Category: Guest Post

Notebook Thursday: Drive (Guest Post)

6/1/2023

Nate Hall is an actor and musician based in Chicago. He is the composer and cowriter (with Cody Lindley) of Stabbed in the Heart, a new slasher-dramedy musical aiming for an October production. Support it with a donation or by buying tickets to its June 4 concert performance at Redline VR's Raven Room. Follow Nate on Instagram: @50firstnates

Drive is a concept that I think about every time I listen to or write music, to the point of often and rightfully deserved parody from my partner. I don’t know that my definition is one that is fully tangible, but I’ll try to break it down here.

When I’m listening to a song I’m really digging, I find myself moving my body in some way. Whether that’s a typical tapping of the foot or a less typical tightening of my shoulders while my fingers curl on a satisfying change, it’s pretty much inevitable. I crave being literally moved by the music I’m listening to.

So, drive is a way to make the music move forward. Less sitting on each beat and more jumping to the next beat too early out of pure excitement for what’s coming next. I want the listener to hop on for the roller coaster ride and put their hands up as we crest an apex, to be an active participant in the listening process.

There are a lot of ways to evoke this elation, but the most obvious to me is through syncopation. The easiest and most efficient way to surprise and intrigue, until you use it too much of course (then the boring becomes your tool of surprise, and the cycle continues). However, I wouldn’t say that a genre like jazz, practically the king of syncopation, is driving in all cases. Though the improvisation inherent in jazz creates some pockets for musicians to shock and awe their audiences, it can sometimes fall prey to its own atmosphere, becoming more of a philosophical think piece with superficially deep “hmms” and “ahs.”

That’s where the riff comes in. I love masterworks of composition by Sondheim as much as the next guy, but the opening riff to Stereogram’s "Walkie Talkie Man" that I heard on a Nintendo DS game in the early 2000s will permanently hold a spot in my brain despite anything I ever do to erase it (why would I, but point made). I love me some Joe Satriani marathon solos, but have you heard the chord progression in Carly Rae Jepsen’s "Call Me Maybe"? Cause I sure have and I am not tired of it and I think that MATTERS.

Though my process changes all the time, one constant has been basing songs off of core riffs that were fun to play and that made me want to hear the riff again, or push forward (drive, get it?). The catch is that I still need the improvisation in there somewhere to make that riff unexpected. To incorporate it, I will record a riff whenever it comes up, but then give it a title that has nothing to do with what it is. In fact, the further from the actual tone and vibe of the riff, the better. Here are some real riff titles on my phone: “string jumpy blib”, “chuuuuug”, “fhuc”, “go go”, “dirty queen”, and “don’t do it lol”. I have no idea what any of these riffs are, and that’s the point. When I have some lyrics I’m playing around with, I go diving into my voice recordings and pick the first title that comes up. Usually, this results in me using riffs for lyrics that I wouldn’t have associated that way otherwise.

Did I properly define drive? Most certainly not. And honestly, for the sake of all my future songs and musicals, I hope I’m never able to.

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Notebook Thursday: Rise of the Machines (Guest Post)

4/20/2023

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Charlie O'Brien is a founding member of The Unswept, who play International Pop Overthrow on Sunday, April 25, at Montrose Saloon.

ChatGPT has only been publicly available since November 2022, and I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t constantly seeing shared attempts at getting the machine to write something creative. Once I discovered “write a Wikipedia-style entry about…” as a prompt, the Unswept’s band text thread quickly became a place to share hallucinatory alternate histories of the band (which have a troubling tendency of killing off Ryan).

I get it—the novelty of entering a prompt and seeing coherent text appear near-instantaneously is undeniable, and it’s a pretty short leap from there to “I wonder if this thing can write songs.” And it can— sorta. A supercomputer trained on the right data can emulate the technical formalities and structure of a poem or set of lyrics (such as the syllable count or the rhyme scheme), but they usually only approach emotional resonance incidentally or accidentally. Far more often, it will create a simplified pastiche of pre-existing art, devoid of the elements that make the original interesting (Colin Meloy wrote that ChatGPT’s new Decemberists song is “remarkably mediocre,” while Nick Cave assessed an AI-generated Nick Cave song as being “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”).

