Lookin' for con-crit: "Saw My Baby and the Devil"

[LeonardScaper]

I gave this one a listen very early this morning and decided to hold my comments for a bit. I have been sequestered in the studio all day trying to figure out how to record a new guitar.

 

Just listened again and I think I'll stick with my first reactions......

 

....I was first struck by the vocals. You know that I have listened to your stuff for quite a while now, and this one surprised me. You are having some fun with the vox here and I love it. The aforementioned comparisons....Jagger, Morrison and particularly Zevon, all hold true. But you, my friend, are a true original and this is just you taking some risks with your voice....risks that pay off big time.

 

I like the horns, but I want them to have more punch.....maybe be more selective with their presence.

 

Regarding the arrangement......I feel like the song is a bit homogenized somehow. I was left wanting more dynamics. Could be the piano that wends its way through....perhaps a bit too pervasive.

 

As far as the lyrics go......I picked up the Nashville thing, but the rest works. You know me......I look for the feel of the song as a whole.

[LeonardScaper]

COCKER! I NEVER TOUCHED HER!

 

[blue2blue]

Sorry, outside my experience.

I was taking fake umbrage, so we're even.

 

My best suit ever cost $135 in the garment district in LA. My soon to be fashion designer and soon to be XGF dragged my backside there 'cause two of my best friends were getting married at different times and places on the same day, one was a modest affair at a yacht club but the other was a formal wedding at Wilshire Presbyterian followed by a reception at the LA Country Club (don't worry, guest of all colors and creeds were allowed; that's how important the bride's dad was ). So I showed up there driving my 10 year old Plymouth Slant Six Valiant (the one in the song) in my $135 garment district designer suite with my soon-to-be-very drunk soon-to-be ex-girlfriend (who was very jealous of the bride, not the least because the bride was also one of my XGFs, who, in fact, I'd lived with a few years before. Maximum fun. My soon-to-be XGF decided it would look cooler for her to blow into Trader Vic's (the once-super trendy tiki bar where drinks were $5 back when drinks everywhere else were $1.50) squeezed into the back of my lawyer/pal's Fiat 124 two seater, behind him and his GF, than riding in in my '75 Val. By the time I got in, she was on her third round (after drinking champagne at two weddings) and, just as I was tasting my own $5 parasol drink (no beer) she gave me that drunk GF we gotta go yank on the arm (without even saying anything but we'd been going out 2-1/2 years, I knew).

 

Where was I... oh yeah... if the devil had stolen that GF, I wouldn't have whined about it.

[blue2blue]

I gave this one a listen very early this morning and decided to hold my comments for a bit. I have been sequestered in the studio all day trying to figure out how to record a new guitar . Just listened again and I think I'll stick with my first reactions...... ....I was first struck by the vocals. You know that I have listened to your stuff for quite a while now, and this one surprised me. You are having some fun with the vox here and I love it. The aforementioned comparisons....Jagger, Morrison and particularly Zevon, all hold true. But you, my friend, are a true original and this is just you taking some risks with your voice....risks that pay off big time. I like the horns, but I want them to have more punch.....maybe be more selective with their presence. Regarding the arrangement......I feel like the song is a bit homogenized somehow. I was left wanting more dynamics. Could be the piano that wends its way through....perhaps a bit too pervasive. As far as the lyrics go......I picked up the Nashville thing, but the rest works. You know me......I look for the feel of the song as a whole.

Thanks, Lenny.

 

The piano. I read that and I pretty much did a mental dope-slap on myself. Yeah, at one point I'd told myself to try a version with the piano dropped out under the organ solo (no, how could that ever happen in a band? ) and then I just, I dunno... got distracted.

 

I already know. I think. I'm gonna have to redo even the interim version (it'll cascade with the new lyrics vocals, assuming I follow through with my good intentions, which I intend [check my Dept of Redundancy Department permit on that] but which is not going to happen before this Hallowe'en. So I'll probably run that mix, render a new version of vid and post that up later tonight. Assuming, of course, that dropping the piano out under the organ will provide the space before the final lift we all know it will... so why am I still typing... I guess I'm just afraid I'm going to have to hear this thing again.

 

On the horns -- on the version I just now posted (replacing the original above) I dried up the horns a bit. I'm not sure that was necessarily the right thing but I was trying to dry everything up some.

[Dingoist]

Where was I... oh yeah... if the devil had stolen that GF, I wouldn't have whined about it.

 

Which comes great song material. I sometimes comb through my mental archives of failed relationships looking for moments to base a song, and that theme has cropped up a couple times but I've haven't yet been successful in materializing that motif quite yet.

