book of Nostradamus.

If that doesn't deflate my whole self-centered evening, nothing will.

My aunt came into town the other night, and I had a truly awesome time catching up with her. It's strange that her visits have served as little milestones for me: last time she was in town, I'd just gone through the breakup, and the time before that, I was just about to experience it (unknowingly, of course). In comparison to her last dinner with me, I must have seemed far more sane and together. And I heard it in me, as I spoke with her. "Wow...I really have come a long way. I'm actually managing to support myself financially (knock on wood), I feel artistically decent, and I'm pretty happy. It almost doesn't feel like me!"

But nothing has been handed to me. I've had to wrangle it all out of the mud and spray the film off just to see if it's any good to begin with. Though cheesy and depressing, I've come to terms with one concept: No one really cares that much about me. And if I put my trust in anyone's sense of responsibility, decency, or even basic ability to act like a human being, I'm being a sucker. The only person I'm in control of is me, and I gotta make sure I do help out others as well as look out for myself. To me, this isn't really depressing. Just a wake up call, and a different tack on things. And it's one I'm already employing largely without much effort. If my big pet peeves are dishonesty and being ignored, I need to pay the antidotes forward.

The only goal of note that wasn't accomplished during my two-day hiatus from the world was the sizable amount of recording I keep putting off. I'm trying to digitally log all the tape I've got on reel-to-reel, too, which is several hour's worth at least. Well, something for next Wed-Thurs, I suppose.

I've some new lyrics from Christmas that I may post next time.

kyrie eleison

2007-12-22T23:45:00.000-08:00

I can't sleep. And it's all thanks to Judee Sill.

For those who aren't familiar, Judee was a singer-songwriter from the early 1970s who wrote ethereally baroque, lushly layered, and religiously- and sexually-charged songs that simply don't fit into any music category, though she was initially grouped with Joni Mitchell et al. I won't get into too much bio stuff here, but suffice it to say that Judee burned very brightly for a very short period of time, before fading into obscurity and dying of a drug overdose at the decade's close. She was so reclusive by this point, that many of her friends didn't learn of her passing for a solid year. Her childhood was marred by family deaths and her own deliquency.

I discovered Judee's music randomly about three years ago, when her two albums were still unavailable on CD (a mistake which has since been rectified by Asylum Records). There's no way to describe how powerful Judee's music is, or how much it affects me...she's everything I aspire to be. She's someone I return to listening to several times a year, bringing somber thoughts and fantasies of what could have been had she lived. All the songs she could have written. But some people can't work past their lot in life...it's as if they're destined to have a few hours in the sunlight, like some anchor, before being forever plunged into the deep.

Her song "Lady-O" (which was covered by the Turtles) has got to be the most beautiful thing on record, and it's so stuck in my head right now that I can't sleep. Always one for a good old emotional purging, I recorded a cover version of my own tonight. As she's relatively obscure, I figured I'd post it so others might get turned on to her. See what you think. No sueing, please.

Lady-O.

your own chosen speed

2007-12-19T23:36:00.000-08:00

I just finished watching Don't Look Back, a 1960s documentary about Bob Dylan, which proved to be as fascinating as I'd been led to believe it would be.

Dylan always has a profound effect on me, as anyone who's read this blog before will attest to. I've made room for other artists in my radar recently, but this has brought back his enormous blip, sending all the smaller ones flying offscreen. He's amazing to watch, not only while performing, but especially when other people are performing; his gears turn so clearly. He's the real deal, no bones about it. Every second of every minute is pregnant with musical fetuses that blossom and fluoresce in that curly-haired cranium. Some are fortunate enough to grow, others wilt and erode away for good. But the process is remarkably noticeable, and it's proof that he's something else.

This got me wondering of course, as I can't help but be a human about this sort of thing. Am I the real deal? Underneath every personal encounter, every mindless routine, every moment of hot- or cold-blooded emotion -- is there a layer of music-truth? Maybe there doesn't have to be in order to be "the real deal." And it probably doesn't do any good to ruminate on it. Dylan probably didn't sit at his typewriter, debating his own integrity on the vaguest of scales. But he had the devotion of millions to dissuade him from such idle activities. I don't got that.

What I can say I have, at least in the last two weeks, is such an involuntary, overwhelming pull to my music, that I can't focus on anything else. This happens to be good, as there are several unsavory things I'd rather not focus on at all.

I was going to try having some new songs recorded and ready to post by this weekend, but that's looking doubtful. How about some lyrics I'm working on instead? Yes, you say? You'd love to peruse them? Well, splendid. Work in progress, mind you. In case you're curious, each verse is two stanzas, and each chorus is two stanzas.

"insect angel"

tarred and feathered
by request
ten years of blood
vitamins and microchips

they gave me lights
so I could see in the dark
and cut me like a diamond
so none could see me

break my skin
plant a pill
they smell your smarts
before you think of the end

dread Gilgamesh
left ancient dragons boiling in me
I’ve written it on mile markers
but no one believes

through fishflesh eyes
look long, look long
see the indiglo dials
see the secret codes

eraserburn
I checked their hands
and saw the spots
they’d tried to forget

blood from the sky
smells sweet
but they’ve torched my files
and now I can’t reach what I need

what will I be?
all the televisions burst around me
at the symphony
I hear different things

obsidian
are the laws and the liturgy
radars cannot see
the fiberglass coming out of me

this insect angel
is still fixed on the starball
bulbous and stuffed with light
hideous, hideous

I’m classified
and stuck in time
like a sugarmelt
I could swear I once was good

roy g biv
in an oil slick
manta rays blot out the sun,
blot out the sun
think of the end

The end times...

2007-12-17T08:36:00.000-08:00

are clearly drawing near. Futurama's contract on Adult Swim has ended.

I'm holding out hope for Comedy Central.

I'm also dedicating tonight's busking to every Earthican's favorite ill-fated cartoon about life, love, and biting shiny metal asses.

Dark Ages

2007-12-15T19:58:00.001-08:00

I've decided that I'm okay with being ignored, as long as I can spend 15 minutes with Rachel Weiss every week in return.

So far, that's worked out. (That's right, I'm serious.) But the second week approaches...

I'm not one for being ignored, and it's currently happening. Girls are a complete mystery to me, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I just champion the "can we just talk about this?" way of life, which never seems to click with females, this year being a prime example.

On a somewhat related note, break ups are a weird thing. I'm still recovering from my last one, over half a year ago. It was on my mind a lot today, and I realized that in a way, I'm still in love with her, and with everyone I've loved before. And not in some fancy pants Oversoul kind of love -- I still feel a romantic tether of sorts. There are, of course, other, less attractive feelings braiding said tether, but we won't get into those. It's just a weird thing. Endings. I don't end relationships, at least I don't think I do. But some people REALLY end stuff, really give it the ole guillotine treatment. It's never occurred to me to exile someone from my life. But everyone seems to do it. Parents get divorced. Lovers ditch ya. Friendships can actually split and evaporate. The latter is always the most surprising to me.

I was listening to John Prine on my way to work this morning. It was a song I'd forgotten about called "Taking a Walk," and I don't think I'd heard it since March. The most at-ease, relaxed, and enigmatically bittersweet song. It was a really nice moment. And I wondered, wow, what if John Prine decided I couldn't listen to his music anymore? All his CDs and mp3s just vanished from my possession, and I'd never be allowed to hear so much as a refrain of "Bruised Orange" or "The Other Side of Town" again. Not even look up the lyrics to his songs, not see the covers of his albums. Or, not to do too much qualifying, but what if that happened with Neil Young? Bob Dylan? I'd spend a good portion of the rest of my life struggling to replay their wayward melodies and rhymes in my head, until they melted and reformed as something off-centered and ghastly, a far lesser version of themselves. And I'd never quite remember them the way they were.

Feels familiar.

So that's what happens. Someone decides we shouldn't be a part of their life, and as we sit there, trying to comprehend what just took place, their memory is already distorting itself, taking on a life of its own. And it would be easy to let this happen. The harder choice is to cut ties and let that person go completely. I've never been able to do that.

But what is the better choice? To let this replay mode happen? Or to cut the canker right off? Can you ever really get over anything? Can I, anyhow?

With all these thoughts floating in my blood since summer, it didn't help that my for first time up at bat in a while, I went out swinging like a fool. But lesson learned, I guess. It just happens to be a lesson that makes me more bitter and jaded, so I'm resisting slightly.

I performed as the musical guest for improv group Busker last night. That's right: an improv group that takes their suggestions from the performance of a busker! Good gravy! How awesome is that? Awesome to the nth, would be one answer, and a good one at that. I had a swell time being a part of their show, and seeing how my songs influenced their scenes. Folded Fox made an appearance, and I rounded off the set with some of my favorite covers. Had a few friends come as well, which is always nice. It was a strange sensation performing on stage like that....though I'm an actor and improviser in my own right, I'm not used to performing music in an environment where people are -- at least -- arranged so as to be watching me. Usually they just walk right past me, or linger for a moment and chuck me a quarter. So I was a little tense. Nevertheless, good practice, as I'd like to be playing more bars eventually. Many thanks to the fine folks of Busker for having me.

My computer's hard drive pooped out at the start of this week. Not a nice experience, but I'd thankfully done a pretty good job of backing up my important stuff. I lost the garageband file for Folded Fox, so it's more or less set in stone now. I also lost three days of chances to record, as my mind was teeming with thoughts like those above. I was not to be thwarted, however. My recently resurrected reel-to-reel reigned in the responsibility of recording rather regally. It's a little too old-school for my tastes, as I've been spoiled with having all of my scraps arranged as mp3s, but it did the job. I also took this opportunity to go back and make super basic recordings of some stuff in my notebooks that never got put on tape.

So here I am, procrastinating work on my Wicked audition because I can't stop moping over some girl who isn't worth the trouble, while my friends are all partying in New Jersey, and the chunks of my family are strewn across the country miles away. I don't think I could feel any more alone.

Refolded Fox

2007-12-09T12:07:00.000-08:00

I started thinking about the point of my new song, Folded Fox. The basic premise is people are made up of what they are, their experiences, their memories. And it's better to let those things have an effect on you, otherwise you're not made up of anything if you pretend the bad stuff never happened. Whether or not "that which does not kill me makes me stronger," it certainly does make me me.

After ruminating on this for a bit, I did some substantial rerecording of the song, most of which I'm rather happy with. Wanting to have an unpolished, semi-lo-fi sound to reflect the idea of an imperfect history, I ran one vocal track through my reel-to-reel, then recorded it into my computer, while still leaving the original vocal track the way it was. The goal was to make a present/past sound that merged into a mellow little pool of lyrics...who knows if it worked at all, but it was fun to make, and I'm enjoying listening to it.

Just like First Snow of the Year (which I think I talked about recently), I got a lot of new ideas for tiny guitar parts that thread in and out of the main progression, in a muffled spray.

All in all, I think it's a better song now. It's going to be really hard to not keep tweaking it forever, though. I usually don't do much with the songs I record; two, maybe three or four tracks. But every so often I'll start working on something and wind up opening Pandora's Music Box of endless (and likely needless) ideas.

Anyhow, thanks for the feedback. Here's the new Folded Fox.

Folded Fox

2007-12-06T06:25:00.000-08:00

Taken by a feverish fit of fabricative faculties, I finally finished the finer facets of a song I'd been working on since Fune. Ahem, June.

Folded Fox.

Technically, I came up with the guitar part close to a year ago, but didn't set any words to it until the infamous Bummer Summer of '07. It's by far the most revised song I've recorded yet, I'd say. The lyrics got redrafted around 7 times, and I'm sure they'll still continue to be tweaked (the middle section is especially wonky to me).

Spurred on by some recent flurries, I had been listening to one of my first recorded songs, "First Snow of the Year," (I know that sounds really self-absorbed...I just get really into retracing my steps), which I still think is one of my personal favorites. It had a very warm, analog sound to it due to a space heater being on during recording, and it's a sound that I like a lot. I wanted "Fold Fox" to have some sorta soft chugging sound to it, so I kept all the tracks going even when they weren't being used, so there'd be a dose of white noise in there. Sounds okay, I can't really tell if it works. Some of the lyrics aren't half bad, but I can never judge this sorta thing.

At least it's done. I have three or four songs from the summer still unfinished, a hopefully dwarfing number, as I'd really like to make good on that "I'm gonna write some happy songs now" claim.

Alarum

2007-12-04T16:40:00.000-08:00

Last night:

Commenced busking circa 7:00 pm. Just wanted to go out for a while, wind down, get my mind off stupid things. Played John Prine song "Speed of the Sound of Lonelyness" (sic) and Elliott Smith's "Pretty (Ugly Before)" for the first time. The latter was pretty popular. Also debuted "Hands & Knees", something of my own I've been tweaking. All was good with the world. Money was made. Somebody even gave me a 20 (though they swapped it with some singles from my guitar case).

Around 9:15, decided I was tired. One more song. Finish whatever it is I'm playing, then I'll wrap it up with "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." I hear a little ruckus going on at the ticket counter behind me, but mostly ignore it. "He's allowed to be playing here" seeps through. I ignore. I play. I get interrupted by clatter on the dividing bars behind me.

"Hey, buddy."

Great. A cop. Scratch that, two cops.

I've dealt with this before. He'll tell me to go away, I'll act like a snot and end up packing, then wishing I'd played it cooler when I think back on it later. So I take a deep breath. I will be cool. I won't act like a douche.

"What's up, man?" I ask, totally chill, friend to the world and all its creatures.

"Look man, I'm not gonna tell you you can't play here, but you gotta be at least 50 feet from the ticket booth. Move around the corner."

"Why, is it poisonous?"

"What?"

"Is the booth poisonous?"

"No. Why?"

"Why can't I be this close?"

"Look, it's the rule."

"Okay, that's cool. I'm not trying to argue, it's just I've either been told to pack it up or nothing at all. I haven't heard the booth thing before."

"Well, it's the rule."

"Okay. Man. That's just weird. Have you ever been down here before? People play in this spot all the time."

"How old are you?"

"Huh?"

"How old are you?"

"I...uh, I think that's neither here nor there."

"Just tell me how old you are."

"30, let's say."

A blank look. The beginnings of a protesting response. I chime in:

"All right, I'm 24."

"You're 24? I've been working this area for six years, so I don't need you to school me on what goes on down here."

"Okay, I --"

"You're not supposed to play so close."

"Okay. I've been playing here for two years, this is what I do, and I'm not arguing, all I'm saying is people play in this spot and this spot alone down here, so I'm --"

"You wanna see the rule?"

"I'd love to."

"It's upstairs in my car. You wanna go upstairs?"

I get the implication. "No, on second thought, I'm comfortable here."

Pause. Pretty long. Me:

"So, this is a pretty interesting stand-off we have here."

"There's no stand-off."

Pause. I finally begin to pack up to migrate "around the corner". Figures that no trains have come to take my audience away in like 10 minutes, so they're seeing all of this. Cop:

"You should do your research. Look up the rule."

As I round the corner: "Yeah, I'll be sure to do that."

I unpack almost literally next to the track, because the platform shrinks greatly after the booth area. As I'm sorting my harps, my peripheral vision picks up the cop's partner stalking up to me. Double great. Cop 2:

"Hey, I gotta say: he defended you. The station master reported you, and he (his partner) defended you. He didn't have to do that."

"Okay, it didn't really come off as a defense --"

"And you acted like a dick. He defended you and you acted like a dick to him."

"Well, I'm sorry, but--"

"That's all I'm saying."

"Wait. Think about it. Think about who I am, and who you are. I'm not used to someone like you defending someone like me, so I'm sorry if I didn't pick up on it, but it seems like he--"

"He defended you and you acted like a dick."

"Well, tell him I appreciate it."

Cop 2 strolls off, muttering under his breath.

I pause. Fumble with my guitar until the train of salvation removes my onlookers and leaves me alone. Then I go home.

But it's not over. With my newfound information, I cross to the ticket booth, knock lightly on the window, and wish the elderly man who's working in there a mildly sarcastic good night. As I move away, he emerges:

"Hey, wait!"

"What's up?"

"I want to let you know I think you're the most talented person down here. He made me report you!"

"Who did?"

"The station master! He made me do it! I like having you down here. All the other guys are broken records. You're the only good one."

"Well, thanks, man."

"It depends on what station master's working. No one's consistent. I say, 'is he allowed to play down here or no?' He says it's a volume issue."

"Weird. I've never heard that before...I've been down here two years."

"Yeah, I've been down here for four months. You're really great, I just wanted to let you know. It wasn't my choice."

"Well, thanks. What's your name?"

"Ed."

We shake, somewhat uncomfortably.

"Ed. I'm Rob. Nice to meet you. Have a good night."

"You too, Rob."

Gone.

What the hell? What's wrong with me? I really tried hard not to be an asshole to those guys, but I really hate cops. I hate misplaced, ridiculously machismo authority figures. It makes me sick. But here this guy defends me because the station master doesn't want me there at all, and I rattle on and act like the unavoidable douche, driving his help away. THEN I learn that even the booth guy didn't want to kick me out. Geez! If I'd only left when I had the instinct, the whole thing could've been avoided. The rest of my evening found me dwelling on the way I treat people, and how it could stand some serious improvement.

All day I'd been fretting over the dumbest personal stuff, basically being self-absorbed for no good reason, only to have the only actual impact I had on the world for the day be an overall negative one. If that makes sense. Basically, to use lame gym teacher speak, I need an attitude adjustment.

I tried keeping that in mind today. Remaining understanding at all times, or making that the challenge, at any rate. Not easy in customer service. Then I tried applying it to the annoying personal stuff. Still working on that...thankfully, there is no shortage of reasonable distractions at the moment.

it's alive.

2007-12-02T18:14:00.001-08:00

Though the cost of the operation is to be forever resented, my reel-to-reel recorder has been brought back to the land of the living, to the elation of the general populous.

I originally purchased the tape recorder during the summer of 2004 (the original Bummer Summer, for those in the know), when songs were running wild and I needed desperately to document each sighting. I'd also procured an incredibly nice electric piano from my friend Kelley who needed a place to store it for the summer, so much of the aforementioned sightings involved me attempting to play things on an instrument I know very little about.

A couple songs that evolved from this era are "Lifeboat Violin" and "The Fly," both of which are on my .mac page. Most everything else I'd totally forgotten about. It had been an infuriating year and a half knowing there were songs sleeping in this AKAI sarcophagus with no reasonable means of rousing them due to a broken motor.

To be totally candid, a great majority of these forgotten "jems" were recorded while I was drunk after a long night of work at Legal Seafood. They're also not quite the jems that a year and a half of mythologizing had led me to believe they were, but I'm nonetheless always fascinated to hear my older recordings and see what things about my process have changed or remained the same. I guess I weigh out the work of actual recording artists in much the same way. Growth has always interested me. There seems to be a fair amount of really nice instincts I had initially that I've buried, and also a lot of pretentious inventions that deserved that fate. Raises the question: is growth really growth?

