:: anne in the attic ::

Create Your Own Countdown

:: Sunday, August 28, 2005 ::

I've been on a serious ride of new music discovery for the last week or two. And it's feeding my soul like nothing else can. I'm hearing and learning new things, and beginning the long road of construction and scaffolding that will one day birth my life's work. Hope I don't run out of time before I finish it.

...Except that right in the middle of all of that, I almost did. Well, not really, because I'm still here, only a little worse for wear. I managed to take a fall yesterday that landed me in a field of broken old glass hidden beneath blackberry brambles. It sliced open my right wrist, palm and forearm in a pretty scary way. A cell phone call and a short ride later, I was triaged through the ER right into a room where I was shot with needles, cleansed, and stitched. For a few moments, though, as I waited for help to arrive and noticed the rate at which my blood was soaking my clothes and the bag I was carrying, I felt a brief wash of urgency and thought, "Okay, please hurry."

Today, I'm just sore. And a bit grateful. No severed tendons or broken bones, just several stitches in two places and some wonderful bruising. The stitches should come out in 10-14 days, and I'm on light duty at work until then. And no guitar (specifically, "no gripping or lifting"). That'll be hard, with all of these ideas flying through my head.

I go back and forth between wondering whether the universe has a hand and a purpose in the things that occur, and going over how I could have prevented it myself. I think it's a mistake to think about it either way, really, but I can't fathom another way to catalogue it right now. Anyway, I have faith in my body to heal, probably faster than expected. And in no time I'll have back the thing that matters most: the ability to make music. Until then, perhaps a more in-depth study of others' music is in order.

:: Anne 7:54 PM [smartass remarks] ::
...

As a forty-year-old woman I've been reincarnated as a fifteen-year-old boy in my studio (fuckin-A) with my electric toys, distortion notwithstanding. Sure feels like that, anyway. I've always known this was what I wanted to do, where I wanted to be. So how come it took me so damn long to get here?

:: Anne 11:37 PM [smartass remarks] ::
...

Okay, I went ahead and signed up for a "MySpace" site. They'll let me post as many as four songs in streaming audio without charging me a dime. Pretty cool. The internet has definitely levelled the playing field for schmoes like me who want to make music in their own homes and produce it themselves. Anyway, I went ahead and posted the song I wrote and recorded yesterday evening, "Lover Go Home." It's full of mistakes and I need to redo the ending lyrics, but can be heard here for now: http://www.myspace.com/anneintheattic .

And because I tend not to sing out, here are the lyrics:

Lover Go Home

Lover go home now
(go home) to the other life
Lover I know now
(I know) we’re only here by night

‘Cause I’m more me in the daylight
than you could ever know
And you’re more you in the morning blue
than I could ever see

Lover go home now
(go home) before it’s too late
If my heart wakes before my mind
Might ask you to stay

When I awake before the sun
Where you were is cold
And I’m sick of all the things
You’ve got to hide
To be with me

Lover it’s cold now
(So cold) without your touch
Lover I knew I’d miss you now
But not this much


There seem to be quite a few musicians listed on the site, most with either streaming audio or free downloads. Found one of my favorites there-- Gillian Welch. I learned her song "Time The Revelator" last year (as well as "Everything Is Free" and "Dear Someone"), but still need someone to sing harmony. Anyone?

:: Anne 8:17 PM [smartass remarks] ::
...

So of course, after seeing the film "Ray," I spent the morning in the studio fuhtzing around with some gospel style on the piano. Stride pianists make it look deceptively easy-- the juice is in the baseline, but the color is in the ornament. I wrote and recorded another song after work yesterday. Again, it's only in rough form, but I managed to capture the idea I was having at the moment. (Seems like everything I have is in study form, not polished, needs to be redone.) It's called "Lover Go Home" and came out sounding kind of like a Cowboy Junkies ballad. It's nice to have the bass in working order again. I tried to compress it enough to stick it up on the atticproductions website, but their stinkin' free server won't accept anything larger than around 300MB. I'm definitely going to have to upgrade for the sake of both file size and bandwidth allowances (for downloading), but I'm not sure if this is the company with whom I want to do that. It was good experience to begin learning HTML, and to get an idea of what kind of structure I'd want, but it's THEIR structure that seems to trip me up. You can code all you want, but one accidental "SiteBuilder" button push and it dumps all of your original work and reverts back to their trite and ugly little templates. (Pastels and "cutesy" designs-- ugh!) I did score some free slick templates that are pretty flashy (some even use Flash), but I kind of like being able to make changes on a miniscule level and even just building from the simple things I know.

I'm falling behind in other projects, though. I know that I could do this kind of work 24/7 and be quite content if it paid me a living wage. It seems I need nice, long blocks of time to really get involved in a zone, and it feels like I'm always having to cut it short to do things like go to work, prepare things in order to go to work, and oh yeah-- sleep so that I'm rested for work. But then I know that if this was my "work," I might feel differently about it, given the pressure to produce an income. I might settle for selling my songs to others who can perform and record them better than I. Or I might just keep on producing this crap in the privacy of my own life until I die (or am unable to do it any more), and let its value be decided posthumously.

:: Anne 11:47 AM [smartass remarks] ::
...