[Marshal]

. . . . , Yeah... you and the others have convinced me that I've really got to clarify the situation and those issues. I give. . . . ,

 

Well it's always important to remember that it's your song. Song critiques are for shotgunning ideas in all directions. It's helpful if you (we) use that as a tool to see what has worked and what hasn't worked for some other critical listeners. But too many cooks can spoil the souffle.

 

Take what makes sense to you and chuck the rest.

 

And NEVER SURRENDER ! ! ! !

[blue2blue]

Oh, not to worry. If I really feel something in a song -- no matter how dumb and no matter how many people try to put me wise -- I'll stick with it. OTOH, there are a lot of times when you need a good wall to throw your spaghetti against... er... I could probably put that better.

 

 

 

Anyhow, I haven't changed the lyrics or structure but I've definitely taken suggestions regarding mix and breaking things up as much as possible in the mix. It's still a freightrain rolling forward at a steady pace -- but at least there are some changes in the passing landscape.

 

I took Lee's suggestion and my earlier idea and laid the piano out under the organ solo -- but that actually didn't have the right momentum and, ahem it left the left and right acoustic guitars, which are a bit on the sloppy side, without the glue that the piano had provided. So, instead, I dropped the velocity (oops, gave it away that wasn't a nice grand I have in a corner of my 400 sq ft beach apartment) on the piano by a sliding percentage, letting it ramp back up toward the final choruses.

 

I also subbed out the tambourine, which had become irritating to me -- and whose steadiness gave it the feel of my first drum machine program before you get it that real drummers don't play steady eighths through every part of the song, including fills.

 

So I magically transformed that into a cowbell part and then massaged that, also building in a little more dynamic variety there, dropping it down just a bit under the organ solo and killing it completely under the second verse.

 

So, I think I've come at least some way toward giving it a little more variation between parts.

[blue2blue]

I gave this one a listen very early this morning and decided to hold my comments for a bit. I have been sequestered in the studio all day trying to figure out how to record a new guitar .

I see they mispelled Stella on that one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geez, it looks like you moved into the granny flat in back of my old house, Lenny. You didn't move to Long Beach, did you? That paneling. Those windows.

[LeonardScaper]

I see they mispelled Stella on that one.

 

1933 Kalamazoo. The tone is somewhat robust........Stella on steroids.

[blue2blue]

Stella on steroids.

And it's magnified by starlight.

 

 

 

_____________

 

 

BTW, there's yet a new mix plugged into the first post. This one with a right proper animated slide show thing attached. Very Hallowe'en.

[poppytater]

:thu:

[blue2blue]

Thanks for checking out the tune, Poppy! I'm guessing that nothing rubbed you too wrong off the top, but if you wake up in the middle of the night saying, I know just what that Devil tune needs -- more bombast! -- drop me a line here or in PM with your suggestions or crits!

 

Thanks!

[jamesp]

I haz it!

The arch Dan-ish hook in the bridge is that your baby is Taylor Swift and all of a suddenly, she can really sing!

[Marshal]

1933 Kalamazoo . The tone is somewhat robust........Stella on steroids.

 

Ooh ! Ooh !

 

I've got one of those. . . . , actually I have two of them. Kalamazoo KG-11. Quite nice guitars.

 

I had new tuners put on mine and had a truss rod added and the neck reshaped to remove the triangular back. They play great. (That used to be my avatar). A friend said i should name it "Kali," after the Hindu Goddess. So I did and wrote a song, Kali.

 

Where'd you get yours? (Are we killing Blue's thread?)

[blue2blue]

I haz it! The arch Dan-ish hook in the bridge is that your baby is Taylor Swift and all of a suddenly, she can really sing!

Damn... that ties it all together and, for me, helps explain Swift's, shall we say, distinctive look -- which kind of weirds me out, more than a little, though I recognize that most folks think she's attractive; and that's ultimately a good thing, never too much aesthetic pleasure in the world, however one derives it.

 

But, for me, her being a creature of the eternal night would explain so much...

 

 

Props where due, though, her latest live vid, which I caught on one of those gossip blog websites (natch) was pretty shaky -- but it was much, much better singing than I've heard her do before.

 

And it clearly was not tuned. She probably substantially missed about 1/3 of the notes -- but it was a lot closer than I've ever seen her come without her robot friends helping her along, like they do in the studio -- although it's the sort of help that is so obvious it screams that her production staff fully believe she can't sing a lick and that her fans are so clueless and accepting that the robo-chipmunk treatment seems like real singing to them.

 

But props to Taylor for apparently really putting in some hard work (presumably prompted by the Grammys show fiasco) at gaining the skill set that her handlers apparently thought that Auto-Tune and Melodyne obviated.