Most of the songs on my tapes are very small fragments that seem too devoid of context to make any sense, but a few are decent. "Angel Post" is the first real piano-based song I've written, and I still sorta like the very elementary melody it has. I was most interested in this character/confessional song about an old west pastor whose family all died during the process of building a chapel, all of which is of course chalked up to the wisdom of God. Not my outlook on things at all, hence it being a character song. I'm not sure how long it is, as there's no clock/timer mechanism on the reel-to-reel, but I think it must be around 12-15 minutes long, which is pretty crazy considering it was entirely improvised, and most of it involves lyrics (though, to be fair, there are some non-rhyming verses in there).

I don't have splicing tape. In a notorious incident dating back two years, cranberry juice found its way onto the recorder and soaked my tape. Thankfully, this didn't destroy anything, but it did make the tape sticky, and eventually caused it to snap in three different places. Not a big deal for tape like this, since it can be spliced together. Cue first sentence in this paragraph. Until that happens, my apartment will continue to be a hi-fi jungle, lengths of audio tape dangling from my cabinets like vines in an attempt at organizing them into some kind of order. I can already see this being something that never gets amended.

dirty medicine

2007-11-26T22:11:00.000-08:00

i'm getting hooked on the whole lower-case too-cool-for-school approach to typing. this has been my approach in word documents since forever because it makes lyrics look a lot more simple and non-pretentious to me (also the method i employ in handwriting), but i think it may have the opposite effect on the rest of the world.

I have a new song! Check out "Down to Earth" on my .mac page for downloading and general fandom. The song itself is pretty disjointed, seeing as the music is two years old (probably close to the day) and the lyrics just kinda fell out in one sitting, less than a week ago. Still, it's not awful. I dunno. Gimme feedback, yo.

By the weekend, I should have "Insect Angel" and "Hands & Knees" up as well. I've been procrastinating in case of lyrical changes, but it's pretty lame to let that get in the way, I guess.

over break, i gave a lot of my unfinished recordings a good listen and thought: holy crap. my music's really sad. like.....all of it. there aren't really any uptempo songs, either. it all SOUNDS sad in addition to actually BEING sad. geez. am i really that jaded? i don't think of myself as a gloom & doom disciple, but my writing seems to reflect this outlook pretty consistently. and that's really not something i feel good about. sure, it's been an awful year and life is hard and whatever....but this has to stop. i'm going to blitz through the rest of the songs i have in my pipeline just so i can focus on writing something that could at least pass as "content."

and now, sleep.

a view from the bed

2007-11-15T08:00:00.001-08:00

Be it a matter of too much partying or too much work or a lethal combination of the two, the end result is the same: I'm so sick I literally can't get out of bed. It took every ounce of strength I had to get my iPhone from across the room, meaning I had none left to procure medicine. I might try again in a few minutes.

It was certainly nice to sleep in, although my dreams were nothing but me interacting with customers. Exotic, right? I think I'd prefer the persistent nightmares I was having earlier in the summer.

Figures that on my one day off, I've got such a sore thoat I can't get any recording done. I'm really not sure when I'll get a chance to work on any of it; this weekend is nothing but training and performances pretty much nonstop. I'd like to hammer out the guitar parts at least, but this fever's got me so weak I can barely muster the energy to play. This whole thing is a flashback to my wonderful bonding time with mono back in high school. I don't think I could get that again, though.

All right, I gotta psych this cold outta me so I can go to my improv show tonight without playing an invalid in every scene.

an ambulance can only go so fast

2007-11-09T16:38:00.000-08:00

I'm considering turning this blog into a dream rant. Lately my dreams have been so remarkably visceral that I expect to wake up with a prominently-featured object from one of them forming a suspicious lump beneath my pillow that demands investigation involving mouths falling agape.

In other news, writing is going really well. I've written five or six songs in the last two weeks, though only two are in a finished state. All in all, the pulling-lyrics-out-of-a-hat method has worked really well not only in and of itself, but as an approach that makes me more aware of instances that could benefit from other practices. I may need to edit that sentence later; it doesn't make any sense.

My most recent dream was basically my subconscious' version of Eraserhead, with the added presence of Dog the Bounty Hunter as my mom's lover, and customers from the Soho Apple store who were impatiently waiting for me to bring them a dead baby shaped like a match.

Speaking of which, I watched my first episode of Gray's Anatomy last night. Too sad. Can't like things that are that sad. Must....not....like....show....ALL RIGHT, okay, it
was pretty good but it's still too sad. I mean, mommies dying all over the place and people crying like it's the coolest new fad. Newsflash: It's not cool. Play more Futurama.

My new mics have arrived, but as I'm in training all weekend, I have no clue when I'll get a chance to set 'em up, let alone record my new songs. Additionally, I have an unfinshed piece about a Dickensian street urchin that needs to be redrafted and completed for my solo perf class on Monday. In short, things are looking grim for everyone's hero.

Ghost

2007-11-04T19:36:00.000-08:00

I wrote a song last night. It came out of nowhere, but I think it had been lurking around for a while, like some vapor that invisibly fills up the room, and all too late you realize someone's run a tube from an exhaust pipe straight into your unsuspecting home and lungs. Who knows why such a thing would happen. Let me have my analogies, damn it.

Yesterday was possibly one of the most stressful I'd had in a while, so I guess it was inevitable that I'd need bloodlet in song form. Funny how that kind of inspiration only leads to new material. I could've stood to finish about six or seven older songs that are now looking as insurmountable to me as my outstanding college loan balance. Ah well.

It's called "Hands and Knees," and I'm actually really happy with it. I spent an hour or so on it tonight, tweaking chord progression and the outro, and I think it's halfway decent. Like most spur-of-the-moment songs, the whole thing was written (lyrically) in about 15 minutes, with the music taking an extra 30 maybe, excluding my work tonight. Why can't all songs be that easy?

I've been working on this semi-epic, semi-free-association piece called "Insect Angel" for almost two months, and something's still not quite right. I think I need a writing partner. My lyrics feel like they're getting better most of the time, but my musical output hasn't grown up at all. I actually feel like I've regressed from the stuff I was working on for my album last year.

Feeling like I needed to record this stuff, and getting sick of my condenser mic drowning out my mixes with gross guitar, I made a whim purchase of a new mic set. One of the mics is actually made for instruments (gasp), so I'm hoping it'll make this stuff sound clearer. Well, sorta. If it sounds too good, I'll want to rerecord all my songs, which will be Sadsville. It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Not much busking lately, thanks to the MTA being a bunch of douches and killing off the local trains at night (or, as is the new weekend standard, all trains at my stop). Lord help me if I ever encounter an MTA employee in...a game of GoldenEye. He would get hurt.

I'll probably post "Hands and Knees" and "Insect Angel" sometime this week, soon's I get this new gear. Keep your eyes peeled if you're interested.

See the sky about to rain

2007-10-22T12:02:00.001-07:00

Thank goodness for electrical outlets on trains.

I spent a total of about 20 hours on buses or in shady, shady greyhound stations in the last 48 hours, where the slightest of amenities is overlooked, having been deemed entirely superfluous. Now epic bus trips are nothing foreign to me. I have a romantic flair in me somewhere, and have at least on one other occasion undertaken to ride a bus for an unneccesarily long pilgrimage with the intention of "learning about myself" and "seeing the country." Too bad the people who ride greyhound buses are so fucking scary that it doesn't really matter how well-intentioned your goals are.

But more on that another time.

The good thing about traveling (for me anyway) is that it almost always yields a huge chunk of inspiration for writing. I dunno if it's the change of scenery as much as just the feeling of getting something done without having to acutally do anything at all. Things progress whether or not you want them to. Its actually the closest thing I've known to a sacntuary in my lifetime; there's no pressure to be doing something else since you're stuck where you are, so whatever you happen to accomplish during that time is bonus material.

I've kinda stalemated myself, though. Things aren't coming quite as easily as I'm accustomed to during travels. I knew that two weekends of weddings in a row would probably depress the hell outta me, but I didn't think it would drain me down to skeletal proportions. Last weekend, while weddinging it up, I felt a strange piece of paper in my blazer pocket, and pulled out a ticket stub from the first play I saw with her, complete with her name printed on it. I felt sick for a day. You don't want to go to more weddings when you feel that way.

Now I'm on the aforementioned train after meeting up briefly with my dad, stepmom and brother in DC. It was really nice seeing them, though I was so thoroughly exhausted that I fear I may have been pretty poor company.

Seeing Funk and Jason at the wedding really was worth the trip. It's nice I have friends you've got such a cool history with, even if they're practically on the other side of the world. A nice surprise was seeing my old friend Chris Tillman again. I'd totally forgotten how cool that guy is. Funk and I came up with a movie idea all spur-of-the-moment like at the wedding. It's times like these that frustrate the hell outta me andmake me really wish that Project Ginger had been telepods (Fly-like mishaps aside).

Back to the train. My dad had recommended a specific side and view for the ride, but it's become so inky dark outside that all I can see is my own reflection. I never seem to look the way I should, or the way I picture myself looking. Right now I look like some hunched Dickensian poet, and the writers block only makes this more image more pathetic.

Dad gave me my old middle school saxophone today, which I haven't used in probably like eight years. I'm stoked to bust it out again and add it to my ever-growing menagerie. Guess I need to pick up a mouthpiece somewheres.

Can't stop listening to Neil Young's On the Beach. A mostly forgotten album. Feels familiar.

Kingdom Come

2007-10-16T21:59:00.001-07:00

Feeling antsy led me to busking for about an hour last night, starting around 1 am. Not prime time for such a thing, especially with erratic train schedules due to construction. I didn't make a dime, but it purged me of my restlessness, so woohoo.

Over the weekend while attending a wedding in the Poconoes, my "sore" wrist that I'd mentioned a few days ago became grossly swollen to the point where I was freaking out a bit. It's gone down since, but last night it flared up again, proving to me that this probably has something to do with my strumming. I don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong per se, but evidently my body feels differently. Or maybe my epic four and half hour stint on Friday was simply too much for my wrist to handle. I dunno. But I guess I'm gonna lay off for a while.

Thank God I have a real job right now. I was imagining myself as a lone balladeer wandering from town to town in the wild west, playing for breadrolls and sleeping on straw pillows...couldn't afford to have a bum wrist in that scenario. I'd likely turn into a left-handed gunslinger or somesuch. Actually, I feel like anybody with a bum anything back then would be pretty much boned.

New song: "Turn" by Travis.

Leechwater

2007-10-13T23:52:00.000-07:00

Went busking for so long last night that my strumming arm was rendered completely useless for nearly 24 hours. I've never quite experienced that level of fatigue from playing before. Well, sometimes vocally, sure. But my strumming is usually basic enough not to cause any unusual behavior. I dunno if I fancied things up last night, if it was just a really long time to play, or if I'm sore 'cause I hadn't played much in about a week. Not important, just interesting.

Setbacks, setbacks. I had the day off today, but was entirely incapable of getting anything done. Unless you count watching The Bridge, a totally fascinating documentary. Not something I should be watching probably, but whatevs.

This week I finally did accomplish a few things that I'd been meaning to get around to: I mounted my guitar hanger on my wall so as to display my beautiful (and as of yet, unnamed) telecaster, and nailed up a picture of this big ole music note. It used to be my dad's, and since I was a kid I've always loved it. There's a little conductor standing in front of the mammoth note, his arms splayed out in mid-conduction. There's not really a way to describe how cool it is (that's why there's the picture), but let's just say that if I had a shirt with this note on it, I probably woulda got into Music Under New York, easy. But I wouldn't want that anyway.

I played the little-known Radiohead song "True Love Waits" for the first time tonight. So good. I'm not sure that subway stations contain the most appreciative audiences for that sorta thing. But I played it three times anyway.

A few minutes after started playing, some religious dude showed up and started passing out pamphlets. At first, I was kinda concerned that people would think we were in cahoots, and assume that all the songs I was playing were somehow linked to righteous lifestyles or something. This really got me in my head, and I began self-consciously scanning what I was singing for conservative/spiritual content. It seemed like just about anything could fit into that mould. (Mold?) "Heart of Gold" sounded suddenly preachy, "Make You Feel My Love" seemed frighteningly hymn-ish, and the aforementioned Radiohead song took on a much more after-school special feeling than it actually has. Not that I have a problem with any of that stuff, I just don't want to peddle that sort of stuff on the hapless patrons of the fine MTA, you know? Luckily, he seemed to repel so many people that they sought me as a comparative refuge, with all the dollars that come along with the services of such a haven.

I'd like to write more, but things are getting fuzzy in regards to my last outing; I think I've hit the highlights. The goal for this coming week is to finish revising and recording the songs I've been working on since May, which number about 20. We'll see what actually happens.

manta rays and munsters

2007-10-09T22:10:00.000-07:00

It looks as though Nick at Nite's come up with an original program. Lord help us all.

The last two weeks have emulated the last five months, acting like an ever-shrinking, ever-quickening cyclone, spinning memory debris all over me and tossing me around like a bale of hay that's come apart. It sucks reliving stuff over and over again, and I'm not positive if I'm doing it to myself or not. It feels like you just can't help some things. But sure, I'm over it.

But what's weird is I can't talk about it. At all. If she's mentioned in the slightest, off I go again down some muddy mental slip 'n slide. But I literally can't bring myself to tell someone that I'm still upset about it. Or mention it, even. It's not like I don't want to, and I feel like I probably should, and that that stuff's all just going to fester into some mound in my gut if I don't coax it out like a tapeworm. But haven't I done that already? Like months ago? It's pathetic at this point. How long is this tapeworm, anyhow? I need to get over this. But I'm not yet. And I just can't admit it.

I guess that energy has to go somewhere, so I've been upchucking it all into my notebook. I have no idea what kinds of songs I've been writing; they're frighteningly abstract, yet as close as I'll probably ever come to clearly and "publicly" discussing the stuff I'm made up of. Like last fall, inspiration is coming from mystery, hoaxes, myths....so much so that I'm starting to think its all I'm capable of drawing from. At least its a quasi-niche in singer-songwriter berserk-hyphenated land. But lately the pieces I've been working on have like literally scared me. They don't sound like me. It's like I've been digging and digging and it turns out I was performing an epic root canal, and now that I pull back and think on it for a sec, I'm some tiny tiny miner peering up from a crater inside some dark molar, and its clear that I never meant to take it this far because my rope sure ain't gonna get me outta here now. Not like I'm going off the deep end or anything, just that I've unleashed a tiny gremlin out of my head, and he's never going to quite fit back in again, and wouldn't really have done anybody any harm had he stayed in there to begin with. It's like someone representing me has screamed out these songs in protest of my stoicism in order to get my attention, to wake me up.

At times like these I always think its good I don't partake of heroin or something. I have, however, just finished a behemoth of a plate of fishsticks upon realizing that the only food I've got is a box of government-condemned Topps hamburgers. Maybe I shoulda ate 'em just to test out how well e. coli stands up to my new health insurance.

Is it bad that I'm more upset that there's a pumpkin shortage than glad that there's not another flu vaccine shortage?

I can't stop this gross pull to the stations...its like this every night. All I can think about is how badly I need to perform this stuff, even if its just to a bunch of MTA patrons who are probably too busy direct-feeding a Top 40's I.V. right into their brains to notice some morose kid banging on a stringbox. It probably is better that way, heaven knows how awful these songs actually are in all likelihood.

This is kind of a weirder post, but my mind's getting all cannibalistic on me, so I may as well let it do its thing.

New Radiohead album in a few hours. Pathetic as it seems, i'm sure i'll end up feeling immensely unaccomplished in some overarching sense after I hear it. That being said, I can't recall the last time I felt this excited about anything.

My Volume Knob

2007-09-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

Rather than hopping on my rented copy of Videodrome, I deemed it a good idea to busk for a chunk of time last night. It certainly warped my mind a little less than the aforementioned flick woulda.

Or so I'd have thought. My mind ended up lost in a tangled ten-minute harmonica jam, an event that seemed to engender more consternation than anything else in passersby. Hey, what can I say? Sometimes you feel it. And you gotta run with it. Even if "it" is a wild, ellipsoidal sequence of notes that are mutilated by dirty, cracked walls, some of which happen to be made up of humans.

Someone using a pay phone in the station had the gaul to tell me to quiet down they could proceed with their conversation, and didn't I have any respect for communication? I responded that using a pay phone in a subway station didn't seem like a contender for best logical decision of the year. My point was seconded a few moments later by a cantankerous express train that shattered the previously unmarred sound barrier in the station, making me seem no more than a cricket in comparison. I didn't quiet down, as you may have guessed.

I received a note in my case that read: "Great music. I would love to improve your feng shui by moving your guitar case and money in front of you, or even to the side. Good luck!"

That's not really a new idea to me, but the strap that hold the lid to my case upright's busted, so I need to lean it against something. Also, it's easier to steal a busker's money if you don't have to go through them first, which is why I like to have it behind me. Though that creates the issue of not being able to see what someone's doing, and if they're donating or really pilfering. The gusts of nasty wind in stations would also probably send my money flying if it was laid out in front of me. I need to get a hat. A deep one. Buskers with top hats are acceptable, right?

New songs:
"About a Girl"
"Dumb"
"Pennyroyal Tea" by Nirvana
"(nice dream)"
"Wolf at the Door" by Radiohead

Rob pens soundtrack Classic!

2007-08-21T16:31:00.000-07:00

When soon-to-be-released Troma horror film, Street Team Massacre, propositioned mild-mannered folk singer Rob Morrison to write them a theme song, no one could have known the surprising results that would come to pass.

Reports are coming in from across the country; "Drink Me Up (Theme from Street Team Massacre)" is flooding the airwaves. The upbeat, intensely catchy 80s-style rock song has quickly overtaken Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" as the most frequently played tune at sporting events of all kinds. Due to its extreme catchiness, iTunes downloads of the song have cracked all known records as listeners everywhere rush to add "Drink Me Up" to their mp3 players. As a direct result, thousands of people have not been able to stop running or working out since the song was released.

Herman Wright, an Upper West Side accountant, had this to say as he sprinted by a Helal foods vendor: "I've never been much of an athlete. But just when I think I can't go any further, the chorus kicks in and Rob's searing vocals drive the lactic acid right out of my tired muscles!"

After reports of paraplegics regaining the use of their legs by virtue of hearing the righteous riffs of "Drink Me Up," several nursing homes across the eastern seaboard began pumping the song through their PA systems to astonishing effects. "It's as though Morrison's song is able to completely reverse the effects of aging," said Barbara Kovacs, Assistant Supervisor at Greener Pastures Nursing Home in Worcester, MA. "Senility has been totally eradicated in all of our patients. I've even heard of asylums using this rollicking anthem to cure mental diseases."

Meanwhile, even greater plans seem to be in store for Mr. Morrison's single. An anonymous White House official informed us that former President Reagan's Star Wars program is to be remounted, but with a focus on peace. "We plan on starting nearly from scratch on the space station, and replacing all the lasers with the largest speakers we can manufacture. With the hugest sound system in history surrounding it and playing Rob Morrison's "Drink Me Up," we're confident that the Earth will reach a state of world peace within forty-eight hours. It would be shorter, but many countries will no doubt need to translate the lyrics before the effects of the song can take place."

