Water Toes

Tripping the Id

One of my favorite things to do is play with rhythm, especially time signatures. I see no reason meter should remain static unless the song's narrative requires it.

In this tune there are alternately shifting 6s and 5s (creating an 11/8 feel), multiple stops and starts, lots of syncopation and changing moods. It's sort of a smorgasbord for a guy like me.  

4:55

Año Nuevo

 I spent an amazing day on the coast of California south of San Francisco visiting the elephant seal preserve at Año Nuevo. Afterwards I drove back to Monterey past kite surfers playing the waves and wind, and some beautiful coastal scenery. It was one of those stretches of time that makes you feel at one with the world.

All it needed to achieve perfection was a great piece of pizza. I looked in Santa Cruz but never found it. Ces't la vie.

6:36 

Incognito

This is a piece that attempts to set a mood: A suspicious character walks into a dimly illuminated area near a street corner. he lights a match, and in the instant of ignition time stops as his powers of observation are directed around the scene - a car waiting a bit too long at a stop sign...patrons in a diner acting a little too casual...a furtive pedestrian propping his collar up against the light rain - then time moves forward again, he lights his cigarette and walks off into the shadows.  

3:41

Malthus' Minions

 Life is often produced in staggering numbers. Many more are born than can be sustained. Carrying capacity may be pushed to the breaking point. Populations can crash. At which juncture it all begins again.

There is no purpose, there is only process.

6:09

Boot Hill Break  

My attempt to inject a little rhythmic eccentricity into a honky-tonk piano ditty. If the tune's story line isn't painfully obvious, let me just note that it begins and ends in a cemetery. Now, what could be more fun?

6:31

Clowns vs. Mimes

 I don't like clowns.

I don't like mimes.

A tussle between clowns and mimes? Is mutually assured destruction too much to hope for?

3:41

Tierra Mia

I had a little melody rolling around in my head that had a feeling of "returning." Not just to a house, but to something more profound; an origin perhaps, a place where a soul can be at peace.

This song imagines travelers finally cresting an Andes range to see the valley that is home.   

6:50

The Lexington

 In Chicago there's an old run-down hotel called the Lexington. It had a more impressive, if not particularly upstanding, former life as Al Capone's residence.

In the hotel, there is a huge ballroom where music and dancing once covered for the more unsavory lifestyles of some of its clientele, and where one might run into some of the ghosts of the Lexington's flamboyant past.

12:07

...yes but, no

Someone I know went through a difficult breakup. What was so unfortunate about the whole thing was that the difficulty lay not in the depth of the couple's feelings for each other, but in apparently extraneous cultural considerations.

The contradiction of it all seemed such a sad waste.  

2:26