2008 Listener's Guide

I gave out the first copy of Slightly Off Beak today, to a friend at work, Shimon. To be honest, he did not seem properly impressed. I'm positive that will change when he listens to it. It's going to rock his world.

If you've been following the blog, you may already know more than you want to about Slightly Off Beak's songs, but here are the producer's notes upon listening to it all the way through for the first time tonight.

By the way, the album is very short. Under 22 minutes for all the songs. You're welcome.

1. Mister Barista
This is my favorite song on the album, because of its energy and its innocent charm. And how many songs do you hear with a bass solo? Not enough, I'm sure. I like the part after the first chorus where it goes "da da da da da da da....BOOM," which sounds like a part in INXS's "Never Tear Us Apart." The recording tends to blur the words, unfortunately, so I include them for you here. They may have changed slightly in the final version:

When I walk from my house in the am (whoa-oh)
The coffeeshop is jazzing my brain stem (whoa-oh)
Cause that is where you work
Oh oh that is where you work
And the caffeine's a nice perk but you're the gem.

My nervousness at seeing you's acute. (Whoa-oh)
Black glasses and tattoos make you so cute. (Whoa-oh)
I can't suppress my sigh
You're just my type of guy
But to you I'm just an order in a suit

CHORUS:
Mister Barista I'm the gal of your dreams
Wake up, smell the coffee, stop playing with steam.
Jump over that counter and into my arms
We'll live happily after once you see my charms.

(Bridge)

I plot and plan my order in advance (whoa-oh)
Will caramel lattes rate a second glance? (Whoa-oh)
Or will you just fill my cup
Barely pausing to look up
I'd drop witty comments but I don't have a chance.

Don't you feel the smoldering behind my mug? (Whoa-oh!)
Are you blind to every eyelash bat, you lug? (Whoa-oh!)
My longing looks, my smiles;
My every feminine wile;
Zip zilch reaction, not one lousy shrug.

CHORUS
Your lack of interest's leaving me bereft (Whoa-oh!)
Could you possibly be socially inept? (Whoa-oh!)
Social anxiety disease
Has never before pleased
But at this point I'll take what hope I get.

If you're afraid of making the first move (Whoa-oh!)
A plan of action I think you'll approve (Whoa-oh!)
Is to have you quickly blink
When I come to buy my drink
And all my unhappiness will be removed.

CHORUS

2. Qualifiers
When we finally finished this song, Jonathan noted that it was not at all how he had originally written it, but he was okay with that. I think he should be proud; it is a very solid finished product. My personal reaction to the song went from despair at the beginning of the month, when I just couldn’t imagine what he wanted it to sound like, to finding it catchy, and stuck not unpleasantly in my head. “The age of deities is over…”

3. Show Me The Way
I cringed when this song came on, having tried to forget it ever happened in the 48 hours since I finalized it. And yet it’s not so bad (or my expectations were just sufficiently low). Jonathan and I each did our duet parts without listening to each other, and you can tell, but I actually like that “not quite lined up” effect. The pace is good, and the bass line is impressive. I know you are wondering about the “voice box.” Yep, that’s me again. You kind of don’t know whether to laugh or cry, right?

4. Iron Kiss
What is so amazing about this song is that it showcases our violin player, Brad, in a couple of different starring roles, neither of which involves the violin. First, he wrote this song, and coaxed it ably from a page of lyrics into the final version. Second, Brad played the drums on this song. Now, the drums have been sitting down in the KEIT studio since July, and plenty of amateurs (I’m a leading offender) have sat down and attacked them with sticks from time to time, but no amateur had made them sound like they’re supposed to sound until Brad came along. He claimed to be as surprised as anyone else. By the way, we determined, with some regret, that KEIT had outgrown the violin this year. There was simply no good spot for it. Luckily Brad has those other talents!

5. Washington, DC
I love Chelsea’s singing on this song. If you have heard the original, by The Magnetic Fields, it is very simple (hence its selection for our repertoire). I think we are both true to the original and give it an injection of garage-band sincerity, including the new irreverent piano ending. Mic was great at playing this ending improvisationally, so it was different in each take, and I cut and pasted from two of those takes to get the final version.

6. Kevin, Shake That Bacon
It would have been ideal to have real drums on this song, as we did when we played it at Kevin’s birthday party (see http://aluminumalbum.blogspot.com/2008/07/kevin-shake-that-bacon.html), but with geographic difficulties, I had to settle for the canned version. Mic took creative liberties with the keyboard drums and at one point toward the end, I am perturbed to discern a repeated noise like a cat coughing up a hairball, but I like that the rest of it has a little percussion funkiness. Again I must congratulate myself on my brilliant software orchestration of the voiceover interlude. Tossing aside the humility that would be appropriate when describing a song I co-wrote, I must say that I think it is a great number and am tempted to re-record and assemble it track by track into a really great finished version, then send it to Kevin Bacon. As the voiceover explains, I have no interest in stalking him; I just think he should know that there is an awesome song about him out there. Wouldn’t you want to know?