With all this excitement teeming around Morrison's single, the singer/songwriter himself was unable to comment much, only to remind us that the film Street Team Massacre has not even been released yet. Projected to overturn Superbad's current stranglehold on the box office, Street Team Massacre is already gaining a fan base so rabid and ubiquitous, that when the film's delayed release was announced, sales of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows dropped by nearly 75% (this being only three days after the unveiling of said book) as fans everywhere gathered in town squares across the country to protest and mourn. Troma has assured the public that Street Team Massacre will see the light of day very soon after its debut at the Austin Film Festival in a few short weeks.

We wish Mr. Morrison and the crew at Street Team Massacre the best of luck, and congratulate them on the quintuple platinum sales of the instant-classic theme song, "Drink Me Up."

Call Me Kotter

2007-07-08T22:36:00.000-07:00

'Cos I'm back, baby.

It's been almost a month since I last went busking....a deleterious combo of work, the feeling that I should maybe exercise on occasion, and a lot of writing, has kept me away from the veritable sweat bucket that is the MTA in summer. But apparently nothing can hold me back forever.

I spent about two hours in the transit kiln last night, and made some pretty serious bank. Also got another dude give me the old Piano Man line "man, what are you doing here?" He talked about making some phone calls for me and hooking me up with whatever contacts he may or may not actually have...what I've learned in my time down there is that this sorta thing never happens. I've had at least five or six people tell me they're convinced they can further me along some path, and none of them returned my phone calls.

It makes me want to really push myself into the music scene more. You know: go for the gold and all that. I guess I'm not really sure how to do that. And I don't think my music is something that's going to resonate much with most people. Maybe I should pass out free demos in Times Square like those hip hop guys do. "Hey! Hey bro, you like over-sentimental, abstract folk music?" Yeah, probably not.

Considering an electric guitar if I end up with any extraneous birthday money soon. Or concertina. Or twenty jews harps.

The one downside to this move back to performing (albeit a gradual one) is that I've lost a lot of interest in the songwriting I was working on. It's always like that...swap out one thing for another. My brain just doesn't work in both modes at once. It does seem to be able to make sure I'm running Bit Torrent 24/7, however.

There's a Busker Musical?

2007-06-10T19:07:00.000-07:00

That's right! Finally, the world has, in a small way, caught up with me: busking is officially cool enough to get its own movie, albeit a small-release made in Ireland. Check this shit out!

It's called Once.

bucket brigade

2007-06-06T09:50:00.000-07:00

I added a new song called "Stanley Steamer" to my .mac page a few days ago. It's something I've been working on for about three years with multiple rewrites and hair-yanking frustration, so I'm glad that I finally made some headway on it. I guess sometimes it just takes the right context to make a song work, and the stars finally aligned for this one.

My friend Matt Guess has an awesome new song on his myspace page you should all check out. He and I have similar taste, but I think where I channel traditional folk, he channels Elliott Smith. Listen to "When You Walk Through that Door" and prepare to rock out to an awesome single-not instrumental bridge.

I can't remember if I've mentioned it already, but my songwriting friends from college, Lauren and Sean, having been meeting up with me weekly so we can put our collective nose to the grindstone of songwriting. (Whoever came up with the nose to the grindstone saying? It's messed up. I should have known before I literally tried it...) Since I've been in a writing upswing, this has been a great chance to get some feedback.

I'll have one or two new songs up on my .mac page by the end of the weekend, so keep your eyes peeled (another saying that's not advisable to try).

words support like bone

2007-05-30T22:48:00.000-07:00

Oh, the cycles of life. Specifically, the cycle of writing has been getting me thinking a lot.

In the last two weeks, I've written a bunch of songs, both finished and not, both in my regular notebook and on shreds of thermapaper from cash registers, both being made up of my usual pet themes as well as being about nothing at all. It's been good. But everytime I hit a writing flash like this, it's only a matter of time before I unconsciously start seeking out other writers.

Maybe it's just because my brain wants to surround itself with what I'm into at the moment. But I think it's because the more I feel like I'm getting a handle on writing, the more I realize that there's a whole freaking pandora's box in my mind, and once I start letting out slips of thoughts in a steady stream every day, I can't turn it off, and don't know how to handle the less-familar, shadowy ideas that I didn't even know I had.

Consequently, I've been voraciously gnawing at books all week. Barnes and Noble (the one in Chelsea that has that coffee bar on the balcony floor) always makes me feel pseudo-intelligent, and I try to get a dose of it when I'm in these moods. Anne Sexton -- a brilliant poet, who I only became familiar with after obsessing over the Peter Gabriel song "Mercy Street" -- revealed some insane poems to me this week, among them, "Rumpelstiltskin" and "Suicide Note." I don't know loads about her, but she moved into poetry rather late in life, which is mind-boggling to me because her writing would suggest she was swaddled in it from an early age.

In passing I picked up a Dylan Thomas collection, eenie-meenied my way to a random poem, and had my mind blown. All I knew was "Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light," or whatever it's called. I'm retarded.

It'd be nice if all this intake will give me more perspective and help me manhandle all these pandorian matters.

my love, she speaks like silence

2007-05-26T22:07:00.001-07:00

Songs can be regrettable things, even if you didn't write them.

I was out busking tonight (briefly, as drunken homeless types forced me to relocate a few times), and going through a few songs I hadn't played in a while. About ten seconds into "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" by Dylan (seriously one of the best love songs ever), it suddenly hit me that I'd associated this song with someone, and that for whatever reason, it was no longer appropriate to sing with that person in mind. The song totally lost its soul as I fell into this mental well, splashing around and trying to get a hold of why the song had ever meant so much. It seemed really hopeless, and I couldn't figure out why I was just going through the motions.

But songs are independent things, no matter how you attach yourself to them.

Dylan's song is all about "his love," and since I first heard it, I assumed he meant a girl. His "love." But all the wonderful qualities that he details about this woman throughout the song...it's too idyllic, too idealistic. No girl is like that. And it hit me. Maybe he just meant his capacity to love. His Love is "like some raven, at my window with a broken wing." Not some perfect girl. The whole song very well could be about him, and this cryptic, beautiful quality in himself that is perhaps so surprising to even him that he felt compelled to personify it in song as if his love was a lover.

Thinking all of these things in an instant, somewhere during the third verse, I felt the song take root again. I hadn't lost anything. I guess it's pretty impossible not to link songs to people, and that's not all bad. But it's a nice feeling to remember that they stand on their own, too.

Is this all really obvious? It might be, but I'd forgotten.

Many thanks to the gentleman who dropped a ten dollar bill in my case, as well as the couple who rode the train with me to 28th Street and stayed in the station for a few minutes to hear me play. It made my night.

busker about town

2007-05-23T20:18:00.000-07:00

i just spilled soy sauce on my shirt.

also, busking sucked tonight. cops were doing a bag check (at 9:00 pm, mind you), and asked me to go to the other side of the station. not one to be told what to do, i hopped a train uptown and tried finding a spot elsewhere. they were not to be had. I circumvented 59th street and headed back downtown, ending up where I'd begun at 23rd street. well, at least i can say i got to see a lot of new york tonight. not that i needed that.

i mostly did originals tonight, but the one story of note happened while i was meandering my way through don mclean's "vincent." I noticed a woman standing behind me, on the other side of the fencing. she stuck around for the whole song, leaning against the fence with her eyes closed, and when I was finished, she got my attention and told me "that was beautiful," and put her hand to her heart. she handed me a dollar through the fence and walked off....that lifted me up a little bit. i'm not sure if she had left the train and heard me on the way out or what, but it was a really...I dunno...artistic/nice/cool thing to do, sticking around like that.

in writing news, i'm going to have all my lyrics (or a sizable portion) on my .mac page soon. click the "rob's music: free" link to the right to download some of the songs i've posted to the aforementioned page. it would be nice to have songs on blogger, but this website doesn't let me do much.

there's been an overload of poetry reading every night for me...i'm a walking cliche. anyone who knows me or my writing well knows i'm pretty obsessed with william blake. i wrote a concept album based on "songs of innocence and of experience" a few years ago, but there were a couple poems that fell through the cracks. i've been reacquainting myself with a few of them, and one in particular really hit me. in case anyone's interested, i transcribed blake's poem "the clod & the pebble" below...it's awesome.

the clod & the pebble

love seeketh not itself to please,
nor for itself hath any care;
but for another gives its ease,
and builds a heaven in hells despair.

so sang a little clod of clay,
trodden with the cattles feet;
but a pebble of the brook,
warbled out these metres meet.

love seeketh only self to please
to bind another to its delight:
joys in anothers loss of ease,
and builds a hell in heavens despite.

nothing's to win

2007-05-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

I've been laying around writing a lot, which has been good. Probably need to go out into civilization soon, but I can't handle any more disappointments. I mean, there had better be telepods by the time I get out there. Or at least no more rumors of Gremlins 3 with CG-only effects.

Anyway, check out my new .mac page and listen to "Tides." Or does it look better if I go like this? http://homepage.mac.com/digitalshrub. I can never tell.

I have a bunch of unfinished songs from the last four months or so that I'm going to try to sketch out and record in the coming days. May as well. I don't like leaving things unfinished, it's a bad habit.

No time like the present.

2007-05-20T00:09:00.002-07:00

I've had a rough few days, and I guess it's given me the slight perk of being able to write a lot and try to get some stuff out there. So, I'm relatively pleased to tell you doods that I have a website through .mac now, which hosts a few of my songs (including a new one and maybe one or two that aren't on my other music pages).

In time, I'm going to plan on having weekly song updates there, but right now, you can click here to download my new song, "Things I Say." Take the other ones too, see if I care.

No busking lately. Can't get myself to go outside really.

Afterbirth of the Cool

2007-05-16T21:27:00.000-07:00

There hasn't been a single night in the past week where I haven't spent at least an hour listening to jazz on the radio. I guess I go through jazz phases from time to time, actually. It makes me feel sophisticated, and maybe a little less white. Also, I think it just reminds me that folk and rock aren't the only things out there, even if they're the only genres I do anything with. Nothing beats listening to some good Thelonious or Miles to get an idea of how different people handle improvisation.

This all fed into what was probably a twenty minute harp solo last night. Having made a fair amount of cash already, or enough to make me feel like I didn't need to attract an audience by playing anything recognizable, I decided to just mess around with a chord progression and noodle on the harp.

Now, I definitely have set harp rhythms in my brain. I resort to these usually at the beginning of a solo, and then slowly but surely manipulate them until it becomes something more legitimately improvised. Last night, I challenged myself to use none of these. To make use of rhythms that I normally don't even think of when I'm in the heat of a song.

I definitely fell back to a few habitual patterns, but on the whole it was a really enlightening exercise, and I definitely broadened my performance vocabulary. Not that it was earth-shattering or anything. That's only going to happen when I hook up a kazoo to my harmonica yolk.

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls...

2007-05-07T21:19:00.000-07:00

...or heard within them, if I may be so bold. I went out for just around 45 minutes tonight, long enough to make a couple bucks and rouse Meltyface from her roost in a far off bench.

I was halfway through "Mr. Tambourine Man" when I heard my voice echoing strangely. I thought I'd managed to tap into some previously unutilized resonators in my chest or something. Nope. I woke up Meltyface. She continued howling out the chorus no matter where I was in the song, be it a verse or a harmonica break. Great. As usual, this didn't help me make any money. After the station was cleared out by a subway, I saw Meltyface's hand emerge from behind a wall, pawing at a garbage can for support. I dunno what her deal is, but she always walks like that. Poor lady's probably got no liver left...she's got quite a stink to her.

That was my cue to peace out. She hobbled over to me and posed some unintelligible questions (at least that's what they sounded like), to which I responded, "have a good night," and vamoosed. Gotta sing "Maria" in the morning, so I needs my rest.

Blurg

2007-05-01T17:31:00.000-07:00

"Did you come up with that song?"
"No, uh, it's a Johnny Cash song. Well, it's actually a traditional song I think. The Band also covered it. It's called 'Long Black Veil.'"
"Well, I--" (look of fatigued frustration at the din of an incoming train, then:...) "..you sing it right."
"Oh. Thanks. Yeah, I do it a little different."
He rushes off to an opening in the train during this.

That was an interesting encounter. Flattering, but weird.

Let's see, what else happened? I played "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and "Second Hand News" tonight, though I've never looked up the tabs for them. I figured they were both three chord songs, and it worked out. So that was nice.

I bumped into Desiree and Carl, both of whom were involved with the production of the Full Monty I was in last fall. Additionally, I saw this guy Alex that Leslie knows, but it was pretty awkward. We don't really know each other, and after we made eye contact, he shuffled away. Boy, it sure is nice to have a job that so many people aspire to.

My brain's a little melted since I was down there for 4 hours tonight, so I don't really remember much else.

The Truce Hurts

2007-04-23T16:39:00.000-07:00

Vlad appeared mysteriously out of nowhere tonight -- like the Impaler who bore his name -- and dropped a single in my case.

What am I supposed to do with this event? I thought we were at war! I coulda sworn he had been glowering at me from across the tracks every time we played against each other. I know I was. But then that dollar hit the grey bedding of my guitar case, and now all I can think about doing reciprocating by lobbing a dollar into his black gig bag the next time I see him playing. What's happened to me??? Have I gone soft? I mean, come on, who would I be without an El Douche-o type to balance me out? In short, as Tim Curry put it in Legend, "what is Light without Darkness?"

Well, I guess that's all over. And I suppose it's for the best. It's generally better to have allies than enemies in life, and the world of the subway performer is no exception. Plus, that was really nice of him. Hell, I even cleared out of my spot early today so I could let the tall, hairy keyboard player take over.

This abandonment of my station certainly had nothing to do with the fact that I made a record low in donations tonight. Nothing at all to do with it.

I'm playing a gig tonight! Waaa!

2007-04-19T14:57:00.000-07:00

Hey, this is a little last minute, but I'm the musical guest for Talk Show with Bob Wiltfong tonight at the PIT at 8:00. I'd love for anyone who reads this crazy 'ole blog of mine to attend!

What: Me, doing some acoustic songs (including one new one), in a show that's hosted by Bob Wiltfong, who has starred in Chapelle's Show and the Daily Show. There will be some burlesque girls there too....click here for some more info about the show.

When: Tonight! April 19th. 8:00pm.

Where: The PIT (People's Improv Theater), 154 W. 29th St, between 7th and 6th avenues.

How much: Money? A mere $5, friend.

What a deal, eh? It's quite a show, and I'm thrilled to have been invited to be a part of it, so do come if you're able.

Thanks. That is all.

Crate, Just Crate

2007-04-15T22:30:00.000-07:00

On Friday, whilst imparting the dulcet folk tones of "Blow Ye Winds" to the fine patrons of 23rd Street's famed 1 subway line, I was approached by a father and his young son, who kindly donated unto me a farthing, or something of that ilk.

The dad told me that it was "nice to hear somebody still plays great folk music." Then, like a guy who finds out that someone who reads his blog also went to school with his aunt, I totally spazzed out and got all into talking about sea shanties. Turns out we had both heard the song when we were younger and visiting Mystic Seaport (which, if you're up to date on the influences portion of my myspace profile, you'll be able to vouch for the truthfulness of my side of this claim)! Anyway, it was a great moment. Man, I sure do love folk music. And man, I don't yet understand why that doesn't make me super freaking popular.

Wanting to change things up a bit, I walked over to a (now) great Chelsea bodega before busking, and asked for a milk crate. The swell folks there forked over a great one, and so began my first evening of busking while sitting on my (now) polygon-etched duff. A strangely foreign concept for me, this busking-sitting thing. I know people do it all the time, but I never had a crate, so I never did it. Times are changing like lightning, friends. Soon enough I'll be glowering over you on a Times Square billboard. Probably because I got kicked out of my apartment and the Cup of Noodles billboard seemed like a warm place to be, what with its 24-hour stream of steam and all. But I'll still be there, damn it. Like that magician guy who hung in a ball or something above the street for a week. I never actually saw that, and I'm kinda glad I didn't; ever since he had to live in his own feces-filled goldfish bowl, I kinda feel like he might be a health hazard to all of mankind.

It's interesting how the crate changed up my dynamic; I almost exclusively did mellower, fingerpicking songs instead of my usual fervent lineup, and I also improvised a lot more with my guitar playing (chord substitutions) and harmonica yarping. That's a new word, don't tell anybody. It just sounds like what somebody does on a harmonica, right? Well, it's just gone into the public lexicon as of...me typing that, so if you're reading up on this blog later on and you have no clue what this jargon means...well, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you were pretty far behind on catching the cool train. Maaaaybe you could say you've got a finger's hold of the caboose railing. Pumping frenetically on one of those seesaw pushcarts behind the cool train is really more like it.

And that, as Phil Ochs said, is all the news that's fit to sing.

Addendum

2007-04-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

Thank you to the family who donated two mysterious Metrocards the other day. I shouldn't have doubted you. Turns out their combined value was 14 bucks.

After shooting a student film in seemingly subzero temperatures in New Hampshire this weekend, I was quite irked when I got back to NYC only to find that my monthly pass had expired. The aforementioned Metrocards came quite in handy. Thanks.

Now that I've got some creamy chicken ramen in me, I'm going busking. El douche-o is across the platform at 23rd Street and it's time to prove a point.

Me vs. the "Chelsea Blues Man" (douchebag)

2007-04-06T17:25:00.000-07:00

It's common knowledge -- if you're a busker -- that if someone's playing in a station, you don't play on the platform across from them. Busking is a first-come, first-served kinda thing. Plus, it's about being fair to the other dude; if two buskers duke it out in the same station, neither of their individual musical talents will be distinguishable in the resulting melange. Come on, it's noisy enough down there already. Trains, bums, people inexplicably using payphones. If I had been ballsy enough to share stations with another busker, I would have successfully screwed both myself and the other guy every time I did it. Most buskers follow the Code and don't do this.

Enter El Douche-o, otherwise known as that electric guitarist who plays outside at 23rd and 7th every freaking day of the year. I admire him all right. He's pretty good, and stalwart at that. But for the love of God, how can an acoustic guitar possibly compete with a sweaty, overplayed Fender blastocaster and its veritable black hole of an amp? (Are black holes noisy?) Douchebag.

I'd been rockin' out in the station for about an hour, you know me, Mr. Cool, and all of a sudden I see this audacious freak across the tracks messing with his amp like he owns the joint. And not without reason! This guy gets write-ups in the local (Chelsea) papers all the time! "Bluesman of Chelsea!" "Clapton's less attractive, bummy counterpart!" "Douchebag that Rob now hates!" All these things are true. Well, the first one's the only one I have proof of, but the printers said they're getting back to me on my headline suggestions. Douchebag.

What started out as a sincerely exciting, lucrative set ended up as the most competitive situation I've been in since FOR-EVER. I raised my voice as loud as it could go, bursting countless capillaries; I banged away on Emmylou like she was Judas Iscariot, practically peeling planks away with my pick; I channeled hurricane-like gusts into my harmonica, releasing raping rains upon its reeds. Douchebag.

