Welcome, everyone, to the first installment of the Open Mic Sessions, where I’ll bring you my performances of my original songs from various open mic nights. The video will be a bit choppy, the sound won’t be perfect, and there usually aren’t too many people in the crowd, but it’s been a lot of fun for me to do these, so I wanted to share my original song performances with the world!
Today’s video is of my song, “Choose Your Words (Carefully)” from my 2012 album, “Those Around Us”. I think I’ve received a great response to this song every time I play it live. People either relate to the words…or just find the chorus catchy. 🙂 Either way, it’s been one of my favorites to play and is always the standby song for when someone says, “Play one more!”
This video was taken by my brother Mike at Sam Ash music store in New Haven, CT on April 3rd, 2013. As you can probably tell, there wasn’t much of a crowd…but the staff sure seemed to like it! Sometimes, even if there isn’t a big audience, it’s still cool to hear your original song amplified like that. There’s something empowering about that.
I hope you enjoy tonight’s video and stay tuned each week for more videos from the Open Mic Sessions!
Hello everyone and welcome to another new edition of the Open Mic Sessions! That’s the web video series where I showcase some performances from various Open Mic Nights throughout my travels in Connecticut (so far- that radius may increase!). I’m excited to bring you more original songs in my quest to play a different original song every time I go out there! At the pace I’m going, it’ll take me quite a while to cover all of my material.
Today, I bring you “How Are You Feeling Tonight?”, which is the last track off of my 2012 album, “Those Around Us”. This is a favorite of fellow Laptop Sessions songwriter Jeff Copperthite, as are most of my “album-ending” songs. I’ve always been critical of songs that various bands choose to end their albums. They tend to choose songs that are slow and introspective. I think “How Are You Feeling Tonight?” is also slow and introspective, but this song (the recorded version) has a good beat, too. It’s also got some biting electric guitar- some of my favorite guitar sounds I’ve done so far. I always want to send the listener off after listening an album with the want to play the disc over again. So, I try to put a catchy song at the end that will sound good juxtaposed with Track 1.
The original version of this song also contains block harmonies throughout the song. That’s kind of rare with me, which is odd considering how much I love harmony vocals. I can only really think of a couple other songs I’ve done that have harmony vocals throughout, namely “Never Outweigh the Chances” from my 2002 album, “My Other Half”. And that song was done like that on suggestion from my brother Mike, so it wasn’t even my own idea! I’m glad he made the suggestion, though, as I love the way that came out.
I thought this would be a good song to do solo acoustically in a live, open-mic setting. I wrote the song with an acoustic guitar handy, though I came up with the “How are you feeling tonight?” line while doing something else- probably just singing to myself in the shower or something. I liked the idea of that- many of us ask questions of those we care about, even though we already know the answer. Do we ask because we’re trying to confirm our suspicions? Are we asking to coax an answer out and possibly start a dialogue? Or, do we ask just out of concern? These are the types of questions I tried to explore during the writing of “Those Around Us”.
The funny thing is that I didn’t ask these questions consciously throughout the writing process for the album. After all of the songs were written, I realized the theme of the lyrics I was writing- analyzing the relationships between me and the people around me that I cared about…or used to, for that matter. I think someday I’ll look back on “Those Around Us” and will be thankful I delved-into that kind of thinking. I think it helped me understand the relationships I had (have) and the ones I wanted.
I hope you enjoy my open mic session of “How Are You Feeling Tonight?”, another original song here on the Laptop Sessions acoustic music video blog!
Hello and welcome to the third installment of the 2010 Project preview series. If you’ve been around the blog recently, you’ve seen the unveiling of both the opener “No Lights, No Sound” and the second track “I Would Prefer Not To.”
Now, on to track three…
“Socrates’ Gulps” is a fairly recent song, one that knocked the older “No More” down to the fourth slot. It features one of my more ambitious vocals in the chorus, which guaranteed its place in the third slot. I won’t say much about it, other than to note that it is the song I plan on recording tomorrow and/or Saturday. For once, I’ll have the song speak for itself.