7. All Mine
The Portishead original reminds me of a James Bond theme, and I believe that our version captures that mysterious, glamorous darkness. Cerin’s guitar solo is perfect. She was a little like a sorceress with the amp, conjuring up fierce feedback while trying not to lose control and let its power overwhelm her. Go ahead, lay heaps of praise on me for my baking sheet stylings on this song. It comes in at the end, right after the last words, in case you’re not sure what you’re listening for.

8-10. Bonus Tracks
If you’re still listening (bless you), you’ll be delighted to realize the album has three bonus tracks! Two are short, amusing clips of conversation from rehearsals. The other is the off-the-cuff swing version of “Iron Kiss.”

You are encouraged to use this blog to make comments on the album! As usual, making fun of us is not just acceptable, it is mandatory.

It's Done

Slightly Off Beak is complete as of 11:15 last night, the result of about 20 hours of work over the weekend. I feel like I shoved all the songs into my mouth as fast as I could and swallowed them without chewing them properly, and now they are making me queasy.

As Ann noted, it is amazing that I managed to sit there for 20 hours without stabbing a sharp object through my eardrum.

Much to everyone's dismay, I did end up doing the singing part on "Show Me The Way," and it is just as bad as you might have feared. I recorded a lot of takes. I started out focusing on hitting the right notes, which is not a strength of mine, but those takes sounded like I was singing the song at a school recital. So then I tried picturing myself singing it to an arena full of screaming fans, but it was still lacking. Then I tried singing it like I was angry. I was getting closer. Finally, I tried singing it like I was suffering from some grievous wound, like maybe intestinal bleeding. That's where it ended up. I sound a little like Axl Rose, I think. When I put the layers together, I turned up the instruments and turned down my voice, to minimize the pain to listeners.

I'll be posting a Listener's Guide to accompany the album just as soon as I can bring myself to listen to it all the way through.

Meanwhile, now's the time to hit up KEIT members for your copy!

Leaps and Bounds

I finally started redeeming myself as a producer yesterday when I spent about ten hours working on the songs, finalizing six (six!!) of them for the album. I didn't even leave my house all day. It looked pretty cold outside anyway.

 

Thanks to our shortcut, more-fun method this year of doing almost all of the playing together, rather than track-by-track, a lot of the songs required little more than a fadeout at the end and some volume adjustments in the middle.

 

Others were more tricky. There were a lot of takes of "Iron Kiss" and "Washington, DC," none of them perfect all the way through, so I did elaborate cut-and-paste jobs to get the good bits from various takes. The ending was never the same twice in "Iron Kiss," with different combinations of voice and guitar and drums, which made it hard to synchronize the pieces. I ended up adding one drumbeat and one guitar strum to keep the rhythm, again cut from elsewhere, in between two larger chunks, and consequently there is a little roughness there on the final version, but that's as good as it's going to get.

 

I found, to my delighted surprise, a perfect "b-side" version of "Iron Kiss" amongst all the different takes. I had forgotten that we blew off steam that day by playing a slow swingy version of the song. It's going to go on the album at the end, not acknowledged in the list of songs. 

 

"Kevin, Shake That Bacon" was another challenge yesterday. I already knew I'd have to pair different endings and beginnings, but I thought it would be easy because the song has a very clear break in the middle during which there is some talking (by me) over light guitar picking. What I didn't anticipate was that the break turned out all wrong when we recorded it; you couldn't even hear the guitar under the words, so it sounded like the song came to a screeching halt and I just started having a conversation at the end, then we picked up again. It was unacceptable. 

 

So I re-recorded my speaking part and gave it a groovy echo, and then, drawing on my new, book-learned GarageBand skills, I plucked a pre-fabricated guitar fragment out of the software's selections and looped and layered it underneath my voice. Then I took a snippet of the last notes before the break and looped that with a fade, to make the transition less abrupt. THEN I copied Cerin's guitar strum from the end of the talking part in the original recording and added it to the end of the new talking part, giving it some hyped-up sound qualities for drama, and then linked it all up with the song's ending. Those twelve seconds of the song took forever to get just right, but I'm proud of it. It sounds better than we had originally planned. 

 

The only thing that is left is "Show Me The Way." My brilliant plan to get Chelsea's track after work last week fell through when I learned that she had zipped off to Guatemala for two weeks. My overtures to an alternate singer have gone unacknowledged. I can scarcely bring myself to say it, but I am afraid I am going to have to sing this song myself. It is December 7. It just needs to get done.

 

Leaving that aside, however, I think that the rest of the album is pretty impressive. As anticipated, the sound quality is not as good as if we had recorded track-by-track, but the music is so much better than on "The Aluminum Album." Know Eye Inn Teem definitely delivered this year.