[blue2blue]

Ooh ! Ooh ! I've got one of those. . . . , actually I have two of them. Kalamazoo KG-11. Quite nice guitars. I had new tuners put on mine and had a truss rod added and the neck reshaped to remove the triangular back. They play great. (That used to be my avatar). A friend said i should name it "Kali," after the Hindu Goddess. So I did and wrote a song, Kali. Where'd you get yours? (Are we killing Blue's thread?)

Actually, I was about to jump in.

 

I've got a Stella (it's currently gracing my living room wall, where it looks cool as hell -- but it's in need of some serious love, needs a bridge/saddle replacement -- the bridge is actually split and partially fallen off)... but never had a Kalamazoo.

 

Are they ply/lam guitars (as I assume)?

 

Did Gibson always own the nameplate or is it something they sponged up along the way?

[LeonardScaper]

A friend said i should name it "Kali,"

 

I thought that was the guit in your previous.

 

A friend from FLA got her for me and he's been calling her Kali. Her name is Kalamazoo Rose.

 

No chance of killing this thread......His Blueness needs all the help he can get. I'll be listening critically in my office tomorrow morning.

[blue2blue]

I never need help killing a thread.

 

For a while I was tempted to change my screenname to threadkillah. (Since then, I've seen someone else using the moniker. Great minds, clearly, think alike.)

 

If you go to the Graveyard of Threads, you'll see stacks of them, all with the last poster being blue2blue (or theblue1, as I'm known in some other forums).

[Marshal]

Kalamazoo has always been the Gibson owned brand. back in the 30s they decided to make guitars so cheap they wouldn't even put their own name on them. The KG-11 is a solid spruce top with ladder bracing. The back and sides are plywood. The tuners were real cheap/crappy. (I see Lenny's have already been swapped out. The originals were black buttons). They also had a thick "V" shaped neck because there was no truss rod. And the nut is not bone, it's a piece of Rosewood.

 

My "Kali" got named for this image a friend sent me

 

I wrote a tune, "Kali" where i use the Goddess Kali as metaphor.

[blue2blue]

Yeah, Kali popped up in my work in the 70s and once in the 80s. I studied (as much as I ever studied ) Indic lit and art a tiny bit in the very early 70s in school. It was this interdisciplinary arts program, so a lot of stuff we did was comparative analysis stuff, influenced by the comparative literature movement, cultural anthropology, and those types of broad spectrum analyses of complex cultural stuff. Fun stuff. And then, my favorite poem was The Wasteland, so I thought you pretty much had to work in 'exotic' literature if you wanted to be taken seriously, so I mashed my book learnin' with my 2 chord wonders. (I didn't start playing, in fact, until almost the end of my second year of college, when I was 20 -- although I kind of started a few months before -- but it took me a couple months to learn how to tune. You'd probably like to think I'm kidding.)

 

One of my first songs was a suggestive blues number (I had to learn a third chord for that one) Or, actually, rather than suggestive, it was just downright vulgar -- but all the references were drawn from my strikingly superficial and spotty understanding of a few words of Hindi drawn from my studies. It was not nearly as hilarious as I thought at the time. Trust me.

[Marshal]

Well,

 

 

 

 

 

 

The originals had black pegs too.

[LeonardScaper]

 

Well, The originals had black pegs too.

 

 

Glad she is back.

 

Rose has mahogany back and sides and an ebony nut.

 

Be checking out the new mix come morning..........

[rockinrobby]

Blew, you'd better not yank my Christmas song post! If you really must yank a post? I have another one for you? :-) I'm glad you got so much play on your song here, it really is a good one.

[blue2blue]

Robby, don't forget you can always post almost anything in the Showcase Threads, they're open to the most blatant self-promo, gig notices, release announcements, covers of other people's songs. (I think I put up a recording of me doing the traditional, "Ballad of Tom Dooley") Really, just about anything. Stickboy put up the US national commercial that used one of his covers -- and I know that cheered us all along. Good to see a brother or sister songwriter getting somewhere -- even if it's doing a cover.

 

In the Showcase Threads, it's pretty much all OK (except for outright commercial spam and x-rated posts). Think of it as the forum beer hall. Uh, family beer hall.

 

In fact, Robby, I would personally be delighted if you (and anyone else who wants) filled the next two monthly Showcases with holiday music! Bring it on! But don't go posting "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" and telling me you just wrote it and want some feedback. :D

 

 

Now, if you (or anyone) want to think up some special institutional thing, like a group holiday song thread with links to folks' versions of holiday songs (we could even make a special dispensation for covers) or YouTube embeds, etc, I think that sounds like a perfectly fine idea, as long as that sounds acceptable to everyone else, I'll be glad to put the official imprimatur on it and even figure out a graceful way to give you first shot.

[rockinrobby]

The showcase thread SUCKS! I'M POSTING HERE! (stomps foot "hard")