My good friend Javier Lovera has just finished a short called A House No More and he asked me to write some music for it. He’s posted about it here. It gets released sometime next week. He’s an awesome photographer, and took some wicked pictures of my piano while we were recording it.
In honour of the fact that James Robertson is joining Christine and me on Monday, I’ve written out Tell Old Uncle Jimmy, which is our shortest song, and also the closest we get to bedroom soul. You can listen Christine and I play it here.
Here’s the pdf: Tell Old Uncle Jimmy.
Monday we’re probably going to play some Elvis!
It’s been a while since I put up a lead sheet, but Sheridan just upgraded me to Sibelius 6 and this was good opportunity to try it out and get back on the horse. Wow – Sib 6 has some great improvements. It’s a lot smarter about automatically moving things out of each others’ way, and it’s great at guessing chords without needing a drop down menu.
Here’s the Deborahs (Roger Travassos, Paul Mathew, Chris Banks and me) playing Inor Man:
And here’s the chart: Inor Man (pdf).
Christine just wrote about a project we’d conceived earlier this year called Shuffle. She’d set out plans to get three projects done this year, and this is the last one, so the pressure’s now on. You can read bits of our grant applications (which were rejected) in her post, but the general idea is more or less as follows:
Christine and I both have a bit of trouble fleshing out ideas – I’ve got a lot of little snippets of song kicking around that are lovely but unlikely to grow into full pieces. So instead of recording a regular 8-10 song album, we’re going to record 40 or 50 little snippets of music – just single ideas. The catch is that each track has to be able to somehow connect to any other one. You put them in your iPod and hit Shuffle, and you get a different piece of music every time.
I’m really looking forward to working on this. It’s both really creative and really geeky. Just my thing.
I wrote They don’t have to be pretty after hearing Dean’s Dragon one night. It’s not a comment on their appearance. They look great. They also sound amazing. They’re clearly mostly crazy.
On Monday I got to play this tune twice – once with Christine at the Tranzac and once with The Worst Pop Band Ever at the Rex. Needless to say, they were pretty different performances, and both tons of fun. One of my favourite things about writing music is what happens when other people get their hands on it and I have to relinquish some control.
Lead sheet: They don’t have to be pretty (pdf)
Listen to Christine and I play it here.