Melancholy

Alone at home Saturday night, after watching an old friend get married in Florida by watching a streaming videocast of the event they put up on the Internet as it happened, and after seeing some smeary video images of so many people I can't hang out with and share the joy with tonight, and after going through some of the last poems I wrote before my last shot at romance some years back drove a stake permanently through the heart of wherever it was that song lyrics and poetry used to come from, I stewed in melancholy. A deep well of sadness I've been staying away from the edge of yawned before, inside, around me.

I couldn't bring myself to work on any of my music apart from some moving files around ready to work on them later.  Then I looked into some online stuff about my used expensive AKG 414 mic I got from eBay, which is acting up.  Then I took a screwdriver and tried to take it apart.  I took a bunch of screws out of it but it wasn't coming apart, so I tightened them all back up and tried it out.  It worked.  Then it didn't.  Then it did, so I decided to record the two songs I am trying to learn lately.  Then it stopped working again.  I monkeyed with it and it started working again, so I slapped down two fairly messy covers of two songs I am not used to playing yet.  I am finally at the point where my gear (when it works) is more professional than I am.  That's kinda great, actually, given how long it was the other way around.

After I did the U2 one, I hooked up my restrung bass guitar to my repaired Bass SansAmp and did an imperfect, first-take bass part.  Both of these songs are great examples of recording something you don't know well yet, when you really don't feel up to it, and you don't use a metronome, so they speed messily up at the emotive parts, and if you almost cough a couple of times from the cold you are staving off, well you just leave it like that.  

I felt the root sentiments of these songs quite a bit tonight, but had that problem where you have too much pent up energy and emotion, so it actually gets in the way of your performance, making you restless and apt to mess up the musical side of things, which I did.  Other obstacles were playing what was composed as a clinky piano ballad all strummily on the acoustic guitar, and singing in a (much lower) baritone range two songs normally performed by tenors.  Singing songs in a baritone range tends to make them slow, soothing, oozy and boring.

Tim Minchin's comedy ballad "Not Perfect."
U2's "With Or Without You"