It’s foolhardy to expect this new generation of large language models to instantly generate meaningful, finished art. But what if we view these tools as collaborators rather than an instant song factory—less an outsourcing of creative work and more an infinitely renewable deck of oblique strategies? As with most machines, the best output tends to come from the most refined input. So rather than tasking ChatGPT with creating an idea from scratch, I figured I at least needed to give it a title.

I first typed the phrase “time is running away from me” in an email at work—I was searching for a different figure of speech (perhaps “time is catching up with me”), but that’s what came out instead. I had a vague idea for a melody behind those words, a vague sense of what the title implied (a subtle indictment of the time crunch that capitalism puts us all into?), and a spare 10 minutes. So I directed my web browser to ChatGPT, performed a CAPTCHA to prove that I myself wasn’t a robot, typed "write a buncha verses of an uptempo rock song called Time Is Running Away From Me about losing track of goals and deadlines because of the inexorable passage of time” and hit enter. Ten seconds later, I was staring at a lyric sheet:

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Baked: Corned Beef and Cabbage Shepherd's Pie (guest post)

3/10/2023

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At a recent rehearsal we were discussing the importance of food to our musical process. I try to bake something every time the band gets together; we had cranberry spice cake for the last Baguettes session and The Cookies for the last Unswept rehearsal. Summer rehearsals are for pie. Charlie is on the record as saying he wants some sort of baked goods if he's not getting paid. Anyway, we realized we could probably put together a decent cookbook of the Chicago indie music world. So, to our already haphazard blog rotation, we're adding #Baked. Like all cooking—and indie music—it's an experiment. Brad Brubaker, songwriter and veteran dessert blogger, kicks things off.

Brad Brubaker fronts the band Brad Bru & The Crowd Goes Wild, whose current iteration shares members with Liz + The Baguettes, the Unswept, the Whiskey Radio Hour, and Parasites. Their upcoming release of the 7-song EP Smiling Politely features musicians who have played with Pigface, I Fight Dragons, Jon Langford, and Even in Blackouts. The band plays Golden Dagger on April 25.

It is one of my family's classic stories. When the Brubakers first came over to America, they were on the same vessel as the Hershey family. Since a charismatic nature runs in the family, it's no surprise that the Hersheys were quite taken by my forefathers. In fact, the friendship blossomed so much that the Hershey family asked the Brubakers if we would be interested in joining them in the chocolate business they intended to start in the new world.

"No," we said. "We intend to open our own grocery store."

Both families would later settle in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. There is still a large population of Brubakers there and, well, you know about the Hersheys. The Brubakers actually would go on to experience prosperity as grocers, but, suffice to say, there isn't an amusement park erected in our image.

What does this have to do with corned beef, you ask?

Well, my brother and I were rehashing this piece of family lore some years ago and I said, "When the Brubakers came over from Germany on the same ship was the Hersheys..."

My brother stopped me. "Dad always told me came from England."

Dad always told me Germany.

We went to ask my dad for clarification, but got none.

It was at this point my brother decided we were Irish. And why not? He loves Guinness, Flogging Molly, and everything else Irish. He even named his kids Patrick and Erin!

All this is to say that every year around St. Patrick's Day, I make a corned beef and cabbage shepherd's pie, a recipe of my own making that celebrates two famous dishes often found at Irish-American restaurants.

Corned Beef and Cabbage Shepherd's Pie
Ingredients
3/4 cup sour cream
1/2 cheddar cheese
1 1/2 lb red potatoes (or any potato, really)
3 cloves of garlic (optional)

2 Tbsp butter
1 yellow onion
2 cloves garlic
4 carrots sliced, or approximate of baby carrots
2 cups cabbage
1 lb sliced corned beef (from deli counter), diced
3 Tbsp flour
1 1/2 cup beef broth
1/3 cup-ish ketchup
2 Tbsp-ish Worcestershire
1 Tbsp-ish hot sauce

Cooking instructions
Boil water in soup pot.
Boil Potatoes (and garlic) until soft to a fork and taste right texture.
Mash Potatoes with Sour Cream, Milk and 1/4 cup Cheese.