This succeeded in making me look crazy. It did not boot the douchebag from his spot. I for one think it did annoy him, though. After about an hour, he'd apparently fretted enough over the messy musique concrete we were creating, and hit the road. I ended up doing all right money-wise, though I should really just walk up to this dude next time I see him in "the Nook" and ask for a cut of his money. Douchebag.

On a less I'm-gonna-force-feed-someone-to-death note, my girlfriend recently got me a turntable -- something I've been without for (shudder) a year and a half. I flipped. Records were once my big thing...I've amoeba-ized a few collections here and there, and I've now got around 300 or so. I've acquired so many records since my busted Miracord was put into storage, and the day hasn't enough hours for me to go through all of them. This afternoon I was listening to Stephen Stills' first solo album and got hooked on "Love the One You're With," which meant I needed to learn it quick before I hit the station. I don't know if it's well-known, but I made a pretty penny off of playing it. Maybe it's just my insightful, inspired rendition. Anyway...thanks, Leslie.

A kid (10-12 years old, I reckon) ran up to me sometime after my turf war had resolved and tossed me a coin, and as usual I made sure to give him a, "hey, thanks, man." But when he turned around, he had a pony tail and was very obviously a girl. Sooooo, the moral of the story is, I suck.

Douchebag.

Me vs. "the Homeless," Pt. 9

2007-04-03T22:46:00.000-07:00

Homeless sparring continues. I went out around 11 tonight, and encountered a crazy, drunken, lovelorn dood almost immediately. He was pretty well-spoken, and made frequent gestures to his cell phone, which led me to doubt whether he was actually destitute or not. Either way, he wouldn't shut up during my songs. Evidently his girlfriend had just dumped him (this guy had to be at least in his 40s), and he was coping with his grief by calling her voicemail and leaving her messages that basically consisted of me singing whatever song I was in the middle of, accompanied by his pointedly angry background vocals. I'm not sure if she got the messages, or if she even existed. But if she did, she's got the very first bootlegged live Rob Morrison performance in history.

This dood also served as my spokesman. In addition to applauding overzealously after each song, he petitioned passersby for money for me, going so far as to say, "God bless you," to those who donated.

It's not that I don't appreciate that. But as with the drunken gross woman from my last post, the presence of a dubious person so near to me tends to freak people out. I make less money. And I definitely don't appreciate that.

I was surprised he knew so many of the songs I played. After a while, I thought I'd shake him off by playing an original, instrumental piece. About thirty seconds in, he was quick to enlighten all of us that he was "sick of it." This catchphrase was repeated incessantly until my masochistic side yielded and I gave myself a break by playing some Neil Young.

This dood informed me that I'm lucky to be young; he got dumped because his girlfriend thinks he's getting too old. I think he might be overlooking the fact that he hangs out in subway stations suspiciously late. And doesn't wash his hands. And doesn't donate to kind buskers who inexplicably tolerate his antics in consideration of karma and in hopes that he'll prove he's not completely bankrupt and toss in a quarter. That didn't happen.

I'll close this post with the first interaction we had tonight:

Dood: (pointing to my harmonica yolk) That's a cool device.
Me: Yeah...thanks.
Dood: (reading my sign)...Rob...Morrison. Is that a real name?
Me: It's as--
Dood: Pssh, it's gotta --
Me: What?
Dood: .....
Me: Yeah, it's --
Dood: Rob. Morrison.
Me:....It's as real as they get.
Dood: Sounds like it. Not many people have real names.
Me: Hmmm. Well, not even Bob Dylan's name was real.
Dood: Yeah, but he was a jew.

Great.

Me vs. The Homeless, Part 8

2007-04-02T09:59:00.000-07:00

I pity them as much as the next dude, I really do. Curled up in a subway station on a piece of cardboard, hoarding bizarre items, begging with the passersby for loose change or a scrap of food, watching while their bodies detiorate. It must be unbearable. So yes, I pity them. But when they get in my way, so help me, William Blake, my wrath doth descend like a plague of locusts.

There's a lady at the 23rd street station who barks drunken commands everyone including me, demanding, "give me that cigarette! I know you got it. Gimme." And "play more Bob Dylan. I like Bob Dylan. Bob. Dylan. Dylan. Bob. Bob Dylan." While I'm not impressed by her drinking habit, I can handle the Dylan stuff...if you read this blog enough, you know that I'm obsessed with the dood. But what I can't handle is that she insists on singing along from her perch on the benches nearby, and then demands more Dylan while I'm still playing one of his songs. It don't work like that, lady. It works like this: I'm going to punch you in the face.

It hasn't come to that yet. But man, is it close. She definitely deters people from giving me money...Her presence alone is unsettling, and she's got powerful psychological abilities, too. I think they see her slobbering all over herself and begin to think that I'm not much different. We're both hanging out in a subway station for inordinate amounts of time, hoping for money, right? I'd like to think that the difference is I'm providing some kinda service, while also not drinking liquor out of a plastic bag with a crazy straw.

Last night I snuck out to get in a quick session at 23rd, and was about to go through the turnstiles when I saw the matted hair and lumpy face of my foe, squished up against the armrest of a bench, probably dreaming about a pack of cigarettes singing "Blowin' in the Wind" in harmony. Like a lost woodsman stumbling upon a slumbering bear, I crept quietly out of the uptown side of the station, crossed the street, and descended into the downtown half. "She'll never be able to get to me over here," I snickered.

Well, it's true that she couldn't physically reach me, but her voice could. As soon as I started playing, she was roused from her drunken stupor, and began hollering unintelligible comments at me from across the tracks. Not the worst thing in the world, as there was pretty much nobody around (it was after midnight), so I didn't exactly lose any money. But I also didn't make any.

Whatever. Her days are probably numbered with or without my inevitably unrealized malice. Oh, and lady? For the record, Bob Dylan covered "Mr. Bojangles" live many times, so shaddup already.

Call me Piecemeal.

2007-03-20T19:51:00.000-07:00

Emmylou's back from repairs! And she sounds freaking awesome. I bought a humidifier to make sure she doesn't get all wonky again. Apparently humidifiers are pretty standard for acoustics in the winter when heat is on. Whodathunk? Well, now that that's taken care of, I can move on to other things on my "to pay for" list. Loans, rent, food. Ah, the day-to-day life of a wandering soul.

I've been trying to learn the sea shanty "Blow Ye Winds in the Morning," which has got to be one of my all-time favorite songs. Thing is, it's got about 19 verses (probably more hiding somewhere, as it's a song that got tossed around from ship to ship, changing just like any good folk song). That's a mite more than I'm used to, even after memorizing my fair share of Dylan tunes. It doesn't help that in the 1800s, sailors didn't seem to care much for rhyme scheme. I'm confident I can do it; this busker at Mystic Seaport knew all of it. There's hope.

Pretty epic set tonight. I don't think I repeated anything except for "thank you." About 54 times. 'Cos I got 54 donations tonight! Awwww yeeeeeah. Next stop, Carnegie Hall. The lobby.

Some creepy fella hustled over to me as a train pulled in and handed me a pen, informing me it was to be my "lucky pen." I awkwardly smiled, nodded, and cupped myself in fear. On the walk home, I realized that this thing really is going to be my lucky pen. It's double-sided! I haven't checked if there's ink in either side, but c'mon! I can sign two recording contracts at once! Autograph two headshots at once! Sign two living wills at once! Okay, that's less fun. But with this pen, I'd find a way to make it memorable.

(Apparently this racist old political cartoon suggests that the Irish and African Americans are equally dumb and worthless or something. Just to be clear, I don't feel this way. I just think it's funny looking and cool in that 'old' way. Don't be mad. I am part Irish, actually. And I like African Americans. We're cool, right?)

You oughta be a fool about me

2007-03-12T13:50:00.000-07:00

Emmylou has gone into repairs, at long last. I had an audition today that required guitar playing, and afterwards I realized how much it sucks to not be able to play anything on the first five frets. So I took 'er straight to good ole Rudy's music repairs. In addition to her bad frets needing to be fixed long ago, it turns out I should have been humidifying her during "this time of year." Who knew? I never heard of that. Then again, up until two days ago, I thought Special K was just the name of a cereal.

She should be done next Monday. This seemed reasonable to me in the repair shop, and I gladly handed her over and took the subway home. Thing is, home really isn't home without my guitar. I live in a tiny apartment where I can see everything I own from any vantage point. But now there's a vacuous space where she normally is, and I had to drape a blanket over my guitar stand so as to not get irrationally glum.

It doesn't help that I was working on a handful of songs over the weekend, one of which I'd like to finish and play for someone soon. Then again, I've always got this wicked hot 90's Casio keyboard that has some pretty slick preprogrammed arpeggiated melodies. That's romantic, right? Oh, I have egg shakers, too. If that ain't a recipe for a masterpiece, I don't want to know what is.

The Secret...

2007-03-10T13:22:00.000-08:00

First, it began with my friend Jason talking about it all the time. Then people in my improv class began citing it. Then Larry King, debatable sultan of tv interviewing, had to go and make it officially buzzworthy. The Secret. The Law of Attraction. And now I've gone and brought it to thousands of people by writing about it on my world-renowned blog (that I haven't updated in a month). I am but a cog in the penny-pressing touristy machine of the Secret.

Anyway, I decided to try it out last night when I busked. Hey, I need money. So I willed money to come flyin' at me. The only thing is, this doesn't work if every patron of the subway woke up this particular morning, kissed their lip-worn copy of the Secret, and willed their money to stay in their pockets, wallets, jars, or even that little hollowed out window sill they think no one knows about. That screws up the whole system! There I was, attracting money from all over the place, while the same money felt obligated to remain where it was. Well, that doesn't help me. Especially if they don't bring the window sill into the subway station.

My guitar is in serious need of repair. I can't play anything lower than the fifth fret without getting a horrible, Harry Partchian buzz from the strings because all the frets have practically melted away. And I can't get ole Emmylou repaired until somebody gives me money. And I can't get money from busking unless people will their money to go where it pleases! Damn you, Secret! Why can't people get back into Ishmael or something? Actually, I don't know if that book champions the donation of money, but I can't think of anything better. A Christmas Carol? Wait, everyone go see Wallace Shawn in The Fever! Then again, in that play, he just points out that the affluence/poverty scales seem hopelessly tipped...

Okay, just go see Zodiac, because it's pretty good.

Latest busking song: "Jokerman" by Dylan.

I'm in love.

2007-02-09T11:34:00.000-08:00

It's true. Just when I thought I was going to be alone on Valentine's Day, I found the most perfect female in the universe. She's artistic, she's clever, she's prolific (not many of you girls out there can claim that one, unless it's in some gross way), she's got a nice dark side to her (which is requisite for me), and she's a total freaking success.

I'm talking about Lucinda Williams, of course. The best singer-songwriter in the everlovin' world. For reasons still being explored by the nation's top scientists, it took me a solid three years to listen to Lucinda's Grammy-winning tour de force Car Wheels on a Gravel Road after copying it from the illustrious Henderson County Public Library during a particularly uneventful summer break. And now I'm hooked, probably worse than I was to Dr. Mario in 2003, which was pretty bad, and also pretty belated seeing that there plenty of other more timely games to get addicted to in that fine year.

Anyhow, I kid you not: Lucinda Williams is the best songwriter ever. And you need to go buy all of her albums now. Yes, yes, yes. I know you have college loans and subway passes to take care of, and you were hoping to adopt an underpriveleged child in Zimbabwe. Well, cancel those plans -- all of them. I can't express how good her lyrics are and how good her music is and how earth-implodingly beautiful they are in tandem, but if you like things that are good, then you'll like it.

Yep. Who needs "real life" ladies? You all suck. I'll take a lovely country folk poet who doesn't know me from Adam Ant anyday over stupid girls whose brains function like Rubic's cubes in a house of mirrors or a better example of logic-barren craziness.

Also, I haven't been busking in a while, so please accept this post as a quasi-legit substitute.

Lob-stars

2007-01-27T17:14:00.000-08:00

I'm not a newb to busking. After doing this for a year in New York, I thought I couldn't be taken off guard by much. The climate, however, is a different matter.

For the second outing in a row, I got some nice red lobster claw hands after strumming for about an hour. I decided to keep going. Tough it out, right? Well, this worked until I got pangs of anguish from the cold. I decided that as cool as they make it look in all those civil war movies, amputation might be overrated. It was a short-lived set.

One story of note: When I first set up the other night, I kicked off with "Heart of Gold" because it's easy and people don't think I'm doing some half-baked original mopey song, and sure enough, a guy approached me and asked who wrote it. I told him Neil Young (it was my chance to take the credit, but I just couldn't do it...damn conscience), and he told me that if I played it again, he wouldn't make me leave. I did a few double takes, he flashed his badge at me. Stalemate. It was probably a plastic "Special Police" badge from $1 Creations, but he seemed cool enough so I rolled with it and played the song again. He amscrayed a few minutes later, giving me a chance to let loose with the Strokes' "New York City Cops."

(The pic is another Eggleston gem. So awesome.)

Frostbite

2007-01-24T20:46:00.001-08:00

Quick shameless plug: ye olde myspace page has a new song up that you should check out so it looks like people like me and such. Click on all this gross highlighted text to listen to "In Your Dark." Thanks.

I came home with a completely scarlet, frozen hand after busking for three hours. That was fun. I got to soak it, which gave me a nice, feeble old man look. On top of my usual evening ritual, which involves sipping tea and reading fanatasy novels, this new addition probably aged me at least thirty years. Wish I could say it was worth it, but evidently everyone's wallet was frozen to their cold hearts, so my profit thermostat reached a new low. Okay, so that was pushing the metaphor.

Busking is awkward when you run into people. They tend to think you're homeless, or horribly desperate. I'm not saying those things aren't true...but it's still awkward. All the other pitches were taken up, so I had to set up camp at 28th Street, which happens to be precariously close to the Magnet (where I do improv) and my agency (where I...hope to get work). But hey. I was desperate. And yes, almost homeless.

(The photo is by William Eggleston, who you should also check out.)

I'll be a blue moon in the dark

2007-01-11T23:05:00.000-08:00

The grinning asian fiddler was in my pitch tonight (that's right....23rd Street belongs to ME), and I didn't want to give in. So I played at 23rd Street anyway. On a different train line. But my point was clear. No amount of dopey grins is going to repel me from my habitat.

My Dylan phase, as with all of my phases, seems to have died off as quickly as it came into being, making way for an Alex Chilton craze! It'll probably be short-lived, as his body of work is miniscule in comparison to Dylan's, and I'm really only familiar with his stuff with Big Star. And I'm sure Dylan's gonna make a comeback within my brain.

I was out for about three hours tonight, and almost nothing happened. People either paid attention to me or didn't, liked me or didn't, gave me money or didn't. I did some cool songs and some songs I hadn't tried much that didn't work, had a couple good harp solos and a couple that blew, had a couple strings in tune by the ned of the night and a couple warped into flatness by the cold. Pretty standard fare.

Oh, and for the record, even if I like Wilco, people are not generally going to be taken in with a song that starts with:

"I dreamed about killing you again last night, and it felt all right to me."

I broke the subway!

2007-01-10T18:17:00.000-08:00

Okay, so it was cold and my fingers were getting numb so I wasn't playing so well and I forgot a chord here and there had the wrong harp for the key I was in and I totally sucked....but I didn't think I was bad enough to stop a train dead in its tracks.

It seems even I have a way of going above and beyond expectations. And, for the record, a lot of the above was for the sake of hyperbole; I definitely didn't mix up my harps.

The 1 train got about ten feet out of the station before dramatically screeching to a halt, launching its occupants hither and thither, and more importantly, ruining an awesome chord change in the folk song I was playing. I mean, come on! Nobody -- but nobody -- interrupts Simon & Garfunkel, Mr. Big Important MBTA! If you want to be all loud why don't you start making official MBTA amps so I can buy one and blast my folk-rock all over the place? Well? I thought so. I mean, honor me already! I was practically Bruce Willis from Unbreakable tonight! Surviving stuff all over the place. I may not have had to deal with stupid M. Night and his stupidness, but I had to deal with cold fingers! A-ha!

Okay, okay. I'm blowing this out of proportion 'cos it was a pretty awful night. I made 8 bucks. Enough to buy a hot dog and consider picking up a newspaper. Just consider. That's right, people of New York: I won't read a newspaper until you start giving me more money! You just better pray that there's not another gas leak in Chelsea, because the only way I'm going to find out about it is when they wrap up my stiff corpse with newspapers detailing the horrific details of the disaster.

That's right: I'M ON A NEWS STRIKE.

(By the way, I didn't mention nytimes.com in this boycott).

Bog Iron

2007-01-09T23:17:00.000-08:00

Had a whole mess of new songs tonight (covers, that is), including Dylan's "One More Cup of Coffee," off of Desire, which I just recently obtained. It's insane to me that he managed to be good for so long....Desire's a mid-period 70s album, and it's absolutely fantastic. Most people know it for "Hurricane" and maybe "Sara" I guess, but the whole thing is just one big artistic stretch for him that totally works. Ugh. May I only live to accomplish such a feat. Then again, he kinda sucked in the 80s, so I guess things even out.

Sparse night...people kinda tumbled in and out of the station with the cold. My case got fed, meaning I did too, but it was nothing amazing, and I didn't feel like my voice or playing was doing any cartwheels to write home about. You can always count on someone in Chelsea to recognize an obscurity...one gentleman had heard "Rain" (Beatles' B-side to "Eleanor Rigby") before, though he couldn't place it. I wonder if forty years from now, some weird, young song collector like me will be playing "Hey Ya" on an acoustic guitar in a monorail station. There certainly won't be anyone playing "Please Please Me," judging by how many people recognized that one last night.

Heatwaves and Hazes

2007-01-06T11:17:00.000-08:00

Having recently returned from NC, I made a point of busking last night before a couple of social things spirited me away into the warm New York night. I was only out for an hour, but it payed for my dinner (which was much needed), and gave me a chance to play "Nowhere Man" and "I Will," two Beatles songs that I'd stupidly never learned until yesterday.

I rang in the new year by finally getting all my music copyrighted. For those of you lurking about in subway stations trying to bootleg my performances so you can claim my priceless, porcelain songs as your own, I'm afraid you've waited too long, though I admire your spirit, and wish you a proseperous New Year as the fine folks of US Airways did wish me but a few short days ago, despite having sliced a rather eminent chunk of my potentially prosperous new year away from me as we were grounded in Charlotte for two grueling hours with no explanation and with flight attendants who seemed to be grumpier than any of the passengers, one of whom was a drunken old man in front of me who spilled his bloody mary all over the History of Airplanes picture book he'd purchased for his grandson which had evidently been pulled out of his bag due to sheer boredom (I admit, US Air magazine is not that riveting) and regrettably placed under the precarious tray table housing his aforementioned bloody mary. So yeah, copyrighting, woot.

