June 3

That’s Dirty

I was looking through my archives and I found this unreleased track. I made That’s Dirty several years ago as a favor for DJ Dirty of Sundae Philadelphia. This one was made with the dance floor in mind because DJ Dirty wouldn’t have it any other way. Unlike most of my music, I did use a sample in this song. It’s a well known bit from Funkadelic’s Not Just Knee Deep. I didn’t try to obscure the sample in any way, but hopefully this should be a completely new way for you to hear it.

May 24

Pinocchiobot

Sometimes when I start a song, I have a vision. Sometimes by the end, that vision is realized, and other times it isn’t. The idea behind Pinocchiobot was that all the the vocals would be performed by a computer voice. I figured that I would write some lines, stick them in a text-to-speech program, and then do some chopping to make them fit into the song. Instead, I ended up proving that even a monotonous, emotionless human voice is difficult to replace with a machine. I gave up on the text-to-speech idea and made Pinocchiobot an instrumental track.

Though the computer voice was left out of the song, as I worked on it, I imagined words a machine might by saying. This song is about a machine that moves and acts according to the whims of it’s puppeteer, but craves the type of attention a real boy would receive.

March 30

Summertime Rain

Lyrically speaking, Summertime Rain is an odd song for me. Instead of trying to tell a story, when I wrote this, I was trying to tell a particular feeling. If you mix feelings of expectation, uncertainty, mortality, and happiness, you will have the feeling I was trying to capture. Musically, I was going for something that’s kind of funk and kind of calm at the same time. This is a song that is easy for me to see imagine as a video. Maybe someday . . .

Lyrics are after the break.

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March 10

Robots and Aliens

I started this song aiming for something calmer than the others I’ve posted so far, so before I laid down a single note, I set a slow tempo.  Proving that music is never simple, this song ended up being relatively energetic anyway. Once I realized what was happening, I made no effort to change it because it seemed the song was trying to go someplace in particular. My task was to figure out where. Well, here’s that someplace. As usual, lyrics after the break.

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February 4

Monster

To come up with the music for Monster, I just added and removed instruments, notes, and parts until I came up with the basis of something I liked. At that point, I had to listen to it a bunch of times before lyrics started coming to me. I didn’t know what the song was about until the first verse started forming in my head.  Hit the read more link to read the lyrics.

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January 29

Restless

I’m cheating a bit with this first track. My studio is in the process of getting moved so I haven’t really started making songs for NothingExpected yet. Restless is a track I made a while back. Normally, I’ll try to write a blurb about the making of the track, but I honestlydon’t remember too much about this one. That’s ok, the music should speak for itself.