Sing Along Thong

I like it when the beat goes da na da na
Baby make your booty go da na da na
Girl I know you wanna show da na da na
That thong th thong thong thong

After reading (or better: listening) to this piece of sheer poetry by the man with the grammatically challenged name, one can only feel every fiber in his (or: her) booty (uhm, I mean body) shiver with pure electrifying inspiration. This spiritual experience drove me into the hands of my guitar and The Sing Along Thong just materialized out of thin air, heavy with Mark Althavan Andrews‘ spiritual presence.

The Sing Along Thong celebrates the traumatized man who brought this 19th century invention to the masses and made millions. Yes, thongs are that old. Doing research for a song can pollute your mind with completely random and irrelevant information you’ll never need and never wanted to know in the first place. Did you know for instance that the word thong comes from the old English word thwong, which means leather cord? And, did you know that apart from the G string there is also a T string and a V string?

With 2.23 minutes SAT is my shortest song to date. Still, it will take you on a roller coaster ride of tempo and style changes. The recording is quite old and was originally made on Logic 5.

I’m not the greatest vocalist in the world (as you can clearly hear), so the ending of this song (a close harmony of 5 different vocal parts) was a particular challenge (especially because of the lack of Auto tune, which is indeed drearily missed in the bass section). Thank God for reverb and the result is not too embarrassing not to be singled out below.

Apart from leaving the ABAB format there are a few other songwriting rules that I break in this song. The first major song writing sin I commit is not repeating the first part of the first verse. The second verse is the same but has a short guitar solo instead of vocals. The second sin is playing the same bridge on three different places in three different ways, but the third time is the finale, so it doesn’t really count…

Sin 1

Sin 2

In fact the bridge is played more often than the verse and in songwriter world this is enough to send you to the gallows pole. See you on the other side…

Oasis In The City

For a while I used to read National Geographic magazine. I think it was an issue in 1997 that featured an article about Central Park in New York City. I’m pretty sure the article was titled Oasis In The City and everyone who’s walked from Midtown to the Park knows that the article’s title was well chosen. Hence, the title for the song.

Though the song mirrors the article to some extent, it’s actually a metaphor for the lives of the two main characters in the song. They’re an elderly immigrant couple thinking back of the time when they arrived in the new world. At times life in the new world has been tough and lonely, but together they could face it all. In the midst of this rat race they have been each other’s oasis.

The song sounds pretty “spacey”. This has been achieved by adding a a double delay to a guitar. I also added a lot of reverb to a clean guitar and re-recorded the same part with a different pick up and panned it to the left. To boost the chorus I replaced the clean guitars with a distorted Les Paul.

Finally, take another listen at the bridge, because something doesn’t add up: it skips two beats.

Lyrics

Do you remember the Chrysler building
We saw when we first arrived?
We sailed from the ocean into the Hudson river
Young, shabby and deprived
There’s a traffic jam on every street corner
Hookers on 42nd street
You work like hell from 6 ‘til late
When you’ve finished you can only sleep

You’re an oasis in the city
Oasis in the city

The statue of Alice in Wonderland
Is where we used to sit
I ate some pretzels and drank a coke
While you smoked your cigarette
The American Elks look rigid and proud
They oversee the entire park
A cold winter day or hot summer night
Manhattan doesn’t sleep and is never dark

There’s an oasis in the city
Oasis in the city

The city is tough and dying inside
A lot of lonely souls live here
The concrete pearls in the evening light
Oh Central park is always here

You’re an oasis in the city
Oasis in the city

Hello world!

It’s almost a year ago that I moved to London and friends in the old homeland have been bugging me to send some of my new musical eructations. In fact, even a few people here have been asking me the same thing. I haven’t been very responsive (sorry about that) and my email provider wouldn’t appreciate me sending my music around, so I thought I needed an easier way to get my songs to the other side of the little pond and here it is: a certified blog! Since the electronic highway isn’t polluted enough with no-no’s with absolutely nothing to say, I thought it would be nice to provide them with a little soundtrack to amplify their message that nobody is interested in in the first place. Hear, hear Kitchudio!

In this blog you will accompany me on my journey in modern recording. I will post my songs, or parts of it and tell you, like I used to in person, how I wrote and produced and what it’s actually about. I think it will serve you well for the simple reason that I used to bore you to death with this stuff and now you can just click away instead of fading out on me.

On more thing: I’m going to break Seth Godin’s rule. The man who shares a name with a cool guitar (must be tough, it’s like calling your kid Fender, or Gibson) says you have to blog everyday. This is what I’m not going to do. Hey, at least leave me with the impression that I actually have a life. However, I promise you I’ll blog every weekend, unless I’m on holiday. Or break some body part that is material when it comes to blogging, or when I’m just too lazy, or have another great reason.