Love and Other Mythic Beasts

2006-12-17T22:37:00.000-08:00

For nearly six months I've been writing, mostly subconsciously, nothing but songs that in some way reference myths, cryptids, Atlantis, ghosts, and general humbug. I'm not announcing this with any sense of dread or regret exactly....I guess I'm just saying it. But it's surprising how much my life -- or at least the way I look at things -- is streamed through this lens and how it actually kinda works. Invariably, I'm more interested in the mysteries of life than the answerable banalities.

Anyway, so yeah....I went busking tonight. In desperation. Yes, it's that time again, that wonderful time in which I have to scramble to make as much money as I can before I go home for two weeks where I can't make money. That sort of thing doesn't happen in Hendersonville, NC. But what does happen is fun, and that's not to be missed.

Someone told me tonight that I should make a CD. Thanks! I think it'd be a good idea as well. So hold tight. In addition to scrambling for dirty pennies, I'm also scrambling to record EVERYTHING I'VE WRITTEN EVER before I leave for home on Wednesday. I've only got a few things left, but I'd like to finish it all in honor of the coming new year.

I debuted a new song tonight about an aforementioned mystery, written for someone recently. Too quiet, though.

Just 'cos I'm a little obsessed right now, here's a great Keats snippet for anyone in the mood:

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod.

-- Ode to a Nightingale, 1819

Nobody Said It Was Easy

2006-12-01T22:38:00.000-08:00

Due to auditions this week, I'm slapping the 'ole lock on my guitar case and resting vocal chords for a while. But I let myself go out for one last hurrah tonight, which was well worth it, despite a bit of running around that occurred. The aforementioned Asian fiddle player was occupying 23rd St around 5:00 (I think he's doing this intentionally to make me desperate), so I hopped a train to the next available station: 59th Street. My old stompin' grounds! I played at 59th throughout....well, pretty much throughout this entire year until fall.

I'm not sure what it was....maybe there's a certain type of performance energy that 59th St patrons respond to better, one that I once knew how to harness. But that didn't happen tonight. I had forgotten just how freaking loud that station is, too. Another guitar player was waiting for me to give up the pitch, so I let him have it and figured I'd try 23rd St again, where, sure enough, the fiddler had retired and I was able to do pretty well.

Except for some guy telling me to play Coldplay. What?! What?! What do I look like? It even says on my sign "FOLK troubadour." I mean granted, it's kind of a joke and an excuse for me to use a fun word, and it's not like I only play folk....but COLDPLAY? This guy didn't even look like he would have enjoyed "The Scientist" or any other overrated selection. I think he was name-dropping Coldplay as much as I was word-dropping troubadour when I made my sign. But the difference is I didn't bark at somebody mid-song to mention the word "troubadour." I'm sure his girlfriend was very impressed that her sweetiekins could read band names off of music videos and repeat them in public.

Some other guy requested a Donovan song, but politely waited until I had finished the song I was playing. I did that. So there. See what happens when you ask nicely?

Addendum: Just so we're clear on this, I don't hate Coldplay. I've had my fair share of enjoyment from their music. I just don't fancy myself someone who covers that sort of thing (especially when I wasn't asking for requests), and I guarantee you all that the bloke in question thought that Coldplay meant snowball fight when he first heard of them in 2002.

One Poor Correspondent

2006-11-28T20:09:00.000-08:00

Back from NC, and ready to make-a the mon-ey!!! Tonight was a pretty good outing, considering I was only busking for 2 hours. My sister and I are kinda obsessed with the America song "Sister Golden Hair," so I hastily learned it before leaping out into the wide world of free entertainment. If you don't know that song, you're seriously missing out....apparently the main riff was inspired by the one in George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" (an equally good song), but I can't hear it. It's total mudslinging on the part of some weirdo Wikipedia journalist who strangely has it in for one of the tamest 70s rock acts ever.

Tonight I got that super "on" feeling, like I didn't have to push or anything; I was just so happy to be performing and bringing music to people that I could just feel raw energy chortling through my veins. Yes, I know chortling means laughing. That's what it was doing.

I'm not the world's greatest guitar player, but I had a surprisingly decent solo on a cover I did of Eels' "Railroad Man" tonight. I'm not sure what it was....I played with Funk a bit over break, so I think that just got me in a jammy mood. Apparently, I got an elecxtric organ for my birthday over the summer, and completely forgot that I had it. When I came home the realization hit me like a ton of bricks and I basically didn't leave it for the first day of being home. My piano skills are far worse than those of any other instrument that I act like I can play, but Funk and I had a pretty decent jam session nonetheless. You gotta love a piano that can make its own reverb. Which is basically what an organ is.

Surprisingly, I miss home just as equally as I love being back in New York. They're like the most completely polar opposites, but I love them equally. Let's not even add Boston into this equation...But at the end of the day, I can't really busk very well at either of those choice locales, and since that's where the cash is coming from these days, New York will be just fine.

Puritanicalypso

2006-11-23T23:32:00.000-08:00

No amazing busking stories tonight; I'm in North Carolina for the holiday, an area sorely lacking in subway stations. Nevertheless, my indefatigable comrade, David Funk, has once again assisted me in a creative endeavor.

I know that the throngs have been ravenous for some Rob Morrison tunage for free download. And I for one am sick of ye olde myspace song limit of 4. Thus, through Funk's wondersome website, Sheer Will Power 2, you can check out 11 original songs of mine, 7 of which have never been online in any form previously. I know. You haven't been this excited since the theatrical re-release of the original Star Wars Trilogy. But try to contain your joy, if you please.

You can check out all 11 songs here.(there's no link from the main site yet). That's right: they're all free! Do with them as you will. Listen to 'em. Sing along with 'em. Convert them into holograms somehow and entertain folks at parties with 'em. Also, I'm going to add some links to the songs on the handy-dandy index to the right of this and every entry for safe keeping.

This Thanksgiving, I wish to extend a kind-hearted salute to David Funk and his brigade of programming Java gerbils. Danke.

The Father Orb

2006-11-20T16:13:00.000-08:00

I hustled out of my apartment around 4:00 today to try cramming in a few hours of busking before hustling off again to run box office for Laughing Liberally midtown. I'm heading home to NC tomorrow for T-giving, and am in dire need of money for the journey (I inevitably spend much more than I should when I'm with my friends back home...the guilt usually hits me about a week later when I question how badly I needed those RC Colas and honey sticks). Tonight wasn't bad, and should at least pay for my cab ride to LaGuardia tomorrow.

Throughout the 10 and a half month existence of this blog, I've written about everything from the perils of busking in the summer to the annoyances of drunken back-up singers. Busking is weird. And not many other people are going to unpack that for you, so it may as well be me. There is one strange nuance of busking that I don't think I've mentioned yet, however.

Tonight, right as a train arrived, a 20-something girl scurried over to my guitar case and dropped in a dollar. I paused in my singing (albeit, at an awkward point in the music) but continued strumming, and thanked her as she began to move toward the train. She bashfully said something to me that I didn't make out at first -- it seemed like maybe she was apologizing for stopping me, or something along those lines. I told her, "no, not at all!" Then about half a second later, as the sardine-can metal doors shut behind her, I realized that she had said, "you really sound good!" Ugh.

When people donate, I -- for some reason -- am reluctant to really stop what I'm doing to thank them for long. Part of the reason for this is that I think it would embarass them. It takes an odd kind of courage to give a busker a buck, and I don't want to call too much attention to someone kind enough to help me out by stopping the song and allowing them to start up a conversation with me. But sometimes people do want that. There have been a few instances in which I could tell that a donor wanted to talk to me about something after they'd plopped their money in. You can just tell; they hover a little. Usually it's in regards to a request or a question about who wrote the song I was playing. And I definitely don't mind talking with people.

It would be ill-advised to stop playing every time someone tosses me a dime only to stand quietly as they walk away from my case. Awkward. It would suck equally to not stop playing and miss out on meeting Scarlett Johanssen in disguise in the New York subway. Alas. No perfect solution. At any rate, consider this entry my apology to the nice young lady who complimented me only to get an incongruent reply.

Oh. Roy Orbison's been on my playlists a lot lately, so I finally attempted to play "Crying" tonight with modest success. It's hard stuff, but about as cathartic as it gets.

DS Hell

2006-11-17T22:11:00.000-08:00

Maybe I make myself out to be a victim too much. Could be. I think people have OD'd on the whole "it's not my fault that I spilled the coffee on myself....it was too hot!" approach. In the same breath, I hate Verizon wireless and the mockery they have made of my obviously, previously pristine existence.

I went out busking last Friday for about 5 hours, by far the longest sitting (standing, more accurately) I've ever attempted. My voice got tender around the three-hour mark, prompting me to be extra careful which resulted in an artistic epiphany wherein I found the perfect, healthy amount of support that my voice needed within the acoustically-depraved 23rd Street Station. I encountered tons of amazing people while I was out, debuted my new song, "Bitten By a Brown Recluse," and managed to barely repeat any material at all. Oh, and I made mad green stamps.

There were many more interesting stories to tell of this epic night of anti-social, pro-free-music antics. But I've forgotten them. Because fucking Verizon wireless' DSL connection in my apartment went dead for the umpteenth time after it took a month for them to get off their asses and connect two wires together and install the thing in the first place. Thus, this blog took over a week to be published and my memories have faded into the mercurial sands of time, never to be retraced.

Thanks a bundle, V. Now millions of people will never be able to know what social and musical barriers were climactically broken and what performance hurdles were overcome and what artistic milestones and zeniths reached.

Pitooey!

Add-verse Conditions

2006-11-07T23:18:00.000-08:00

Writing bulletin!

I'm now about half-way through tooling and retooling songs for what I'm foolhardy enough to consider my next album. As you may know, I have never released any album. That hasn't stopped me from making a double album, however. Even if it never sees the light of day, its existence alone is important simply because I can consider my current project, "my next album," making me sound pretty cool and seemingly confident in the realm of sticking music on a tape. We'll see.

Anyhow, in typical Rob Morrison fashion, I've ironed out most of the musical aspects of the album to a pretty definitive point. It's all written! But where are the lyrics?! Ack! That's right: I always put off writing lyrics. Call me crazy, lazy, or just plain bad at it; I'm not sure of the cause, but I'm pretty tentative about lyrics. Part of me loves to rewrite and revise, and the other part loves to quit milling over a song and hurry up and record it already! The latter typically wins. Only he doesn't really because I get noncommital about the whole thing around that time, and the song I'm working on is completed six months to a year later. Sheesh.

That's a habit I'm stomping from here on out. But there's a hidden danger to nixing that sense of censorship: I can't stop. I started writing a song last week that consisted of five verses and clocked in at 7 and a half minutes. A tad lengthy, yes. Tonight I unearthed my notebook to revise a couple lyrics, and voila: now it's eight verses and surely over 10 minutes. Yikes. No one writes songs that long. Well, they do, but probably not when they're trying to get signed to a folk-friendly label. Oh well. Better add another verse and an mellotron solo and hope that some Prog label will want me.

All was not quiet on the busking front this evening. In fact, it was downright rocking with good times. Some lady sang along with me to "Mr. Bojangles" and another patron told me it was the perfect song for the subways, citing that it brought back a lot of memories. As I mentioned several posts back, I love that song. It's an incredibly sincere slice of Americana that dates back a ways and has been covered by everybody who's anybody. That's right -- me included!

After a rendition of "Sad Eyed-Lady of the Lowlands" (talk about a long song), a guy walked up to me and proffered up a Scooby Doo lollipop. I was pretty content with that alone -- hey, if it puts off dinner for another hour or two, great! -- but he also donated some free insight. Apparently the lyric regarding "the kings of Tyrus with their convict list" was not a good idea to cite because in his words, "a lot of ex-cons live around here." I informed him that the author of the song was Dylan, and that I didn't play it with any intention of getting a rise out of a demographic that's more likely to shiv me with a payphone than quietly grumble as they board a subway car. He nodded and wished me good luck.

And that was the evening as it was.

Wheellock Quickdraw

2006-11-06T00:38:00.000-08:00

It's on. A rumble. A knock-down, dragout skirmish spar destruction-o-rama beatfest. I might even go to the gym for this.

The last three times I've gone busking, I've either been forced to go to another station because this way-too-smiley asian guy playing a two-string fiddle is paying rent at the 23rd Street station he's there so often, or because a crazy drunken homeless lady takes up residence near me while accurately shrieking out the author of the song I'm playing, effectively frightening away anyone who actually wanted to contribute to my dinner fund (I mentioned her awhile ago, I think). Long story shot, I keep relocating to 28th Street. Which I don't like as much.

Tonight was not so bad, however. Despite being out for a brief time, I did all right, and I even managed to attract a fan! A nice woman skipped probably five trains just to stick around and listen to me...she even told me that I was very talented and that she couldn't believe how bad some of the people are on American Idol when there was someone like me in the subway! I was definitely flattered...I've had one or two people skip a train before (I say that as un-egotistically as possible), but this was a first. I'm grateful that it happened...I guess everyone has a day or two of self-doubt, and I'm smack in the middle of it. It's always nice to get a compliment.

But I'm still really pissed at that fiddle player and that drunk lady.

Jack-o-Lantern Heart

2006-10-31T16:33:00.000-08:00

In a desperate attempt to capture a melody I heard in a recent dream, I've spent the last few weeks writing a new song that I just posted to my music page on myspace a few minutes ago. Check it out!

As for my Halloween plans as a busker, I thought I might as well make the full metamorphosis that I've been undergoing slowly and don the guise of Bob Dylan. I certainly know enough of his songs to make it through a three hour set. Unfortunately, I'm incredibly hungry and have decided to visit the grocery store instead. I hope 23rd St can get on without me.

Expect a bunch of new songs soon. I've been writing up a storm of (typically) unfinished lyrics, but now that I'm back from that Boston gig, I can really buckle down and finish 'em off.

Now go do yourself a favor and watch The Innocents. I don't care what anybody says; it's the scariest movie I've ever seen.

Though I only harvest song

2006-10-25T23:58:00.000-07:00

The challenge for this week was to go busking every single night in hopes that I might raise some R 'n R money for this weekend's trip to Boston. Unfortunately, sleep and a number of unfortunates have derailed this plan slightly, but I picked it up again tonight in hopes of making a comeback worthy of any jaw-droppingly goregeous slow-clap sequence.

No such luck. As I've said before, people are sketchy late at night (myself included), and I was unable to get out to the tracks before 11 tonight, so I had to deal with them. Not a lot of cash to show for my troubles, but I did start out doing an all-original set including some newer songs that I've been working on. As soon as I figure out how to post them in some free, exciting manner on here, I will. For now, you'll just have to imagine a couple haunting chords and some lyrics that are probably too pretentious for their own good. What else is new?

I received a MTA pass from a passerby tonight. He said he didn't have any cash, but had a couple bucks on the card. I accepted it gratefully, mentioning that if there's one thing I always need to have in order to busk, it's a means of admission to the platform.

That is until jetpack busking gets a little more well-deserved attention. Ah, day of days!

Whose Cider You On, Anyway?

2006-10-23T19:44:00.000-07:00

There's a job I'd like to have. Driving a subway. I'd get to see all sorts of crazy underground catacombs that I'd keep telling myself I'd one day explore and settle in, but ultimately never do more than shine a flashlight beam upon. I'd get to take out aggression on slow, unwitting commuters who are unfortunate enough to end up between the doors of my tyranny. And I'd probably get to see a lot of cool buskers if I was that driver in the middle, who probably shouldn't be called a driver since I don't think you can do that from the center car on a subway train. But far be it from me to say what the responsibilities of this position are. I just know it would be fun. Just looking around to make sure everyone's inside the Cool Train. And checking out the tunesy wares of someone such as myself. The other self. I mean...'cos I'm just imagining myself driving the train. But that imagined self would be watching my real self do selfy things.

Long story short, there actually are one or two drivers (or whatever) that I see on occasion who nod and bop along with my music, and even give me a nice little wave from time to time. One guy gave me the peace sign tonight (I'll assume it wasn't that "most-likely-an-urban-legend-but-in-Australia-this-means-up-yours" sign). I think that's right cool....these guys don't have to do anything at all in regards to me, and I'm glad they seem to be enjoying themselves and can give me encouragement through signage.

On the other hand, you don't gotta look all peeved at me. Some lady tonight gave me a look like I'd suddenly produced all the works of Chaucer by tugging them from my rectum and then had to sit down and explain to her who Chaucer was (I'm not trying to be mean, but you weren't there. Trust me. She has no clue who Chaucer is). Why the look? Sure, I'm not necessarily ushering people onto the train or cleaning up the station or otherwise benefiting your cause. But am I hindering it? Am I a musical remora attached to the soft underbelly of your infrastructure? Am I merely a penny-pinching planarian parasite perusing the plains of your putrid, petty, pancreatic plaza? I think not. So don't give me a look like you just sucked on an egg that was filled with lemon juice. Because if that happened, you should be giving that look to your grocer.

In other news, I've decided that when I grow up, I want to be like the cool guy tonight who hopped off the train, skipped over to my guitar case (his fine cashmere coat rippling behind him), to drop a stack of ones in, without even hearing me play. Definitely want to be like that. Some day. Right after I settle in to my new apartment in that subway catacomb.

Awktoeburr Boiz

2006-10-22T19:18:00.000-07:00

When you want to talk on your cell phone, chances are you seek out the solitude of a nice, tranquil New York City subway station, right?

I didn't think so.

Well, some lady tonight did just that, and brough her two year old kid along for the joyride. She didn't seem to mind telling her boyfriend/husband/whoever over the phone that I was "some nobodeeee playing cowntry music and sanging and -- ow! I am naht in da mood for dis shit!" My temptation was to play a little louder -- after all, what did she expect? Trains were zooming all over the place. Well, mostly on the tracks. Anyway, I let it slide and she eventually retreated to an corner where my dastardly "cowntry" music couldn't offend her senses.

Not much else happened tonight...somebody told "God Bless You" when they made a donation tonight. I was touched at first, then thought that perhaps my singing voice resembled a sneeze. Or that I looked like a bum again.

I also failed to provide any of the requests of a certain donor. She asked if I knew any Bruce Springsteen, or a bevvy of 90s artists including Rob Thomas, Goo Goo Dolls, or Creed (shudder). And I couldn't think of a single song by any them! I like Springsteen, but the other requests were just never anything I'd considered learning before. I heard so much Creed in high school that I think I may be ready to give them a shot by the time I'm 50 something. But hopefully never. Still, I felt bad that my inner library of 90s music + Springsteen was failing miserably in public (although, to her discredit, she didn't seem to know who Oasis, Travis, or Radiohead were...how could she call herself a 90s fan?!?).

Later, I enjoyed some tasty sausage pizza (with requisite hot sauce) with my earnings. Busking's totally worth it if only for making obsolete my ATM card.

