Songs to Play at my Funeral

I sort of skipped ahead with my last post. Somewhere in between recording Iris on that cheap recorder and the better more refined if you will, recording, Mike and I continued to play and record together. We would get together and just try to come up with stuff on our own and sometimes he would bring lyrics that he had written and we would try to come up with the melody for the song.

There are two songs that stand out to me most. A few more that I don’t want to put out there as they were not what you would call “good” at all. But hey, we were just throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick. The first of two songs is a song called Candy. It was my first real introduction to how Mike wrote songs. The lyrics were very abstract, where I wanted to write stuff that was much more literal. However, I really liked his writing. I got the sense that Mike adjusted to my musical style more than I adjusted to his and part of me feels selfish for doing that, but it was all I knew and my comfort zone. I wanted a more melodic sound and always try to improve my vocal abilities, which admittedly at this time were still very raw and not great. Mike, I believe cared less about the vocal quality and more about the raw energy of the sound. He liked to experiment and actually enjoyed more electric stuff than acoustic. But again, I think he was very patient and gracious with me and met me where I was vs. me trying to meet him where he was. I regret that I wasn’t more thoughtful and attentive to where he wanted to take his songs.

The first song I want to share is Candy. It is Mike on guitar and I did the vocals. It was similar to our Simple Song session in that he wanted me to just find the melody and he would play along to an electronic drum track. If you listen closely (and you should be on headphones anyway), there are a lot of flaws on this one too, but i think we are getting better. We tried to double the vocals which is just to sing over the original track and make it sound a little fuller. As well as some echo stuff in the verse. You can also hear that we get a little offbeat as the song closes out, but I still think we were progressing at this point.

The second song from this era is called More Than This. This was the first time since playing with Mike where I played the guitar part. Again it was to an electronic drum beat and Mike’s lyrics. Mike and I shared the vocals and the technic of blending the vocals is not great (still trying to figure out the production side of this whole “music making thing”). At 1:30 into the song there is a long section where, if we were better at our craft at this point, we would have put some lead guitar section in whatever key we were playing in, but again, we had no idea what they Hell we were doing. At 2:47 I come in before I should with a vocal line. We left it in because it would have been too difficult to go back and fix and who were we kidding? We weren’t putting this out as a single. We were just two kids(ish) living a dream, warts and all.

Last little fun fact for this era. Mike and I, one night wanted to come up with a band name for these little songs we were making. At this time we were playing racquetball at least once a week and (stay with me on this) it seemed like every-time I wore a cotton t-shirt, my nipples would get sore and itch. I have since seen an episode of The Office where Andrew Bernard’s character had to put tape over his nipples for the “Fun Run For Rabies….” episode so I am not the only one to suffer this affliction. So, we came up with the band name……The Cotton Nipples. I personally have a fondness for this name as ridiculous as it sounds. It just takes me back to a younger time when we could be silly and dream that we were in a band, playing to an audience, our stupid little songs.