Preheat oven at 375 degrees.
Skillet at medium medium high heat.
Add Butter & Garlic, Onion and Carrots, 5-8 minutes or until onions are translucent and carrots softened a bit.
Add Cabbage and cook 4-5 minutes.
Add Corned Beef and cook 3 minutes.
Add Flour and cook 2 minutes.
Add Broth, ketchup & Sauces. Simmer 10 minutes.

Add Corned Beef & Cabbage mixture to a baking dish.
Top with Mashed Potatoes.
Sprinkle remaining Cheese on top.

Bake for 10-18 minutes. I don't take it out until the gravy is bubbling up.

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Notebook Thursday: St. Jerome Success Stories (Guest Post)

6/2/2022

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Thomas Zeitner is one-fifth of the Baguettes and one-fourth of the Loudness War. Scott Tribble is his longtime songwriting partner.

Songwriting is already hard, and everyone does it differently. Collaborative songwriting is the art of dropping two unique processes on top of each other and hoping they mesh. I’ve had the most success co-writing with Scott Tribble, published author/rhythm guitarist. We played together in a band that went through multiple names and roster changes, a la Spinal Tap, from 2000 to 2007. Scott moved out of state, but wanted to keep writing, so we would meet for the odd weekend to try recording new material.

You need to devote serious time to collaboration. Our songwriting sessions were mostly periods of throat-clearing and empty space, while we waited for our brains to hit the same record groove. One thing we had to our advantage was that we had different strengths. Scott’s end was arrangement. Mine was lyrics. We basically pitched half-formed ideas until something lit up on the other side. It works, but it takes a long time for the flint to spark. Not everyone writes “Get Back” on a smoke break.

“Make It Home Alive” had two sonic parents: an orphaned, Gin Blossoms-style chorus that came to me while practicing, and a melody line that Scott had recorded and sent to me, like a voice memo.  Both were at least a year old when we got together in 2008 to record what we labeled the "Tap Sessions." Looking at what we demo’ed that weekend, it was a productive session, but I remember feeling we were losing steam toward the end. Time was of the essence, since logistically our in-person collaborations were few and far between. It might be why Scott decided to revisit his existing melody line (labeled “Honesty” in my iTunes).

I had heard that piece dozens of times, especially because I played all of his tracks in anticipation of the weekend. But there was nothing there until that moment. I overuse the metaphor of fires of creation, but I promise you, dear reader: on a good day, songwriting is more light than sound. And the room was glowing.

The melody repeats itself a little, which inspired an internal rhyme. “Your dad’s saying that you tricked him. Your mom’s playing the victim/But it’s all a trap for you.” Great. Now we had half a verse. All I needed is another internal rhyme and something that rhymes with “you.” Easy.

Scott, meanwhile, saw that I had something, and was willing to just play the same four chords over and over until I figured it out. “We did nothing ‘gainst the law but I’m the only one they saw/So I’m going to take the rap for you.” There’s a good chance that we might have stalled out there, but Scott was playing in A major, which gave me a segue to the chorus I already had in my pocket. I just needed to slow it down to the mellow tempo, which had an alt-country vibe—like a Wilco or Old 97s ballad.

“It’s all right. It’s okay. It’s better it happened this way/And I don’t think I’m gonna make it home alive./You can call the police. They couldn’t catch a disease/And I don’t think I’m gonna make it home alive.” I sang, muttering chord changes to Scott in between words.  After two hours of nothing, we had one third of a song written in about two minutes. It only took a year!

We paused long enough for me to write everything down. (I’m pretty sure “gainst” was a deliberate choice from the very beginning but there’s a lot of editing on the fly.) It was a strong template. Unless we did something really bizarre for a bridge, the piece was four chords total. Scott kept playing. His part was done. Now we were just painting the house.

