You can bet I’m still procrastinating on projects to write weird, quirky songs for my on-going, double-side, bedroom-demo project called Your Basic Tune & Lube. Usually I collaborate on these songs with my friends (the lube), but lately, I’ve had more time to try some solo stuff (the tune and the lube). For some reason, they keep turning out folky, but that’s probably because I’ve been listening to a lot of The Band and Randy Newman lately. Check them out and if you like what you hear, there’s a whole lot more.
And no, I never sing any of these songs with my “actual” singing voice. These are all vague characterizations/mixed impersonations.
Wow. It’s been over seven years since me and my friends made Hobos in Space: A Musical Tragedy our junior year of high school.
“What is it?” you ask? Well, let me tell you! Hobos in Space is a 50-minute movie musical about a hobo who falls in love in a somewhat Shakespearean way (that is, they die). Somehow, we managed to reserve our high school auditorium on a Saturday night back in the simpler days of 2003, paid a tech friend under the table to let us in and turn some stuff on, and invited our entire student body to attend for free by running trailers on the school’s video announcements. Over 600 people attended the screening — that was more than any single band, orchestra, or choir concert.
It’s one of the projects that I’m most proud of, still to this day, because it was about some really good friends (3 of the 4 hobos who are still best friends) getting together and being creative without any outside influences. And by “outside influences” I don’t mean drugs; I mean that I’ve noticed lately that a lot of my creative friends, both in film and in music, are coming up with ideas based solely on desires to “get noticed” or make a movie that is “film festival material” or develop something that is going to “make money.” There’s not necessarily anything bad about wanting to make something that has high commercial value or a marketable appeal. However, it saddens me that these thoughts often cloud our creativity to the point that our creative voices get somewhat lost, or at least, trampled on. I’d rather be a broke and living on the streets than make something that I wasn’t passionate about.
Let’s go back to 2003. Let’s go back to when things were just “for fun.”
A few days ago, I was contacted by Second Lieutenant Dustin M. Doyle of the USAF Band of Mid-America. As it turns out, he recently took the Band of the Golden West (from Travis AFB in California) on a performance tour up in Idaho. Concluding the first act of the concert was none-other-than Turkey in the Straw. With the proper military permissions in place, I was granted approval to post a recording from one of those concerts. Enjoy~
TURKEY IN THE STRAW(MP3)
USAF Band of the Golden West;
Dustin M. Doyle, conductor
You can bet I’m still procrastinating on projects to write weird, quirky songs for my on-going, double-side, bedroom-demo project called Your Basic Tune & Lube. Usually I collaborate on these songs with my friends (the lube), but lately, I’ve had more time to try some solo stuff (the tune and the lube). For some reason, they keep turning out folky, but that’s probably because I’ve been listening to a lot of The Band and Randy Newman lately. Check them out and if you like what you hear, there’s a whole lot more.