The boy waits forever for a girl he never gets, and when he gets her he treats her bad, and death’s at the bottom of everything – the lyrics are pretty consistently melancholy. Which is good, because the music can be all over the place: I’m just as likely to strum like I’m sitting by the campfire, crunch like I’m trying to wake up the neighborhood, or compose for a robot orchestra. I was inspired to record these songs by the RPM Challenge (www.RPMChallenge.com), aka the “record an album in a month” contest, aka “NaNoWriMo for musicians.” They were recorded either for RPM 2007, RPM 2008, or sometime in-between, in the style of the RPM Challenge (i.e. very quickly). So the recordings may be sometimes scratchy, the singing may be occasionally pitchy, and there might be a wrong note here and there. But there’s value in rawness. And who knows – maybe I’ll re-record them one day in a professional studio with some other musicians. Instead of in the upstairs study, next to the litterboxes. Instruments used: Yamaha PSR-320 keyboard, Mitchell MD212 twelve-string guitar, Ibanez Performance acoustic-electric guitar, and an emerald Ibanez electric guitar that the girl at GuitarCenter said brings out the green in my eyes. 1) The Rattle Bag (duet) – 3:10 Written in Summer 2007, recorded for RPM 2008. The lyrics are from Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” although I’ve snipped a word here and there. The girl spends the song parrying the boy’s advances, but the last verse sets up one of the main themes of the album: “But could youth last / and love still breed / had joys no date / nor age no need, / Then these delights my mind might move / to live with you and be your love.” So she would gladly be with him, but only if they stay young forever and their love never cool. Singing with me is my friend Traci, who learned to sing from years in church choirs, whereas I taught myself to sing in my room with the door closed. So if our voices don’t quite go together, that’s why. Maybe it would have turned out better if we’d taken more than two takes to record the vocals. 2) Waiting for the New Wave – 5:38 Written and recorded in an about a week, sometime in Spring 2007. Let’s face it: most rock songs are about teenagers. We fall in love with songs we heard as teenagers or songs that remind us of being teenagers. “Waiting for the New Wave” may tell a story of teenage love, but it’s not FOR teenagers. It’s intentional nostalgia for adults who spent their teenage years of hormone-induced misery listening to ‘80s New Wave. 3) The Protégé – 5:28 Written in late 2007, recorded for RPM 2008. The first thing I came up with for this song was the bass line. I think it’s pretty exciting. The lyrics are pure pulp up until the last verse: “I’m not gonna wake up ev’ry day / thinking I’m gonna die / gotta be something better than this / better than the great big lie.” I’m fascinated by people who turn to crime as a way to court death, as a way to “get it over with already!” I like to think that line has some kind of existential import. 4) Everybody’s Girlfriend – 3:38 Written a week or two before RPM 2008, recorded for RPM 2008. My songwriting journey has been one of paring down to the essentials. My early attempts at writing rock songs (over 10 years ago!) were vast and complicated, with over a dozen synthesized instruments and non-repeating chord patterns, and clocked between 6 and 9 minutes. “Everybody’s Girlfriend” is the youngest song on the album, with a 2-chord verse and a 4-chord chorus, and gets its point across in less than four minutes. The inspiration and chorus comes from a remark that came up in a conversation with my wife, about how every lofty desire to create art is tainted by the lowly yearning to impress the ladies. 5) Dead Roses – 3:17 Written sometime between 2000 and 2005, recorded for RPM 2007. We shift gears from 3 rock songs to something more pop. For RPM 2007 I set out to make “techno-folk,” that is, poetry-circle strumming and singing combined with techno and hip-hop beats. “Dead Roses” best exemplifies that with its machine drumbeat clashing with its acoustic guitar. It also, incidentally, has a perfect pop pattern of intro, break, verse, break, verse, chorus, solo, verse, chorus, outro. 6) Mood Music – 4:24 Written sometime between 2000 and 2005, recorded for RPM 2007. This piece started out as that little xylophone / keyboard riff that you hear in a break early on. I found it on guitar and intended that entire xylophone part to be played on guitar, but it was just too hard for the amount of time I had, making this one of two tracks on the album to feature no guitar at all. I really like the chords that I built around the riff and the bitter “love-hate letter” lyrics came naturally, for some reason. Sometimes I think that I wrote songs with depressing lyrics, then went around looking for girls who would fulfill them. 7) Valentine’s Day Waltz (instrumental) – 4:46 Written in Spring 2006, recorded for RPM 2007. The first of two instrumental tracks and the only track to feature neither vocals nor guitar, this one owes a lot to the “Amelie” soundtrack and the waltz from Jazz Suite No.2 by Shostakovich, featured prominently in Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” It has a “dark carnival” feel crossed with an accordion player in a smoky Parisian dive late at night. As the name implies, I wrote this as a Valentine’s Day present for my wife and I think it turned out pretty well, complete with a modulation from E minor to A minor. She likes the middle section the best. 8) Butterflies – 3:44 Written sometime between 2000 and 2005, recorded for RPM 2007. Whether I want to or not, at some point or another during the creative process I start to imagine every song as the first one on the album or the final drawn-out encore at a rock concert – that’s a lot of pressure for a song! But with “Butterflies” I never imagined it being more than a lark, more than a song that would appear in the middle of an album. Yet it turned out really well, a catchy little pop ditty, like something from the early days of The Human League. It’s a bit too cheesy and synthpop for the smelly longhairs you run into at Guitar Center, but girls seem to like it, and there’s a distorted guitar solo at the end to up the testosterone. 9) My Own – 5:49 Written sometime between 1996 and 2001, recorded for RPM 2008. The oldest song on the album, and therefore the one with which I am the least objective. It is, of course, influenced by Andean folk music, but I really like the third verse, in which we get pretty dance-y, with the piano and the drums. If tracks 2, 3, and 4 are electric guitar songs for boys, then 5, 6, 8, and 9 are my attempts at “sensitive” acoustic guitar pop and girly synthpop at their most infectious. 10) Anniversary Song (instrumental) – 6:49 Written in Summer 2007, recorded for RPM 2008. The other song I wrote for our anniversary. 11) Book of Wisdom – 5:38 Written and recorded in two days in Spring 2007. This song is comprised of nearly random lines from one of those bleak books in the Old Testament (which you’ll find between Song of Solomon and Sirach in your Catholic Bible). I don’t like the way a lot of rock songs will overdub guitar after guitar, some of them only appearing for only a few measures. I wanted to do a song with a repeating pattern of two guitars, with a third coming in just for the solo. I think the texture turned out pretty well. 12) Sixeight – 3:46 Written sometime between 2002 and 2006, recorded for RPM 2008. My favorite song on the album. I like the mood of loss it sets, I like the texture of guitars and keyboards, and I like the guitar solo at the end. I think it makes for a good way to lay an evening to rest. —Peter Kovic, March 2008