Acoustic Lightning

2006-10-17T21:52:00.000-07:00

I realized just now that I have very little control over the type of music I write. Sure, I can cross out words and rearrange chords, but the type of song I've got rolling around in my ribs is going to come out one way or the other, like it or not. Okay, so maybe my songs have grown a lot since I wrote my first one way back in middle school. But then again, have they really? Sometimes when I listen to my old stuff, I think, "geez, I would never know how to write something like that now! It's so free and sprawling and sincere." In another few years, I may say the same thing about the song I was working on today.

If I've learned anything in my few years as an artist, actor, musician, writer....it's that sometimes you have to kinda forget what you've learned. It's great stuff to have and all, like a backbone. An outline. Discipline, structure. But in the end, what matters is creative drive and work ethic. I don't mean to slip into self-help mode here...I guess I'm just trying to talk myself through some of these realizations that I've had many a time, which will probably repeat their appearances in the future.

There's definitely a kind of song I'm after. An honest, woodsy folk song that has elements of true folk music (lyrics and ideas being passed down from one generation of singers to the next) as well as elements of my own personality and outlook on the world. None of that's easy, really. I'm tempted to say that my own viewpoint and take on things is the hardest to grab the reigns on because it's still developing...but then again, the folk element is equally daunting, because it could be so easily forced and tarnished. In the end -- the temporary one anyway -- I'm left with whatever spills out of my fingers and my mouth.

Meanwhile, I'm listening to sequencer-laced, synthesized songs by Tangerine Dream that call to mind crystal-grid mountains in a glistening computer world. Go figure.

Abs in the Night

2006-10-11T12:04:00.000-07:00

Having recovered from typhoid or whatever cruelly unrelenting (and therefore, old world) ailment I contracted two weeks ago, I ventured out into the wonderful world of subways again last night.

It was a good night for money. I don't normally talk about that kinda thing on here, but man. It was good. And Lord knows I needed it. It was also a good night for some new songs; I busted out my new piece, "Son of Cain," and tried my hand at Dylan's 11-minute long epic, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (which I think I had previously mentioned was the sole member of an elite recent playlist of mine). All in all, good things happened.

I even had an audience. Sure, she was homeless, drunk, loud, and had an appearance that compelled me to believe she was a stand-in for that Pigeon Lady in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. But she was supportive! She banged on her corner of the bench with her bottle of liquor shrouded in brown paper so vehemently that it drove away potential donors to my fine cause. So maybe it wasn't that cool.

Finally resigning myself to the fact that she'd never leave (although her surprisingly comprehensive memory of the lyrics to "Rocky Raccoon" was interesting in its own way), I gave up and took the 1 train up just one stop to 28th Street. Ah, yes. FIT fashion students are always patrolling this area in search of some forlorn busker to whom they can give away a sizable morsel of their trust fund. Or so I tend to think. It didn't work out quite like this.

But it wasn't awful, either. I met a guy who books singer/songwriters for a coffee house at Columbia...he told me they're looking pretty full for the fall, but there'd be space in the spring. I thanked him, and he told me he'd get in touch with me via myspace. He was wearing a Dylan hoodie, so he seemed respectable enough.

As I was packing up, a suspicious dude started swaggering his way towards me at quite a pace. I say suspicious, because he seemed to be one of those homeless guys who has headphones on and is carrying a CD player that's yellow and was probably made in 1995, and it's my guess that even if this guy was able to find batteries for it, not even SONY made discmen that had such a notable longevity. Discmen suck, it's a well-known fact. Plus, he had a sleeveless flannel shirt on that was unbuttoned (similar to what I wore in The Full Monty, if any of you saw that) which exposed his (again) suspiciously well-toned abs, and black jeans. That's just not a good sign. So I tried to pack up quick in case he had some nefarious designs to steal my motherlode or deface my capo or something. Instead, the guy gave me a dollar bill. I thanked him, and he held out his fist for me to reciprocate. I fist-hit him (what do you call this? punching?) back, but apparently you're not supposed to do it with your left hand, a matter that he made sure to relay to me for correction. I got him back with my right. He tipped his grungy baseball cap and sauntered off into the night, his suspiciously rock-hard abs cutting the air as he walked.

Talk about abnormal.

An Extra-Special Trip to the Writer's Corner

2006-10-09T20:45:00.000-07:00

Funny things used to happen when I got sick. Once, while watching TaleSpin under a haze of fever-induced euphoria, I convinced my mother that even though I hadn't been able to keep any food down in three days, I absolutely needed to eat hot dogs because Baloo was chowing down on some. I'm glad he didn't fly the Sea Duck into the Iron Vulture...I may have attempted to reenact it. Later on, when I got mono in high school, I had a serious craving for twinkies (even though my throat was lined with so many pods of pus it must have looked like those towers of plugged-in mindslaves in The Matrix). Okay, so apparently I just got obsessed with semi-odd food items when I got sick back then. But I also beat Final Fantasy VIII while I had mono. Maybe that's not so weird.

To make a long (and predictable) story short, I'm currently sick. And the only funny thing that's happening is this: because I'm sick and still in the midst of my Full Monty run, I can't risk busking. In short, I'm poor. Make that poor with a capital "P" and pronounced the way my music professor in college preferred (poo-wer). Oh...and being poor isn't so funny when your rent is due.

On the sunny side of my ailment is the opportunity to lay stranded in bed for about twenty hours a day. This is reclined position is of course famously known for being inclined to produce a creativity unparalleled in accomplishment and distinction. I'm pretty sure Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway while sprawled out supine. Copland couldn't have thought of all those crazy intervals while standing up, no sir. And what about the Sistine Chapel? Don't even try to tell me that Michelangelo was on a ladder or some scaffolding for that one!

In light of my inevitable location for any number of days, I've decided to get some writing done on a few songs I've been kicking around the proverbial batchee field. Writing is one of the weirdest things to me...in some ways it gets easier with every piece I finish, and in other ways it gets progressively harder. I tend to get pretty mad when I work on something and realize that it's already been done (most often by me), so the pressure to come up with something completely and utterly new is probably a contributing factor to my songwriter's block. But inspiration can come unexpectedly. I snapped my low E string the other day, leading me to say outloud, "well, great. Now I have to get up and find a replacement string. Otherwise it's gonna sound like it doesn't have any foundation." This "foundation" statement suddenly gave me an idea for a song, which I finished in nearly an hour, called "Son of Cain." It's certainly got some wannabe Dylan elements to it (inevitable, as I've been listening to "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" on repeat for about week), but I'm rather pleased with it, and hope to post in on myspace soon.

I love getting things out of the way. Sometimes I like to let songs stew in the 'ole crockpot in my head so that they come out as near to perfect as can be reasonably expected...but I think I do this way too often. I've got dozens and dozens of songs that I've recorded while drunk or intoxicatingly-inspired that were indeed preserved for posterity in their infant stages, but have never made it out of the nursery. Tons! A few weeks ago I got a little fed up with this and finally completed "Searching For Spring Hill", a song that I started about one year ago. It's up on the old myspace page now for your listening delight.

Finishing "Spring" and writing "Son of Cain" gave me a jolt of energy the other night and I stayed up till all hours brainstorming ideas for a completely new album from the one I've been (slowly) working on since January. I realized that I have about twelve songs or so that have the same general feel...a kind of pastoral, autumnal, eerie, colonial-era feel...and that my new task is to finish these up and record 'em for a new record. My last album (written, not released as of yet) was a double-album conceptual piece called Songs of Inexperience, based on the books of poetry Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake. It was pretty complicated stuff (for me, anyhow)...each song on the first CD linked up to a song on the second CD in terms of themes. But this untitled new album will just have a cohesive sense of season and feeling to it, not anything too ornate or out-there. It's actually very refreshing to think about writing it...I almost always make things too difficult for myself. We'll see how things turn out.

In Paul Zollo's interview with Dylan in Songwriters on Songwriting, the great troubadour said that to write songs (his way), he has to empty out all the "good" and "evil" thoughts in his head because they're just "baggage," and "don't mean anything." "Then you can do something from some kind of surveillance of the situation. You have some kind of place where you can see it but it can't affect you." The idea of entering that kind of dead zone is akin to the notion of learning how to breath properly by zeroing in on your breathing pattern to detect how you're doing things incorrectly without actually consciously changing what it is you're doing (part of the Linklater vocal training I had in college). I've been in that place before, but it's incredibly difficult to find. And once you've found it, it doesn't necessarily get easier to find again. You just gotta keep on trying. "Searching For Spring Hill" came out of that place, as did a handful of my other songs, like "Glassfish" and "Spill the Coffee." It's still not easy to do, though.

In the meanwhile, I'll keep brewing up these ideas of fever dreams, spider bites, jack-o-lantern hearts, wheat fields and hollow trees, and see where that gets me.

Thanks for stopping by the Writer's Corner, kiddies! Come back soon!

Ceptehmburr Gurlzzz

2006-09-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

I have returned to the internet after what feels like ages.

One might think that this means I have oodles of yarns to spin on this blog.

Unfortunately, I don't.

I'm currently in a cosmically-significant production of The Full Monty at the Studio Playhouse in Upper Montclair, NJ, so my time hasn't been flowing quite as bountifully as my unemployed self is accustomed to. Come check out the show here. It's going to be a crazy good time. I mean, just look at the above photo. Any time people make that pose, you know your mind is about to be irreversibly blown. And besides: I know all you people who read my blog/see me playing in subway stations really just want to see what I got goin' on beneath my clothes. Now's your chance!

Oh, right. Busking. Let's see...I went out about three nights ago around midnight. Yeah, pretty late. But I was in the right mod for it, and had reconciled myself to the reality of not making a whole lot of money. It's interesting who you see late at night. I actually got quite an audience at the 23rd St Station. Not a large one, just an attentive one. Late at night I usually do all originals since I don't have to be as loud (I write a lot of fingerpicking type stuff that gets drowned out during busier hours), and the small group of tired commuters I found that night seemed to genuinely enjoy themselves. Sometimes I really have no clue if what I write works at all...sometimes all it takes is me finding enjoyment in playing the song, and that being strangely translated as talent to passersby. I don't know. This stuff is all a delightful mystery to me.

I almost had to go all Dirty Harry on a guy, though. Some bastard that works in the MTA booth barged out after I'd been playing for at least half an hour, to inform me that if I didn't have a permit, I'd have to high-tail it outta there. Now let me be clear about something. I've only ever had one run-in with the cops. It was fine; I just said I'd go home, then went right back to busking (in another station). Anyone who cares to thumb through these archives can remind me of when that was...I think June maybe. Anyhow, that was during rush hour, so I was not, at least, surprised that the confrontation occurred.

This was at 2:00 am. Two friggin' am! Who did this guy think he was? The only people in the station were me, a sleeping bum, and somebody's legs I could see from around the corner where they were sitting on a bench. I was basically playing for myself! Didn't matter to this Eisenstein. He threatened me with a call to the coppers. I stood up to this douche and told him that what I was doing was perfectly legal (again, this is true), and that he could call in the Navy SEALS for all I cared. Sure enough, he called. And, sure enough, no one came. Just as I suspected. What cop is going to make a pit stop at some god-forsaken MTA station to boot out a red-haired kid who's quietly plucking his guitar, lulling some poor homeless guy into a sleep that may result in an untimely yet inevitable death? NOBODY.

I still wished the MTA worker a good night when I left. What can I say? I didn't have any hand grenades on me.

A Voice From Beyond the Shadows of Corporeal Matter...

2006-09-13T09:27:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am still here. I wasn't mugged in a subway station and tossed in front of an oncoming train. But it feels like I was.

I haven't had internet for sometime (I'm sneaking some right now), and have waited -- no joke -- three weeks for Verizon to get off its duff and install mine, since I paid for it and all. As I now know, that's far too much to expect from them.

Long story short, in two days I'll have the internet once more, and there will be legitimate postings here. Then again, they've told me all this before, so who knows.

The Obnoxious Back-Up Singer Meets the Back of My Hand

2006-08-28T10:49:00.000-07:00

After returning from my first rehearsal for The Full Monty last night, I was feeling pretty pumped about the performance prospects of the production, so I put off going to bed and booked it out of my building to go busk (sorry...in an alliterative mood).

I wasn't out for long. By the time I cracked open my guitar case, set up, and started playing, about four trains had gone by, which is never a good sign because there wasn't much of an audience lingering in the station. Exacerbating the evening's outlook considerably was a large black man who decided to sing unrelated back-up vocals for "Heart of Gold" -- the first song I played! Unbelievably bad luck. His friends thought it was the funniest schtick they'd ever seen. Being a billowy, blubbery sort of fellow, his voice more than drowned out my own, and I was forced to wait it out until he amscrayed.

When their train arrived, the group shuffled over to it and the dude's friend goes, "C'mon, man, give him a dollar!" The dude just starts laughing and shakes his head. I couldn't believe it. I wanted to channel good 'ole El Kabong from that Hanna-Barbera cartoon and smash my guitar over his empty noggin, but remembering that I only have one guitar, I abandoned this option.

A minute later, I thought of a decent comeback. "No, tell him to keep his money. He needs it for voice lessons." Always too late.

An Inkling

2006-08-24T12:31:00.000-07:00

Last night was a late one. Even without me watching The Legend of Boggy Creek until like 3 am. I usually busk until 8 or 9, but I've been feeling pretty liberated (read: poor) lately, mostly due to my lack of other jobbyness, so I stayed out until midnight.

I've encountered some pretty weird troglodyte-type characters in the nocturnal hours of Subwaydom (most of which are way scarier than those stupid things in The Descent), but this time around I was blessed with a pretty tranquil evening at 23rd Street.

A few new songs entered the mix, both substantial classics: "Lola" by the Kinks and the Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Feeling ballsy, I even tried playing the standard "Love Hurts" (Roy Orbison and Gram Parsons have covered it, among others), even though I had only an inkling of what the chord progression was. Turns out that inkling was a right inkling. It's kinda cool to know that I can more or less play a song after hearing it a couple times (providing it has a somewhat traditional chord structure). Remembering the lyrics, however, is a different matter altogether.

A lady asked for my contact info last night just before she hurriedly hopped a train. She tried shouting something as the doors closed, which very likely could have been, "I'm working on a movie and we needs songs for the soundtr--". Then again, maybe she was saying "I work for an insidious organization that shops people's phone numbers around to all sorts of terrible telemarketers and nefarious nogoodniks and dastardly do--". With my luck, it's probably the latter.

A-chording to Me.

2006-08-16T13:10:00.000-07:00

To provide some contrast to my day-to-day posts, I figured I might spend some time answering a handful of questions people ask me from time to time about the daredevil realm of busking. Consider this entry an Official Busker's FAQ.

Do you get tired?
Ah, good 'ole fatigue. It's tiring to do anything for three hours at a time, but when there are sharp strings and soft fingers involved, fatigue tends to lead to a fair bit of abrasion and eventually some nasty strumming wounds. I'm often seen sporting some fashionable Rocko's Modern Life band-aids as a result. Maybe it gives me some indie cred or a streetwise appearance. Probably not, unless it's still 1996.

Don't people steal from you?
Yes, there's the ever-present danger of having someone steal from the veritable cornucopia of cash that is my beat-up guitar case (I should point out the intended sarcasm in that sentence so as to avoid any mistaken "cocky" labeling). I've actually never had a problem with this yet, but there have been a few instances when a couple of thuggy kids (it's aaaalways kids) have eyed my property and I had to go all Conan the Barbarian on them (because no one deserves Conan the Destroyer), which for me means puffing myself up like a blowfish and trying to look intimidating. For proof of the existence of God, I'd cite that this tactic of mine has miraculously worked and none of my earning have ever been ganked by a lowlife. Then again, maybe I just didn't see it happen.

What about your voice, dude?
Yeah, it's pretty rough singing nonstop for three hours or more while trains whizz around and people bark at each other and the smart ones just keep listening to their headphones in order to stay sane. There have been a few instances when my voice started feeling pretty ragged from being pushed too much, forcing me to call it a night. This past Friday evening, my voice completely bottomed out in the middle of "Eve of Destruction" (a P.F. Sloan tune that the Turtles covered). It wasn't a good feeling, and I've been resting my voice ever since (it's fine now). I went to school for musical theatre, so I know how to take care of my voice...sometimes I'm a bit too stubborn to take the proper measures.

Are you homeless? Can I like...give you food?
Yes, I'll totally take your food. I'm usually hungry. One kind lady gave me a water bottle the other day. No, I'm not homeless. Interestingly enough, one homeless fellow gave me a bag of chips once. I would have counted that as more of a favor if he hadn't already opened it and ate half of them.

Can I get change for a five from your money if I leave you the five?
This happens a lot, actually. Passersby would like to leave some money for me but only have a five dollar bill. It's fine and I let them change it out in my case. Sometimes I get weird looks from other folks who didn't see the whole transaction and must think the person is stealing from me and I'm just standing idly by. But whatev.

Do you take requests?
I can try to! I'm not quite up to human-Wikipedia skills yet, but I know a fair amount of bands and songs. And I like to make people happy. So go ahead and try me (if you want definite results, it's best to stick to Neil Young, the Beatles and Weezer).

Well, I think that's all for now, but I'll be happy to answer more questions in the future. Feel free to contact me through this blog if you have any other questions about the wide world of Busking.

Wild at Heart and Crazy on Top.

2006-08-03T09:28:00.000-07:00

I was out for maybe 45 minutes last night until one of my strings broke. Replacing it would have been a cinch but I'd taken out my boxes of strings at home, searching them for a G and lamenting that I'd used all of them already. My current G string (for my guitar, thank you very much) is coming apart at almost every fret, and I was certain it would blow off and lash my face at any number of my outings lately. However, not to be figured out so easily, the Universe willed my D string to break instead.

On Tuesday night, a girl slipped the following note into my guitar case:

hi!
(I'm not a sketchball)
I saw you getting out your guitar with your harmonica around your neck and wondered if I'd be lucky enough to hear Dylan. Then it was the first song you played. (let's be friends?)

She included her name and e-mail address as well. I appreciate the note a lot because it seems like something I might do if I liked a street performer, and simultaneously didn't wish to be mistaken for a creep. I'm really afraid of that. I remember realizing one day in high school that someone who feels things as strongly as I do (in this case, it was love) tends to be regarded as a creepy person. And I didn't want that. At the same time, I don't really know how else I should do things. I guess it's nice to be so passionate all the time, but it gets less nice when you get labeled "crazy."

Not that I particularly care what people think. I used to wear polar bear pajamas and hawaiian shirts to school while singing along with the Devo songs playing in my blue Sony Discman that I'd outfitted with industrial strength velcro in order to attach the unit to the fuzzy ceiling of my 1989 Honda Civic so I could avoid track skipping on bumpy roads. In case you're wondering, it didn't work.

Nevertheless, I don't like the idea of being discredited. That's why I don't ever want to be an alcoholic, drug addicted, child molesting, fascist, hallucinator who's a fan of Gray's Anatomy: it totally discredits anything else you might have done. People won't trust you around their wines, medicine cabinets, children, flags, senses of reality, or television sets...and that's no good at all.

Things got so hot and stale in the 50th St Station last night that I very nearly passed out. I love how I can put off busking for days at a time when the weather's nice, but once the thermostat creeps up to the triple digits, I'm out strumming my stuff every other night. Take that, Global Warming!