Outside of tonight’s video, I’d like to emphasize that I haven’t forgotten about the Weekend Review. In fact, I have the next six reviews lined up and ready to be written. Finding time is the issue. I did finish my class, which has freed up a lot of time, but I have been spending a lot of time hanging out with friends, reading books that I want to finish before the summer is out, and kicking off recording sessions for my first album in four years, The 2010 Project.
In other words, I’ve been enjoying the latter half of my summer break!
But stay tuned here, as I’ve pledged to post 52 of my 2010 music reviews here at the Laptop Sessions, and I am confident that I will be able to do so. (As for my Bob Dylan review-writing goal, I’ve shifted that to included his sixties releases only…)
As a final note, be sure to glance behind me in the video tonight and check out the Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin lithograph that has covered up my previous Dead Weather Sea of Cowards poster. I mention this, first, to give Wilson’s new album a shout-out (it just may end up being the seventh review on my list), and second, to re-iterate how much I love Newbury Comics, whose coupon brought the album price down to a reasonable $9.99 and included the poster for free.
At that, I’ll leave you to this Original Wednesday video and turn my attention back to the increasingly depressing Mets game, currently in the bottom of the twelfth inning. With any “luck,” Ollie Perez is getting warmed up. I mean, his role is as the twelfth inning specialist, isn’t it?
This, as you’ll probably be able to tell once you start listening to it, is a song that I wrote a long time ago. In some ways, this would be a reason to choose a different song to record, as I think I have better songs to showcase that I’ve written more recently. I do feel that I’ve progressed as a writer and that I’ve written more structurally complex and lyrically thoughtful songs.
And yet, in other ways, this is one of those songs that reminds me how I used to write and, in some ways, reminds me of a type of song that I don’t really write any more. This song, “Writing Thousand Kingdom Blues,” was written just as I really started to get into Bob Dylan’s work. Everything about him fascinated me — his lyrics, his music, his personality. Everything about him had an other-worldly feel to it, particularly to a young high school student who had yet to experience many things. At the time, I hadn’t even heard nearly as much music as I have now.
That being said, I wrote this song without filters. That is, I didn’t think about literal meaning as I was writing; I focused more on the feeling and the overall image that the words conveyed. Thus, terms like “chalkboard salesmen” or “unnecessary sports gaming powers-that-be” didn’t need to make immediate sense to everyone; it was more important that what was in my head flowed out and onto the page honestly and in as creative and unique a form as possible. I’ll freely admit now that I don’t remember exactly what I meant by all these lyrics in the song. I do remember the specific references for a lot of them, though, and it’s fun to think about the ones that I don’t. That’s what I always hoped people would want to do with my music — with any music, really — to take it in and come up with a theory about what it means and, perhaps, how it could relate to their own lives.
The inspiration for the title came from a novel I read in my senior year of high school — Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres. My English teacher, Mr. Rinaldi, had us read it alongside Shakespeare’s King Lear and draw comparisons between the characters and plot details. It was an enjoyable book, and I remember its themes and ideas creeping into my own writing of the time. That’s actually one of the things I miss most about being a student — the ability to take in a lot of new literature and information in general and tune out class when inspiration hits, putting the pen to paper and writing. My most boring classes in college were often the ones that I got the most writing done during. I can think of a couple for which the only interesting aspect was trying to complete a poem or decide on how to finish the chorus to a song.
Ah, well, there’s always my nine remaining master’s degree courses to look forward to… 🙂
Well, that’s it for me tonight. But, before I conclude, I should point out that I have the honor of recording and posting the very first Original Wednesday of 2009! For my next Original Wednesday, I’ll be debuting another new song that will be featured on my upcoming album (to be recorded in 2009!). For now, I hope you enjoy this blast from my recording past.