I focused on the ambiguity of the first verse. It evoked rumors and innuendo. Details would only pin down two unnamed souls who already had enough working against (‘gainst) them. I somewhat regret using “we’re not here and we’re not proud” as it’s more explicit than anything else in the song. Is “Make It Home Alive” about coming out in a very conservative community? Yes. It’s also about abortion rights, manslaughter, and John Grisham’s “The Client.” The salient issue is that young people have problems they’re not prepared for.

Even with internal rhyming, ABCB is one of the most forgiving schemes to write within. The rest of the lyrics were finished in less than an hour.  We recorded a rough, ROUGH demo, adding some country-fried lead fills to temporarily cover some of the musical gaps. The song was much slower than the chorus I started with, and it’s apparent when I hear myself trying to hold a melancholy note long enough. Rough performance aside, it’s a solid song, and a great example of collaboration as a synthesis of two parts.

At some point, we remotely re-recorded it in a faster "Hey Jealousy" style, with me valiantly and painstakingly adding GarageBand drumbeats to propel the song. But it definitely needed the energy of a full band together in the same room. I eventually started a new project in Chicago and brought the song to the group as something that our guitarist Charlie could sing. We maintained the faster tempo, and it worked beautifully. Our original country weeper was no more, but, hey, we can always include it when we release our Basement Tapes, right?

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Notebook Thursday: Please Don’t Waste My Time (Guest Post)

5/19/2022

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Charlie O'Brien is the guitarist and cofounder of Sheffield power-poppers The Unswept. "Please Don't Waste My Time" appears on their most recent album, Fast Casual.

Editor's note: Charlie's pants are much fancier than ours, and he wrote with numbered endnotes, which this blog does not support. This blog does not even let you superscript numbers, which we did not know until we tried to format things manually. A small blue-green numeral follows Charlie's annotated thoughts, like so: 1. Tragically, you cannot mouse over the number to see the annotation, but the notes appear at the bottom of this post. If you are a Weebly/Square customer, please let them know that the people demand annotation.

There are two popular schools of thought about songwriting:

Fully-finished songs are sitting out there in the ether, waiting for a musician to tune into the right wavelength by which they can become the conduit through which the song flows, or…
Songwriters are crafters who hone their skill with carefully considered musical and lyrical ‘tricks’ to laboriously create the illusion of a piece of music that has always existed.

But I’m sure that the reality falls somewhere between those two extremes. Everyone who writes a song has to strike their own balance between capturing the raw, mysterious inspiration and honing in on something that’s “finished.” The scare quotes are there because, for me, the most surprising part of working on a song is deciding that it’s done. This was certainly the case for “Please Don’t Waste My Time,” a song that appears on the Unswept’s fourth LP Fast Casual.

This song’s vocal melody arrived with little fanfare – I don’t think I was even playing an instrument, the tune just appeared in my head. Once I found time to sit down with a guitar, I strummed a simple chord pattern (a variation on the reliable old Pachelbel Canon in D chord sequence) and the basic structure of the song was in place shortly thereafter. But there were no lyrics – just boo-doo-boo vocalization,1 culminating in the line “please don’t waste my time.”

I’m not sure where that line initially came from (it’s possible I subconsciously cribbed it from the bridge of “Sleeping With The Television On,” one of the only Billy Joel songs I really love), and I couldn’t figure out what the implications were for the rest of the lyrics. It’s sort of a harsh and argumentative phrase, but I had a vague feeling that the song was pulling in a more romantic direction. Also, the melody leading up to the line implied a rhyme scheme that demanded a lot of rhymes for “time.” So I opened up a Google Doc2 and started free-associating phrases and words hoping that a topic or focus would reveal itself…

Friend of mine
Give me a sign
Mountains left to climb
Guitars chime
Nothing rhymed3
In a bind
I feel somewhat disinclined
Is that such a crime
Miss all the warning signs
So unkind

Some of those lines made it into the final draft, but I was mainly just searching for a lyrical hook that would sing well, and which also had enough details to suggest a plot or situation to give the song focus. But I couldn’t immediately find it, so I set it aside for several months, when I returned to it and wrote these 2 verses:

You’ve known lots of guys before me
I’m aware, and I don’t mind
Cuz I fell for you and you fell for me
And we had some good times4

But I don’t like feeling cut down
By someone who’s a friend of mine
I get sad and then I shut down
Please don’t waste my time

These lines acted as a Rosetta Stone for the rest of the lyrics – it introduces the characters (“me” and “you” – the Dramatis Personae for most pop music), establishes an alternating rhyme scheme (with the first line of each verse featuring a rhyme spread between two words), and suggests a plot for the rest of the lyrics to follow (which threads the needle between celebrating a romantic relationship and worrying about the factors that could harm it). That’s a lot of boxes to check off, and for the next few months I continued adding lines and phrases that fit those requirements.