Slightly Off Beak

While I have been procrastinating on finalizing the songs this week, I have made great progress on the CD inserts.

Here is your preview of the album cover!

You will see that we settled on the title, "Slightly Off Beak."

Cerin originally made the suggestion of "Slightly Off," which we all liked quite a bit, given the aptness of the description to KEIT's music.

Apparently this was not random enough for Mic, who volunteered "Slightly Beak." "Slightly Beak," what does that mean? I didn't and still don't have a clue. The conversation took place during lunch and quickly turned to our favorite holiday foods, and the next thing you know, someone suggested that our album title feature the word "parsnips." Parsnips, for those who don't regularly dine in the British Isles, are a superior version of carrots.

I wish I could have worked in "parsnips," but the beauty of "Slightly Off Beak" is twofold: just like our band name, it is something of a play on words, making us think of "slightly off beat," which we often are; also, I like the randomness of "beak," straight out of the bizarre depths of Mic's brain.

There were other suggestions, too, that were soundly rejected. Brad offered "Geneva 3-1-C," referring to the portion of the Geneva Conventions that bans "Outrages upon personal dignity; in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." Apparently convinced that the only way to improve on an album name referencing the Geneva Conventions is a DIFFERENT album name referencing the Geneva Conventions, he also offered "Geneva 3-1-A," referring to the provision banning torture.

This is what happens when you ask Washington policy types to try to think like rock stars. The results aren't pretty.

I still have high hopes of getting the album out the door this weekend. Remember when I feared that RCN was going to cut off my cable (http://aluminumalbum.blogspot.com/2008/11/not-just-rock-band-barack-band.html)? Well I did a little research, and decided it was all a scare tactic. And then the bastards cut off my cable. They're sending me a box to fix it, but it won't arrive till next week. Without my "House" reruns to distract me, I should be able to finish "Slightly Off Beak" in no time.

Future Band Members

This is EXACTLY what KEIT has been missing all this time! A saxophonist and a guy in a wetsuit!

photo from Christian Science Monitor

It's A Wrap

Know Eye Inn Teem wrapped it all up yesterday...almost. I realized sort of belatedly that I still need to get a vocal recording from Chelsea for "Show Me The Way," but since we work in the same office, I'm thinking I will just bring the laptop to the office one day and make her belt it out after hours. Aside from that, we are dis-banded.

Yesterday the first thing we did was to redo "All Mine." Mic had recorded a keyboard track way back in early November, but was nonetheless stymied all over again when he sat down to play it yesterday. There was a lot of fussing. Finally, a lightbulb went on: he was playing the wrong chord. Problem solved.

The recording featured me in one of my finest roles ever for the Teem: I played the cookie sheet. Yes!! The cookie sheet! When you bend the cookie sheet back and forth, it makes a waka-waka-waka sound that sounds very similar to the sound at the end of "All Mine." I was a virtuoso on the cookie sheet yesterday.

After we redid "All Mine," we redid "Qualifiers." We had layered bass and drums over guitar and voice earlier, but that was backwards. You always want to do the drums first, obviously. But since Chris is off battling third-world parasites half the time, we didn't have that option right off the bat. So Cerin had been forced to keep time while she played the guitar, and it seemed like she did a pretty good job. That is, until Chris tried to drum along to the voice/guitar track, and found himself having to speed up and slow down at points. He has a lot of skill and covered up as well as he could, but there were spots where you could hear the incongruity.

"Qualifiers" is Jonathan's song and I told him I would play the layered version for him and we could re-record it if he wasn't happy with it. He listened to about 2 measures and immediately requested a redo, and no one would blame him. But Chris made a request: could we play it TWICE AS FAST? He just thought it would be cool to play it really fast.

Jonathan, being more open-minded than me about changes to his vision (I would have said no way), said "sure," and the band was off, at near Chipmunks speed. Never again will a band member refer to this song as funereal. It's lively now!

We toyed with the idea of redoing Ann's song, "Mister Barista." Our recording had featured Chris playing our crummy yard sale drums, before we had hauled his rowing-machine-esque electronic babies to the studio. But we listened to it, and decided it wasn't bad, and were unmotivated to give the song another go.

Incidentally, Ann is working on a sequel to "Mister Barista." The original is about a cute coffee shop employee. The sequel will be about a cute British lawyer and will be called.....

"Mister Barrister." Ha ha ha ha ha!!!

Anyway, thus ended Know Eye Inn Teem's 2008 odyssey. Now it falls on me to make an album cover, and turn the tracks into songs and load them up on the disks. I think it shouldn't take too long. By the end of next weekend, there is no reason we should not be handing out our album to scores of shrieking fans. They will be shrieking in dismay, of course, not admiration, but bless their hearts, many of them will consent to listen to it, or if not we will force them. Rockstars have our means of persuasion.

The studio looks pretty empty now, without everyone's amps and instruments and sheet music and extension cords strewn all over the place. Now it's just a basement again.