Some Music?

Besides triathlon, my other personal passion is recording music.  There was a time back in the '90's when I was playing in a band that had some (very) moderate success.  But even then I always preferred the studio over touring.

So every couple of years I'll cobble together a bunch of songs and record them.  Since I've started triathlon training, I haven't put much time into the music, but I did recently finish up a project I started a year ago.

Since I earn my living with at least one foot in the music business (where involvement in same has a way of jading you in about 2 seconds), I decided I wanted to write and record as a fan and pay tribute to some of things that I like so much about music.  So I made a list of bands, albums, songs, and even random parts of albums that I loved, and then tried to fit a little something from each entry into the songs.

I'm most cases, I would go into a marathon session and finish a song in a day.  That means that the arrangements are not always stellar, the lyrics are not that good, or there is some other flaw along those lines.  But I tried not to get too hung up on anything, this is purely for fun after all.  And in the end I  like how all the influences I wanted to include seemed to work their way in to what came out (at least to me, anyway).

I uploaded all the songs as MP3s into a zip file.  If you want, you can download them here.

I played/programmed/sang everything you hear.  I recorded it on a Mac based audio workstation in my extra bedroom.  It's amazing what you can do with computers these days :).  A quick disclaimer - I am not a very good singer.  The only reason I could get these vocal tracks to a point that other people besides my mom consider passable is by recording them multiple times and then running them through every vocal processor and pitch correcting device I could line up.

I'm usually uncomfortable talking about my music.  I'm fine leaving that to Bono.  But since these songs are so heavily referential,  I think I should include some Cliff Notes:


1 - Ballad Of Missed International Phone Calls.  This is really just an intro piece, and it is a mixture of what I like about the beginning of The Smith's song "Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me" and the interludes between songs on Pink Floyd's "The Wall".  You know, where Pink is trying to make a phone call back to the UK?  Yeah I know the ringing phones are fairly obvious.

2 - Home.  There is a guy named Bob Mould who started with Husker Du back in the '80's and has been putting out a record more or less every year since.  I pretty much love everything he has ever done.  He has a knack for writing hard driving, guitar-centric pop songs.  I also love a band called The Doves who also write pop songs, but add in a big dose of electronic synthesizer sounds and textures.  So mixing those together, I came up with this one.  The bridge also gives Duran Duran a little shout out - I used an appregiated synth (think "Hungry Like The Wolf") underneath the guitar chords.

3 - Get On The Fun.  I love T-Rex.  And I love a Canadian band called Sloan.  You have to admit that T-Rex's "Get It On" is one of the greatest dirty/sexy songs ever recorded.  And Sloan writes the best pop chorus hooks that you've heard since you heard that last Sloan song.  I don't claim that my song is dirty/sexy or contains a brilliant pop hook, but that is where I was hoping to get to.

4 - Mister Sun.  This song is me copping Oasis copping The Beatles - pretty much all the John Lennon and/or George Harrison songs on Revolver, McCartney's "Eleanor Rigby", and a little bit of "A Day In The Life" from Sgt. Peppers.  I also love the drum loop at the start of NWA's "Straight Outta Compton", so I threw that in for good measure.


5 - 1:15 AM Somewhere in Sheffield.  This one is just a short interlude.  There was a time in the '90's when there was a lot of great techno/rave music coming out of the UK.  My favorite stuff was by Orbital, with their album "Orbital 2" being the best album by far.  I like Orbital so much because at the end of the day I am a pop music fan.  Orbital is a techno band for sure, but they manage to make each track into a great melodic song as well.

6 - Center Of The World.  Both Air, the French electronica duo and Paul Weller where on my list.  With this song I thought the backing track sounded quite a bit like Air but the vocal melody could have probably shown up on Weller's "Wildwood" album.  And since I had already propped out 3/4 of the Beatles, I needed to include a Ringo song.  So I tacked a vocal arrangement similar to the end of "With A Little Help From My Friends" on to the end.  It worked out pretty well.

7 - All The Time.  When I first started messing around with the chord structure of this song it reminded me of something The Turtles might have done.  But The Chemical Brothers have a song called "Let Forever Be" that has one of the greatest drum tracks of all time.  So I borrowed a little from here and a little from there, turned the guitars way up, and ended up with this.

8 - Bomb.  There was a band called Throbbing Gristle around in the '80's.  One of the first (if not the first) noise/industrial groups out there.  They used to scare the crap out of me when I was in high school.  There is not much to this track, but every intro deserves and outro and so here it is.

The choice of "Weldon's Apple" for the project name is unremarkable other than I thought of it in thirty seconds and I think it sounds vaguely psychedelic era London-esque.  Yep, I'm a bit of an Anglophile when it comes to music.

If I recall correctly, all these songs clock in at about 26 minutes.  Perfect for your next short run...