The lyrics in the b-section of the song5 came from following the logic of “wasting one’s time” to its logical conclusion: time is all we have, and you can’t get it back once it’s gone. I briefly toyed with the idea of doubling up on the b-section at the end and adding these lyrics:

Don't you lead me on
I'd never do you wrong
And don't you close that door
Treat me like you did the night before

But even though there’s never a bad reason for a blatant Beatle lift, these lines seemed surplus to requirements, so they were shitcanned. (Although reading them now, maybe it would have been cool to pair them with an upward key change? Is it too late to pull a Kanye and take the song off the record while I rework it?)

The final verse was inspired by binging through the entirety of Call The Midwife – the phrases “for all’s sake” and “I must implore you” popped up around Season 5, and both sets of words seemed to share the “emotionally exasperated yet politely restrained” tone of the rest of the song:

You should know I still adore you
But I cannot read your mind
For all’s sake, I must implore you
Please stop wasting time – either yours or mine

By this point (October of 2021), there were enough lyrics in my Google Doc with which to assemble a song of reasonable length. Which took me by surprise – I’d been accumulating lines for a little over a year at that point, but the song seemed like it was going to remain perpetually unfinished. I knocked out a quick demo on acoustic guitar and sent it out to The Unswept, who confirmed my suspicion – it sounded like a finished song! (We actually used the acoustic guitar track from my original demo as the basis for our version.) Once the arrangement started to fill in (with Liz’s bass line and harmony vocals, percussion from Ryan and an all-in group handclap track), I started to forget the prolonged, solitary process of writing and began to accept it as a finished piece of work – one that didn’t necessarily belong to me 100%.

I suppose songwriting is a little like writing a good joke, in that comedians tend to start with a solid punchline, and then work backwards to set it up so that the punchline has maximum impact. But the magic doesn’t really happen until you say the joke in front of people and they laugh at it. With songs, you can have a great melody or great lyrics written on a page (or saved on a word processing document), but it’s not really a great song until you play it for somebody else and they react to it. So much the better if you have musical collaborators who are willing to add their own ideas and play it alongside you.

1. This method of fishing for lyrics by singing nonsense syllables is a time-tested yet mysterious tradition. John Linnell of They Might Be Giants described it thusly in a recent podcast interview: "A lot of ideas come from the sounds of the syllables of the words... You usually start with a melody, and then the melody suggests a set of syllables that work with those particular notes... Often, you let the song write itself in that way."
2. Dated October 20, 2020, as it happens. There’s something to say for writing longhand, and I probably was more prolific when I carried a Moleskine around for song ideas, but it is sort of nice to be able to go back and see revisions automatically.
3. It would have been nice to include this as a nod to Gilbert O’Sullivan, but it was not to be.
4. Changed in the final draft to “it’s been a real good time.” a line whose grammar would not impress Dorothy Zbornak, but included as a nod to “Real Cool Time” by Ramones and “Real Real Good Time” by Parasites.
5. I’m not sure whether to call this bit a bridge or a chorus. Actually, I think what I have been referring to as “verses” here could be a variation on what Andy Partridge calls a “vhorus” – a hybrid of a verse and a chorus which prominently features the title line.

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Notebook Thursday: Drive (Guest Post)

Notebook Thursday: Rise of the Machines (Guest Post)

Baked: Corned Beef and Cabbage Shepherd's Pie (guest post)

Notebook Thursday: St. Jerome Success Stories (Guest Post)

Notebook Thursday: Please Don’t Waste My Time (Guest Post)

Liz Bagby

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