Words and Music

Yesterday Mary Beth and I went to go see a talk at this Literature Is Liberating fest up at Crosstown (centered on African American literature) and we got to the talk right on time of when it was scheduled but it had clearly been going on for a while and we only caught like the last ten minutes or so. And then the rest of the event was closing down and tables cleared even when we'd gotten there. Alas! What we caught was good. After that we went up to Burke's looking for a present for someone but didn't find one, but I did find something for me: Collaborators by Janet Kauffman (second time there in recent memory I'd found a book by an obscure writer who I'd read another book by sitting out on the display shelf!). Then at night I finished working out the lyrics to that new The Family Ghost song. I guess it's title is "Anthropocene" now. I kind of messed up and wrote an extra pair of lines, one more than I'd intended and I tried to find a pair to take out but I couldn't so I guess it's stuck like that. Maybe I'll work on it some and massage something out of it then? (I wrote them in a kind of haphazard way and I'm really not sure how they're turning out.) I have no idea of what it's going to sound like sung (I mean, a vague idea but not solid at all, I don't quite know how I'm going to sing it). I also tried to figure out the drum patterns for the two songs we used the drum machine on, and I did find them but the drum machine is acting kinda weird. A couple of the sounds (bass drum and toms) don't make a sound when the program is running (but they do make the sound if you just hit the one-time trigger button). So really not sure what's going on with that. Worse case for this show, I think that both songs have the drum machine running solo on the album for long enough to just sample that and we could loop it for the show. Not my favorite way to do it, but we'll see how it works at practice when it's all running through the mixer.