The Teem Swings Into High Gear

Know Eye Inn Teem got its act together this weekend, and made two final or near-final live recordings.

On Saturday, we attacked The Magnetic Fields' "Washington DC." Ann had suggested this song for the KEIT repertoire, which is ironic, because it is our only song that doesn't need a bass guitar, which Ann plays. I am going to make Ann put a bass line in anyway, but absent that, the song is done. It is less than 2 minutes long, with some cheerleaderesque chanting and a simple yet endearing melody. In short, it plays to our strengths, plus we love that it is about Washington.

The song has only a couple manic spurts of marching-band-style drumming. Given that our drummer won't return from far-flung parts of the globe until the 15th, I did the drumming. The fuzziness of the recording and brevity of the drumming is such that you can scarcely tell I can't keep the beat. The biggest challenge was to play quietly enough to avoid overwhelming the other band members. At one point they tried to force me to play the drums from the laundry room, but I would have none of it. How undignified would a drummer have to be to play from the laundry room? Please. I have my pride, even if I don't have rhythm.

We got a fairly good recording pretty early in the rehearsal, and then spent I don't even know how long trying futilely to improve upon it. Mic noticed that as time went by, our cheerleaderesque chanting grew ever less perky. Finally we threw in the towel and decided to stick with our original winner of a recording.

Yesterday we took Brad's song, "Iron Kiss," and cooked it from scratch into a bad-ass anthem to love as a dictatorship. Or something like that. I had thought it was a song about Sarah Palin, but apparently I was wrong. In any case, it is a gritty song and I like it. I thought we were going to have to add drums to it on a later date, but when I was upstairs making dinner for the band, Brad sat down at the drums and somehow morphed into a reasonable facsimile of a drummer (Brad is our violinist). This is what I love about Know Eye Inn Teem: I am continually taken pleasantly by surprise.

So we wrapped up "Iron Kiss" yesterday in one day, and even had enough time to goof around afterward, which is how I ended up on Cerin's guitar....

...and Ann's bass. You are fortunate that this blog does not convey the sounds I was making.

Given my crisis of faith last week, I really needed these two wins this weekend. It feels like such a relief to have two songs now more or less in the bag. Jonathan has this bee in his bonnet about getting a "better quality recording," but it's just not a priority for me. I just want to make sure that by November 30, one way or another, we'll have our seven dubious megahits on a disc and we can get trashed and hit the town like proper rockstars during the holiday season, fighting off groupies and paparazzi, lighting off firecrackers out of the sunroof of our moving limo, and engaging publicly in lewd acts under clumps of mistletoe. Like last year.

Our success last weekend really took Ann by surprise.