Sweat.

2006-07-31T13:21:00.000-07:00

So hot. Want to touch the heiney.

New York is gross right now. I, being my usual brain-a-tron self decided that such an environment might be ideal for busking. I'm sure I don't need to relate to you the details of what I discovered.

But I will. I think I'm becoming a manly man, in the sense that I sweat all the time, but unfortunately still don't have muscles or an imposing presence. I suppose I'll take what I can get. Subway stations are particularly bad places for sweat glands to be. Above ground, you can at least air out smothered areas of your body, and if you're lucky there might even be a stray gust of wind to refresh your heat-addled existence.

In Subwayland, there's nothing like that. Well, there is actually. With every roaring train comes a boiling maelstrom of engine exhaust that's very likely to strip away the flesh on your forehead if you're not cautious. Other than this unpleasantry, literally NO AIR MOVES in the subway stations of New York City.

Not a good thing. It sucks enough when I have to go off to my mindless office job or to gorge upon delicious milkshakes uptown. But these trips only require a ten-minute wait, tops. Imagine being in a station for, say, three hours. While strumming fast enough to fuel multiple strum-o-matic power plants. While singing with the efforts of a hundred men, women and children, none of which are strong enough to counter the fearsome thunder of incoming trains. While pressing an increasingly warming guitar body up against one's own, creating a wondersome jungle of steam, friction and discomfort. Then add in the part about a cockroach trying to stowaway in my guitar case, and you've pretty much recreated my typical Friday night.

Attention one and all: this entry has just received the coveted Cube-Side.com Golden Sticky award for Blog of the Week! Click on the sticky to check out all the knickknacks at Cube-Side.com! Thanks for your interest, everyone; keep reading and keep tipping!

Forgotten Glockenspiel

2006-07-19T14:36:00.000-07:00

There's been an eminent lack of tips lately. I've always admitted to my pursuit of busking being purely for the purposes of catharsis, practice, and providing entertainment. But hey, the money's a plus. And it sucks when people are super stingy just because they're in a super bad mood as a result of every single summer blockbuster this year being a load of codswallop. (Even that might be generous for DaVinci Code).

Maybe it's the heat, the recent life woes, or the inevitable feeling of going through the motions....at any rate, I've been noticing that I'm trying almost too hard to get tips from people lately. This desperation is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that everyone seems to be as miserable as I am. I'm not going all-out with mugging for my "audience" or anything, but I've been doing this weird thing where I kinda close my eyes when I'm singing, as if I'm channeling the Great Spirit or something to prove how well I can emote in the 59th Street Station. I mean, I do close my eyes sometimes, but this is way overboard. Luckily, I have all the aforementioned excuses as well as the ultimate one: this heat is freaking disgusting. After checking out Gore's documentary, I'm half-tempted to shut off my computer right now and pretend that I can feel the world's overall temp increase by some infintessimally small percentage.

On the ever-present upside, I rediscovered my love for the ole classic song "Mr. Bojangles." I know tons of folks have covered it, but I'm principally familiar with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's version. For anyone not already familiar, "Mr. Bojangles" is a melancholy little 3/4 tune about a preternaturally-gifted dancer who tours the fairs and the like in the South, impressing people with his deft moves and impossibly high jumps. I remember my dad used to love the song, and the first time he played it for me (in the car going somewhere...Abu Dhabi perhaps) I got a little choked up in spite of myself when Mr. Bojangles explains that he made his dancing rounds with his dog for 15 years before the latter "up and died."

I've always been a little too sensitive for my own good.

As a side effect from this obsession with Mr. B, I've had a sharp stab of homesickness, probably because of the delicious chain of Bojangles fried chicken restaurants that are studded around my hometown in NC.

Don't think twice, it's all right.

2006-07-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

I guess I don't think of my music as being all that cinematic or underscore-y, but the world seems to think otherwise.

My friend Jeb asked me to work on a soundtrack for a short film he was doing back in March. I expressed a little reservation because I simply don't write a whole lot of instrumental tunes, and certainly know next to nothing about the finer points of film scoring. Ultimately I gave it a shot because he was doing a western, and being such an idolizer of a healthy chunk of that genre, I'd always wanted to write my own version of "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" theme. The end result turned out halfway decent. (It's on my myspace page as "The Ballad of Rusty Spurs.")

A few nights ago at 59th, after singing some Radiohead cover, a twenty-something girl approached me.

"Do you write original stuff?"

"Yeah, I do. Why do you ask?"

She produced a flyer from her bag. "Well, I'm doing a threater show right now, and I'd love to have you as our musician. We just need some haunting guitar music to serve as transitions and the like."

I was certainly flattered (she even offered to pay me), and politely "maybe'ed" the proposal. Could I really write 20 minutes' worth of music in less than a week for a threatre piece? Unlikely. But then again, I do tend toward the haunting side of things with a lot of my music, so there'd be a natural knack built in, and it'd be a good challenge for me anyway.

Then I woke up this morning and realized that neither of us had contacted the other.

"Scratches on their Forearms."

2006-07-06T11:14:00.000-07:00

This message, hastily scribbled on a scap of parchment and delivered to my brownstone moments ago by a satchel-toting Nike of a lad, appears to be the latest of Mr Morrison's correspondences from the front. If you fancy yourself bold enough to scan these jots and floats of brainnotes, I shall by all means curtail every impulse to beg you to consider the consequences of such devious actions (not to mention the significant difficulty in trying to chew food despite the holes hewn through one's mandible by the namesake weapon of the laserbats) – in short, read away:

My friends.

Allow me to declare that which most of you have wished for many a moon: war upon Music Under New York, (or MUNY). For the few of you who aren't familiar with this insidious organization, allow me to explain. MUNY is an organization for which one must audition which purports to foster musical performance and appreciation in the New York subways. Once admitted, performers (for they can hardly be called buskers, as you will soon see) are given a banner to hang up behind them which emblazons their skills and origins (mine, for example, would read: "Rob Morrison, folk singer, guitarist and harmonica player. Mortal enemy of MUNY.") and a schedule that depicts specific times and places when and where a performer shall perform.

Okay, fair enough, you say. No, not quite, say I. These fine philistines can boot out any other busker from their pitch if said busker isn't fortunate enough to (or isn't wont to sell out) possess the sacred MUNY banner.

It's my opinion that to have a schedule, not to mention the "authority" to forcibly remove others in order to strictly adhere to this schedule, strikes me as extremely antithetical to the basic idea of busking. In my warpedly idealistic mind, busking is about performing music that is important to the busker, in a manner that makes it easily affordable to an audience, not to mention displaying a "DIY" aesthetic, through which music should be music, performance performance, and most importantly, performer performer. In other words, setting up organizations that dole out performance times for their members is a ridiculous, because these locations are not to be booked as if they were concert venues; they are subway stations. Not only that, but having to go through a booking company immediately begins to zap away the special aspects inherent in busking. Perhaps I am misguided: perhaps there are underground coalitions through which homeless persons schedule windows of time for appearances in desirable locations throughout Manhattan. But I suspect that this sort of organization does not exist, and if it did, an audition/interview process would certainly be required so as to sort through applicants and select the most respectable lot to be set up as members. Obviously, this goes against most commonly established notions of what it means to be homeless: if there are such institutions that would prove so organized and so thoroughly resigned to helping their homeless clients earn money, shouldn't such an institution simply become a shelter or a mission? That would provide true help.

The analogy is, of course, somewhat incongruent. Buskers, most of them anyway, do not typically require help in the form of bookings or money (though many find both in the subways). Nonetheless, MUNY seems expressly aimed at supplying both of these to their musicians.

In the past few months, I've had plenty of encounters with MUNY folks, most of them ending with my exit from the desired pitch. I can't say that this has exactly changed recently, although my last run-in was my most ballsy by far.

About a week ago, I arrived at the 59th St Station around 6:15 pm and set up as rapidly as I could. I hadn't even made it through my first song before my peripheral vision picked up a duo of asian musicians setting up behind me. It wasn't long before I caught a glimpse of the familiar gold and black MUNY banner. After a brief flicker of a temptation to pack up, I firmly resolved to completely ignore them and continue playing. One of the members of the duo walked up to me, and I avoided eye contact and persisted in strumming out any opportunity for him to engage in conversation, quickly going into my next song and my next song after that, not allowing any breaks in between. He ultimately came right up to me and asked me to go away, brandishing his schedule of righteousness as proof of his entitlement.

I wasn't satisfied, and blurted out frankly, "Look, buddy, anyone can perform here. That (the schedule) doesn't mean anything to me. If I don't do this, I'm not going to eat tonight, and since I was here first, you'd better find somewhere else."

The starvation claim was definitely an embellishment. But my feelings were sincere, and a good 20% of my income is derived from busking. He seemed rather flummoxed, and conferred with his duo member before then shuffling off to further confer with the police. Obviously, my protest had reached the pinnacle of its effectiveness (I doubt the police would have appreciated my points), and I scurried off amidst a fog of my own expletives.

Rest assured, my friends: this war has only just begun.

Rob Morrison

Well, Morrisonites, I daresay that this note hardly makes sense to most of you. Nevertheless, Mr Morrison seems to find some import in these matters, and will, I am sure, be greatly moved by your taking such matters to heart.

Godspeed.

Archaeopteryx T.C. Bustard

Bits of music.

2006-06-23T10:03:00.000-07:00

All of my belongings have finally been relocated to my Manhattan apartment (which means I now have a spacious 2" x 2" area in which to sleep.

My turntable is broken.

On the sunny side, all of my records seem fine.

I hate X3. Oh, and...

2006-05-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

So it's been a while since I've posted anything up here, mostly because I keep typing up entries, previewing them, then wantin to make a change but stupid freaking BLOGGER won't let me browse backward without wiping out everything that I just entered in. And it usually feels really retarded to retype an entire entry, though it may seem like a mere trifle. It also feels a little strange to force myself to write about every little quirky thing that happens to me in the dingy capillaries of the MTA, so I've been trying to hold off. But here's something cool.

A few weeks ago I was packing up after a few hours of playing. I descended to a lower platform to head home for the night, when I passed an asian man who was playing on a long-necked, three-stringed instrument that appeared to be fashioned from a turtle shell. With a surge, all my knowledge of Harry Partch and eastern, microtonal music flooded back to me and was converted -- miraculously -- into understanding and total enjoyment. I say that this was a miracle because, though I am fond of all music and certainly a proponent for its continued existence and creation, and am aware of its functions as well as the differences in its manifestations depending on the culture from which it originates -- despite all this, I am not a huge fan of eastern music. Well, not a big "listener" of it anyway. So transfixed was I, that, had Rachel McAdams approached me and professed her undying love for me after years of watching me from her celebrity hilltop, as well as her uncanny ability to land me the role of Carnage in Spider-Man 4, I seriously doubt I would have as much as blinked.

After he finished his smokey, wirey song, he looked up at me, and seemed to appreciate my attentive listening. Then he noticed my guitar, and gestured toward it ambiguously, animatedly speaking in its direction. I confess that I didn't really understand what it was about my guitar that he was commenting on, but something in his good-natured smile and curiousity-filled eyes led me to believe that he wanted to try his hand at playing my guitar. So, I opened up my case, and attempted to hand the symbol of contemporary western music to an eastern traditionalist. This was not, evidently, what he had in mind, and he began laughing beneficently (as did a few onlookers, though I doubt that any of them knew what that word meant), before implying that I would be welcome to try his lute-like instrument (an offer which I politely declined).

In the most tentative, language-barriered terms, we began to speak of music. He showed me how difficult it was to play his lute (because of his incredibly fast strumming method, he employed the use of a sharp, very stiff pick that he fastened to his thumb, much like the approach of some bluegrass musicians, I believe). When he saw my harp (my yoke was still hanging around my neck), he seemed genuinely interested in the notion of playing two instruments at once. I was very near attempting some sort of east-meets-west jam session when, as it is sometimes known to do, my train arrived, and our conversation came to an end.

I saw him a few days later, and he had no clue who I was.

But you break.

2006-04-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that I haven't blogged for the last seven or eight busking trips. This might lead some to suspect that I've given up the ghost, fled for the Catskills, or been pinned between a steel subway car and a concrete stubbly platform, my guts precariously prepped for bursting should anyone attempt to rescue me. But this is not the case.

I am merely scatterbrained. Plus, I didn't feel like anything of interest was happening. I mean, I'm sure that the one or two friends I have that read this blog LOVE to hear about me learning the lyrics to "Guantanamera," or my latest encounter with a group British high schoolers, but I can't pretend that anyone else experiences such passion when perusing these passages.

So, the last four weeks, abridged: A girl ran by me while I was playing and told me I'd done a great job at the Magnet Level One Showcase (the house fits like seventy people, so the chances of her seeing me in the subway are mighty slim), I went out with Cat again (our act is slowly materializing), I played for a three-year-old's birthday party after his mother saw me in the subway (great people), and I've been playing a cupboard full of Bob Dylan songs (latest obsession).

I've also decided that I fervently hate Music Under New York. Not familiar? They're a group of petty thieves, basically...it's a bunch of buskers that the city authorizes to perform at choice pitches, and endows with schedules that are so uncannily powerful they can drive non-MUNY buskers away from their precious locations. I've been booted more times than I can take, and the next time some freaking ethnic yuppie (I haven't seen a single causasian person, not to mention singer/songwriter type) brandishes a laminated schedule, there might be some fur flying. Of course I'm kidding.

I'm just gonna piss on 'em.

The Night of 1000 Oddities

2006-03-24T23:54:00.000-08:00

Tonight was easily the strangest mix of events I've ever witnessed in one evening of busking.

I started out at 59th St (1 and 3 line), and got through about one song when I discovered that another busker had set up shop behind me. One of those "Music Under New York" fellows. (Sure I applied to be one too, but this guy is significantly less cool than I would be as a MUNY representative). This guy sings in a really obnoxious high-pitched voice and plucks some crazy African instrument with his thumbs...I used to think it was nifty, but now that he's got me all miffed, I'm gonna pull a human and be mad at him. I told him, "look, I know you're all official, but this is part of my livelihood, and since I was here first, you should probably go." He presented an official MUNY schedule, which apparently equals diplomatic immunity. I wish I coulda been like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon II, when he shoots that guy with diplomatic immunity anyway because he's just that cool. I didn't have a gun or an original film to make a sequel out of, so I let it go and migrated down to 34th St.

It's a bad pitch. There's no freaking room, there are four potential platforms to receive the noisy razor subway cars, and everyone looks pretty miserable. Nonetheless, I made decent money and had a pretty good time before I had to head out to see my friends' improv show at the Magnet.

Afterwards, I thought I'd scope out 59th St again. Sure enough, it was free, and I set up camp. I don't know what it was...maybe a full moon?...There were soooo many cute girls out tonight! One group spotted me after getting off their train, stuck around to hear me finish my song, and then asked if I took requests! I did my best...I really need to expand my repertoire. After they left, more cute girls replaced them...I'm not usually a completely girl-crazy type, but I couldn't help but notice them tonight. It was awkward of course...I mean, what am I going to say? "Hey, so yeah, I'm playing my guitar in the subway. Wanna get a drink sometime?" It doesn't really work. At any rate, they all seemed to like the stuff I was playing, and that's more than enough for me.

I had applause tonight! On a couple of occasions I've had one or two people applaud after a song, and I was flattered; not only because of their appreciation, but also of their willingness to applaud a busker, someone who the general public does not congratulate or admire in the least. But tonight, practically half the station applauded after three consecutive songs! I was truly flabbergasted.

Later on, one guy asked if I knew "Save Tonight" by Eagle Eye Cherry. While I like the song, I didn't really know how it went, but luckily he was able to tell me the chord progression. I spun through the chorus a couple times, but didn't know the lyrics to the verse. A crazy group of college-age kids came in a little later and formed a little pow-wow around me, swing dancing to the Oasis song I was playing. And not in a mocking way, which has happened before. They were all super nice, and seemed to get a kick out of me interacting with them so nonchalantly (at least as far as I'm concerned, everyone should feel free to talk to me...it's not like I'm onstage and can't acknowledge the audience).

To top it all of, as that group was leaving, a hispanic-looking gentleman with a guitar strapped to him trotted up to be and began strumming with me. Being completely down for a jam with a stranger, we tried tuning for a second, but he clearly wasn't into such specifics, and wanted to get going with a song. Before I knew it, he was playing "Guantanemera"...now, if you're one of the three people that know me in this city, you'll know that I'm obsessed with this song. If you aren't, you know now. I couldn't believe the coincidence. We had a fun time harmonizing for all of thirty seconds -- then the train came and he was gone (with a promise that he'd be back after making two laps on the subway...seeing as how that would have probably found him returning to 59th around 4:00 or something, I decided he wouldn't be too offended if I went home).

Interestingly enough, upon returning home, I discovered a myspace invitation to a Be-In. The invitation apparently came from someone who saw me at 34th St earlier tonight and remembered my myspace URL. Pretty cool...Be-Ins seem like they'd be a lot of fun.

After my first stint at 59th tonight, by G harp blew a reed, so I snagged a new one on my way to 34th St. Unfortunately, I couldn't really use it much since it hadn't been broken in yet (wailing on a new harp is sure-fire way to demolish it early on), and it just so happens to be in the key that I play in the most. So, I decided to transpose all my songs up a whole step into A tonight, to match my other harp (it would have been too much of a jump to make them into C, my third and final harp). I was worried that I may not be able to sing some of the songs up that high (sometimes G feels like it may be pushing it), but it actually fit into my voice even better...I guess I must have a vocal break somewhere around G, though I've not given it much thought before now. Having the songs up higher tonight also made my voice travel a little better I suppose, which could explain why I did so well...I'm not sure. I'm only sure of one thing:

I have no clue how to meet girls in this city.

Mbube

2006-03-21T12:51:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a bed looks a little too hungry to be just a bed. Like maybe it's a monster or something, swallowing up the last few hours of a day that's inevitably spent doing required things for bosses and other spuds. Tonight was one of those times. I decided to avoid my monsterbed and hit the rails.

Busking is weird late at night. I got to 59th St around 11:15, and made about eight bucks all night (granted, I only stayed about an hour and a half). People don't seem as apt to receive entertainment at the tail end of the day. I'm not sure I blame them, but then again I wasn't prancing about warbling "Daydream Believer," so I don't know what they were so peeved about.

Saw V for Vendetta earlier tonight: completely saucesome. I'd heard a salvo of unpleasantries about the movie, but it just goes to show that you sometimes have to formulate your own opinion.

I was reading about this guy Solomon Linda today. He wrote "Mbube," which eventually became "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." I remember hearing the Tokens' version of it in elementary school and seeing Timon and Pumbaa jam out to it, and more recently enjoyed hearing Pete Seeger's impassioned live recording...but I didn't know it had its roots in Africa, where Linda wrote it as he actually protected his livestock from a lion. Turns out Linda got completely screwed over by the record label that purchased the song from him (a familiar story), and his family barely received any of the royalties once the song hit it big and appeared in films. Linda has long since passed away (he had only $22 in his bank account when he died), and a sizable chunk of his family has passed away also, some simply because they could not afford medical treatment. The remainder of the Lindas have worked in factories and mills to support themselves, until recently, when litigation has finally corrected the injustices of Disney and several record labels.

If that story isn't enough to piss off any sensible person, I don't know what is.

Thievery in the Land of Plenty

2006-03-20T23:42:00.000-08:00

People do know "MTA (The Man Who Never Returned)"! Albeit, those who do represent about 1/1000th of the subway-going population, but still....that's one or two people everyday that are so totally on my side that I'm pretty sure I can count on them when the great war breaks out between me and the creepy violin player that hovered over my spot tonight in anticipation of inheriting it. (To catch you up, "MTA" is a comedic folk song the Kingston Trio and others have recorded that I've loved since days of kiddiness, but haven't found much success with in the busking world).

Busted out a new tune called "Woodgrain Love Song" tonight, and some little kids seemed to enjoy the feelgood, uptempo groove of it. Then again, I'm pretty white, so I'm not sure how much of a groove there is in any of my music. But it was a good time.

I love it when I thank someone for their donation, and they say, "no, thank you!" That's way nicer than most New Yorkers are often reckoned to be.

A man who looked like Albert Einstein combined with Doc Brown from Back to the Future scurried up to me tonight inbetween songs and asked, "do you like Bob Dylan?" I replied that I did, and he rapidly informed me that he's a composer who recently wrote a piece in which he distinctly heard Bob Dylan's "voice." I guess I understood what he meant, but I was so entertained by his peculiar energy that I wasn't trying very hard to do anything but watch him.

Also played the Beatles (George Harrison) song "Something" for the first time today, and it went over rather well. One guy even applauded!

Saving up for a concertina...wouldn't you like to know why?

It's the singers, not the songs.

2006-03-12T17:44:00.000-08:00

I recently started taking improv class at the Magnet here in NYC. Improv's never really been my thing...I mean, I like it and all, but I used to go a little too crazy with it in high school, and several injuries have resulted...okay, not really. But suffice it to say that I need a lot of work. Anyway, class so far has been pretty swell, and I met a girl named Cat who expressed some interest in joining me for a busking expedition (plus, she's from NC like me, which is pretty radical).

I guess I wasn't sure what to expect from being a duo. We'd never sung together before (although I did hear her warming up the other day before improv class, and she's got some killer pipes. Aaaaaand her voice is good, too.), and I wasn't sure if we'd know any of the same songs, or what exactly the setup would be for our carousing and cavorting.

It actually went really well. Cat's voice is really versatile; she was able to do some Emmylou Harris-esque background vocals on a couple songs, we both looked over some belty Kelly Clarkson sheet music while playing (I was impressed...her songs aren't as bad as you might think), and Cat wrote out the chord progressions for a few other songs she knew as well. She's also a pro at transposing music apparently, which I was simultaneously impressed and intimidated by (I don't know a whole lot about music theory). But, all in all, we had an awesome time.

There's talk of more adventures like this one....so keep your eyes peeled! For just when you've let your guard down...the (UNNAMED DUO) shall smite you with batallions of musical spears and rhythmic howitzers! Rest while you can.

and the mome raths outgrabe...

2006-03-11T11:59:00.000-08:00

The sun came out today. Noting the rarity of this phenomenon, I decided that more people than usual would be out and about, traveling to Central Park or whatnot, and that these conditions might make an ideal setting for a busker such as myself.

It's weird, but this is the first time since starting busking that I've actually needed the money. Before it was all about the music, the art, etc....now I just need cash! It's not like I'm at the end of my rope, but I'm trying to save up as much as I can right now so I can afford a place of my own for recording purposes (I sleep in my friends' living room right now).

"MTA" actually got some donations this time around (albeit, from older folks who seemed to have heard of the song). I also spotted someone who I believe to be a friend from NC, but she didn't respond when I called out her name. As a busker, I should've felt pretty confident about shouting out something like that, but for some reason it was pretty awkward. I guess I was trying to maintain some semblance of professionalism or something.

Around the time I was planning on terminating my session, a subway car pulled up, and as the doors opened right in front of me, my friend Christian popped out. "Deus ex machina!" we both cried, our voices ringing like so many Hershey Kiss Bells from that holiday commercial. He snapped a few photos of me on his digicam, and SWOOSH! We were off to make like Sheryl Crow's sellout song.

The Grover Cleveland of Busking

2006-03-10T23:27:00.000-08:00

An erratic schedule has kept me from busking for two weeks, and in an effort to compensate for this, I occupied the Columbia University station for two, non-consecutive terms this evening.

Thinking that I may see some cute girls near Columbia, I was temporarily blinded to the fact that college students have no money. Thus, many a cutie was seen, and nary a dollar was made. Well, okay, a couple bucks. I mostly just need quarters for laundry at this point, or people really will think I'm homeless since I'll be busking in the same clothes tomorrow.

I learned tonight that just because I think a song is funny/great/super/touching/moving/whatever, doesn't necessarily mean that audience members (I think it's the first time I've called them that, but I think it's logical) will pay enough attention to figure that out. For example: recently, I really got into this song from my childhood called "MTA (The Man Who Never Returned," about a Bostonian who gets on the T without being aware of the fare increase, and cannot afford to get off the train. It's a ridiculous song, made all the better by its popularization by those swell fellas, The Kingston Trio. Anyway, I guess the song either references Boston too much, or people can recognize that it's a goofy song from a bygone era...either way, it got the least response of any song I've played yet! On the upside, I jammed out to it with my family in San Diego a couple weeks back...maybe I like it better that way. Yeah...it's a family thing.

One thing's for sure: people sure get weirder late at night.

Beasts of Bourbon

2006-02-24T22:30:00.000-08:00

After ten or so days and six or so songs in California, I have returned to New York. The weather was disappointingly cold, but seeing friends and family was saucesome, and I'm pretty excited about a couple of the new songs that I have. Traveling out west gave me a sort of Manifest Destiny, Woody Guthrie sensation -- if that makes any sense -- and sparked some tunes in that style. We'll see what comes of them.

My first night back was weird...I think my head is still in California, eating sunbeams or something. I tried out two new songs, one of which is still going to take a lot of practice. I think people can sense when I'm playing a song that I feel isn't quite ready yet. I thought busking would be a good toolshed for shaping up new material, but sometimes I feel too awkward to try out the fresh ones. I dunno. Anyway, two guys were complimentary of my song "Emmylou" tonight, which dispelled some of my insecurities in performing that one. They wished me good night and good luck, like the great Edward R. Murrow.

I'm a big fan of kids asking their parents if they can have money to put in my guitar case...it's wonderful to see children enjoying music at an early age, as well as acknowledging the music maker!

Boston may be housing me once more, this time just for the weekend (my first time back since living in NYC...which hasn't really been that long), and I may test out the T for buskability (they require permits in Boston, but I've never had problems).

Indonesian Junk

2006-02-14T00:08:00.000-08:00

Oasis song + group of teenage British girls = big moolah.

This I have learned. It would seem that I also learned that my horrible new haircut (it's so freaking short that I look as though I just tumbled out of a naked mole-rat's womb) and grotesque shave (the first barber shave I've ever had, and let's just say I'm not going to let it mate with any other painful shaves out there to make shave-babies) have brought on a deluge of donations because people probably think I'm a fifteen year-old kid. I'm cool with it. What I'm not cool with is how I forgot to bring my website sign today. Pretty unfortunate, since so many passersby were flocking to see the lumpy-faced, pre-adolescent busker.

I've had difficulty thinking lately because the Cheap Trick song "Surrender" has been lodged quite firmly in the intersection of my crucial neural pathways. I decided the best solution to this dilemma was to learn how to play the song in about a day and spout it off to the great underground ear of New York. I certainly had fun, but I'm not sure if people recognized the song. Am I crazy, or is that like the best freaking power-pop song ever? Sure, Badfinger's got some pretty sweet tunes. But "Surrender" is truly epic. I was just surprised that I didn't see more looks of acknowledgement tonight. Talk about "losers of the year"....

Still, I made record cash tonight. I was close to losing record cash, too. A huge bunch of black kids were eyeing my case full of money and pointing and laughing at me. Heh, real cool. I'm not trying to be racist...they just happened to be black, and they really seemed to be planning some kinda heist...or maybe I just got keyed up and my imagination filled in the rest. Regardless, I got pretty evil-eye on them, and started playing a little snarly; my appearance probably negated this, though. I swear that barber's gonna get a piece of my mind! And many pieces of my hair....

I've been having some problems with one song, "Where Marlborough Street Ends." Could be because when I wrote it, I quickly recorded it with a drum loop and now I can't play it exactly right since I can't hear the drum rhythms. I also wrote it when my ex-girlfriend and I were still dating, so maybe it's hard to play for that reason. At any rate, I think I'm going to give it a rest for a bit. I'm still polishing up my newest song, "Cold, Cold Columbia."

I'm actually heading to sunny California in a few short hours! It's high tme I see my grandparents and extended family out there, plus my bottles of sunshine are almost out here. Every time I go out to CA I have an amazing time and get pretty into my writing, so hopefully I'll have some swell stuff to update on when I return on the 23rd.

Until then, godspeed and gehsundheit.

Bond. Vagabond.

2006-02-10T12:28:00.000-08:00

After creatively exhausting myself to the point of actually going to sleep before midnight last night (I think the last time that happened was 5th grade...must have been the one Friday night that TGIF was temporarily replaced by the news, sports, or "Beaches"), I think I've decided to not worry so much about this song I've been working on. I'm really happy with the lyrics, so who cares if the melody sounds like a Neil Young song? A tweak here, a tweak there...unrecognizable. I hope.

I got a guitar pick (canary yellow) from a guy at 59th Street yesterday. Musicians are definitely -- and logically -- the most generous, at least thus far. I got a five dollar bill from a guy who said he needed to help out his fellow guitarist, but he'd only been in the station about thirty seconds before hopping on the train! I was floored. I also met a very complimentary lady who really liked "The Fly," a song I wrote based on the William Blake poem of the same name. I usually don't play it because the finger-picking pattern is too soft amidst the torrents of underground New York, but I'm glad I did on this occasion. She wrote down my website address, and told me she's a performer, too: an aerial performer! Cirque du Soleil type of stuff, she told me. Wow. I can't even ride an escalator without tumbling into oblivion...doing anything more complicated is simply incomprehensible to me.

It's weird...everytime I start feeling groggy while busking, I'm able to convince myself "Just one more song," and I always end up getting a sizable amount of donations from that last song, or meet someone who has valuable insights into music, busking, performance, etc (or mybe part of my brain just searches for something meaningful to justify my procrastination). Last night I ran into my friend Caroline (the one who didn't really ditch me a few posts earlier)! She and I went to high school together back in NC, and haven't seen each other since. I wonder what would have happened if I continued on this "one more song" mentality...maybe met some Mole People?

Samhain's Revolver

2006-02-07T22:33:00.000-08:00

The main highlight of today's busking expedition was my friend Christian trying to take some pictures of me at 50th St -- most of them didn't really come out so hot. Turns out that the visual flurry and musical splendor of a real, live Rob Morrison performance simply can't be captured on film. Ha, if only that were true. Oh well, back to the drawing board. Literally, since the photos are a no-go.

I only stayed out for about an hour and a half today...I was supposed to meet up with a friend from high school for coffee (she totally ditched on me...or maybe I was supposed to call her...), so I kept things short. I did see the same guy today who observed me quietly yesterday. I think that's probably the first time I've ever seen a passerby more than once.

Things were low-key at the office today, so I was able to spontaneously write some song lyrics. The trouble is that when I write lyrics first, they often take on someone else's melodies. Today I ganked a Neil Young tune from his new album, Prairie Wind. Whoops. I've also been noticing that I write way too many ballads and generally downtempo stuff, and since part of my goal in busking is to entertain the folks around me enough to get them to actually listen to what I'm playing, perhaps super-depressing tunes aren't my best bet, at least not a full brigade of them.

Milk and Honey

2006-02-06T23:17:00.000-08:00

Life is all about calluses. If you're not willing to build them up either literally or figuratively when it comes to what you wanna get better at, chances are you'll stay pretty bad. Not 24-karat wisdom, to be sure. But true, I think.

I'm having an awkward time spinning the acting and songsmith plates simultaneously. Well, in truth, I haven't done much for my acting career since arriving in town. There are tons of excuses to be had, and none of them deceptively winning enough to show up here. Suffice it to say that way too much of my life has lately been sapped by unimportant projects (my job). Nevertheless, I came out of last week one song lighter (I guess I should say heavier...but when I write something new, I feel a lot more buoyant and a lot less cumbersome), and the show I was helping out with is -- thank the merciful heavens and even-more-merciful jars of tupelo honey that have imbued me with sufficient sugar rushes to charge, broken-axle and off-kilter, through this week --is done! Now I gotta get back to earnin' me some songwritin' and buskin' calluses.

Had one listener tonight who never said a word to me but made a nice donation and gave me multiple -- if somewhat grave -- thumbs-up. I wouldn't think to do that in a solemn way, but then again I didn't think to pay off my monthly college loan payment on time this month.

The new song (I even need a working title!) was a scrap of something I started writing two years ago, if I'm not mistaken. I hadn't forgotten about it, but I had forgotten a chunk of it after I came up with it, and in a sacred effort to summon the ghost of the missing chorus back to the realm of living music, I nobly left it my its lonesome for way too long. Now, sidestep for a second: I've been really into this artist Laura Veirs (I mentioned her a few posts back). I haven't really fallen headlong for an artist's stuff in a while, so being won over by her performance and music brought a much-needed sense of refreshment. More on her stuff another time. At any rate, I read an interview of hers regarding songwriting...she was never super into music in high school (can't say I shared that trait), but music of all manifestations -- including songwriting -- hit her towards the end of college. She's since become a champion of songwriting, insisting that "anyone can do it", and going so far as to teach private songwriting lessons in her hometown of Seattle. One of her pupils was an elderly German guy (if I recall correctly) who adamantly resisted the notion that he could write until Laura sat down with him and helped him string some chords and phrases together. Once he saw how easy it could be if he just allowed himself to toss the fear of failure (or success, as it may be) aside, he was overjoyed. But he soon descended into huddling over his lyric scraps, protecting his ideas...basically becoming one of those "classic cases" as Laura says.

I'm totally one of those guys, and I hate it. Songs don't need to be these malnourished tubors that I labor over for ages, providing just enough water to keep them alive but preventing them from growing. That's like fucking veal. And I hate veal. I'm not going to write veal!!!

Anyway, I finally finished that song. It's far from perfect (I fudged some lyrics today at 50th St), but until I really really really get in the habit of working on songs (I'm only up to one and half reallys), I shouldn't be expecting a smooth, polished shoe of a song. I'm fine with Chuck Taylors for now.

Brother, can you spare some time?

2006-02-02T23:05:00.000-08:00

Yeesh. Just one busking outing this week. I thought I was getting quite an audience at one point because the trains stopped running for about forty minutes....and then my string broke. I thought I had a replacement, so I started fitting a new one in before realizing that I'd picked the wrong string. The proper G string (that just doesn't good) was waiting at home for me, so I packed up and called it a night. Not too eventful. I was kinda grumping around all day, and because office work's getting crazy and longer (I hate having to use that as an excuse), I didn't find a pitch until 8:00 or so. This weekend's not looking so good either...it's amazing how quickly I can get rusty.

Moravian Spice

2006-01-28T19:55:00.000-08:00

All right, so it's been nearly a week since I've been out busking, and I've been much more agitated about this than I thought. Performing is addictive. So addictive in fact, that once I started playing tonight, I effectively missed the improv comedy show my friends Jason Grossman and Christian Capozzoli were in! Alas. These guys are hysterical, by the way. There are some links to their respective websites yonder to the right. They're in two troupes: The Academy and El Partido, and they perform at the Magnet theater in Chelsea. Anyhow, I'm pissed I missed their show....but it was so gratifying to busk.

I added a sign on my case that mentions this site and my myspace page. I was shocked at how many people seemed appalled by this. A lot of passersby squinted at the sign, then at me, then at the sign, then at the lump of confusion clotting up their neurological pathways, then kept walking. Weird. But I also had some very friendly onlookers tonight. Some little kids (3 or 4 years old?) were really mesmerized by my guitar, and I let them come over and strum it for a while. Way too cute. The little boy ran around me in circles while I played, but his sister stayed further away, a bit chagrined. Later, a couple listened to my songs for a really long time, arm in arm. Something about having that sign on my case....it made me want to do all original stuff. I barely played any covers tonight, and that was all at the beginning. Consequently, I was a bit rusty on some of the original material I busted out, but it felt really good. Anyway, the couple was very nice, and another guy told me, "Never put that thing down!" I hope he was referring to my guitar...They were all very nice, and I was really glad I'd made it out tonight.

I've been listening to Laura Veirs nonstop since I saw her open for Colin Meloy on Thursday. I wasn't familiar with her stuff at all, but I seriously think it's changed me. My writing has lately been so much more...I dunno...liberated, free-spirited, and relaxed than normal. Her new CD, "Year of Meteors," is absolutely gorgeous. I guess that the best category for her music is folk/singer-songwriter, but both of those terms are pretty vague, and often misused. Just go pick it up.

Water Moccasin

2006-01-23T18:26:00.000-08:00

I only learned one new song for tonight, the Beatles "For No One" (which I actually used to know way back when). I have plans for almost every night this week, so I busked somewhat abruptly tonight knowing it would be a while until I could do it again. Although I got to my pitch at 49th St pretty late (around 7:00), I still made decent money -- and I got two five dollar bills! Yowza. One couple gave me six bucks -- I was flabbergasted. I guess my salivary glands were overeacting tonight; one of my harmonicas was waterlogged by the end of the night. Luckily, the reeds seem to be okay, which is fortunate since I don't know the first thing about replacing them. Speaking of which I've been kicking around the idea of getting another harp...I've got one in G and one in C. I've got a lot of songs in A, so that might be a contender for purchase. I also cannot get concertinas out of my head! I want one so bad, but they're surprisingly pricey (like many musical instruments, it's not necessarily a good start to buy a bottom-of-the-barrel model).

Been listening to Neil Young like crazy. Especially his golden era (no pun intended) like After the Goldrush, Harvest, and Comes a Time. Such beautiful music. It makes me want to be a lone vagabond traversing the wild west. Will the time ever come for such things?

Last night I got entranced with Desmond Ivey's biography. He built his first guitar from plywood and fashioned guitar picks from plastic bottles. Years later, when he finally examined a professionally-made guitar, he discovered his fretting format was absolutely perfect! What an amazing guy. He's studied all over the world. Yet he plays in subways! Don't get me wrong -- I love that! It proves that even for the most talented musicians, sometimes the most important part of your life is the MUSIC, not the money you make playing it.

Anyhow, I started working on a new song last night using Desmond's story as a starting point...we'll see what happens. I definitely want to have some new songs when I go out again.