What I’m listening to: The Anthology of American Folk Music, Biograph (Bob Dylan)
What I’m reading: Why is Sex Fun? by Jared Diamond, Jimmie Rodgers, The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler by Nolan Porterfield
What I’m watching: Battlestar Galactica (Season 1), Paintings of the Italian Renaissance, The West
Well, I didn’t blow my mind out in a car, but came uncomfortably close…I had a major car accident on Tuesday. I didn’t see the dump truck until a split second before I rear-ended it. My car was totaled, and if not for the seat belt and the air bag, I would most likely be dead now. As it was, the deformation of the car caught my right foot, still on the gas pedal, and twisted it a bit. The car began filling with acrid electrical smoke and I came to myself enough to think that I needed to get out of the car. I pulled my foot free and managed to work the door handle, finding that something was wrong with my left hand in the process. About that time a man came up to the car and asked if I was all right. I could only stare stupidly, not really even registering his face; my brain was reeling from the force of the impact and was barely functioning. He advised me to get out of the car if I could because there was a real danger that it could catch fire.
I managed to lurch out of the car at last and limped around to the back. I rested my weight on the trunk lid and tried not to pass out as I fought to breathe with an aching chest. The man helped me to the side of the road and asked if I wanted to sit down. I did, my arms and legs and brain tingling, and the pain starting to become noticeable. A woman came up and said she was a pediatrician; she asked me to lie down and checked my pulse and breathing. By now there was a crowd around me, it seemed, but my eyes were closed and I was only vaguely aware of anything except the voice of the pediatrician asking me where the pain was, did I know where I was, what day it was, my name, etc. She asked if I wanted her to call my wife; I gave her the name and number but got no answer. The ambulance crew arrived by then, they took my shoe and sock off to check my ankle and then put a neck brace on me, then rolled me onto a back board and loaded me into the ambulance. They checked my blood pressure, which was low, and was told that that was probably normal under the circumstances. They started an IV and gave me some oxygen through a mask; my head began to clear a bit.
Before I knew it, we were at the hospital and I was rushed into the Emergency Room. My injuries were examined, they gave me a pain pill, did an ultrasound and some x-rays, and I found myself discharged at around 11:30 AM. Three and a half hours had passed since the crash.
The moment of the impact still haunts me if I let myself think about it. I still have quite a bit of physical pain. I’m temporarily unable to play guitar because of my injured hand, and my ankle is still very swollen. I can’t walk very well and I can’t drive at all. My car, which I really liked, is gone. We reclaimed all my possessions from its corpse on Wednesday. I have to find a replacement when the insurance company writes me a check for the damages. I’m a little frightened of getting behind the wheel again. I have to go to court at the end of June to determine blame for the accident. Despite all the pain and hassle, I rejoice. I walked away with only minor injuries.
I’m alive!
I haven’t posted in forever, so here’s a bit of fluff to start things going again–my votes for the top 15 albums of all time.
1. The Beatles – Revolver
This is the Beatles at their best; the most focused and yet diverse collection of songs the band ever released. You get scorching rock (“Taxman”), beautiful pop (“Here, There, and Everywhere”), raga (“Love You To”), a children’s sing-along (“Yellow Submarine”), and far-out psychedelia (“Tomorrow Never Knows”). All this while they were still touring!
2. The Beatles – Abbey Road
The band had all but fallen apart, they were moving in different directions, and yet…this, the last album they recorded together, was one of their strongest efforts. Lennon and McCartney shine, as usual, but Harrison finally becomes their equal with “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun”, and even Starr proves he’s no one-trick pony with “Octopus’ Garden”. But it’s side two’s medley, beginning with “You Never Give Me Your Money” and ending with “The End”, that lifts the album to greatness.
3. Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited
The snare that kicks off “Like a Rolling Stone” is the sound of Bob kicking the door down and storming into your house with sharp and acidic tales of the absurdities of modern society. And just like Mr. Jones in “Ballad of a Thin Man”, something’s happening here but we don’t quite know what it is.
4. Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland
This sprawling double album proves once and for all that Jimi was more than a guitar hero, he was a great songwriter and lyricist. My favorite track is “1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”, a strange sci-fi epic that makes you feel you’re sinking beneath the depths of the ocean. “So down and down and down and down and down and down we go…”
5. Led Zeppelin – (Untitled)
This is the album with the four strange symbols on the cover, the one with “Stairway to Heaven”. Yes, we’ve heard these songs a million times on classic rock radio, but they’re still great. That’s why they play them over and over again.
6. The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds
Forget about “Surfin’ In the USA”…this is the Beach Boys as they were never heard before, with ethereal melodies, complex chords, and introspective lyrics. Brian Wilson is at his creative height, before drugs and mental illness take him out for a few decades.
7. Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here
Yeah, “Dark Side of the Moon” is great, but I think this is better. The last time the Floyd really worked together instead of being a Roger Waters vehicle, their instrumental freak outs are never better than in the extended “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.
8. Neil Young – After the Gold Rush
This is Neil before he began segregating his acoustic and electric proclivities onto different album sides or even different albums. Most of the album is more acoustically-based, but you have “Southern Man” and “When You Dance I Can Really Love” to break things up. And even though there are a couple of inconsequential fragments here, I think his songwriting was at the top of its form.
9. Creedence Clearwater Revival – Chronicle
It’s not really kosher to include a greatest-hits collection here, but it’s my list! CCR was, first and last, a great singles band, and this collection proves it once and for all. We’re only left wondering how a group of California boys could transform themselves so convincingly into the shamans of swamp-rock.
10. Chuck Berry – The Great Twenty-Eight
Again, another greatest hits, this one included with the defense that they really didn’t make albums in those days. This collection of the best of the first Poet Laureate of Rock and Roll makes a strong case for revisiting just who the real King was.
11. Nirvana – Nevermind
This album blew away the hair metal of the previous decade and reminded us why we loved hard rock in the first place. The hook-filled melodies disguised and in some ways, transcended the raw and disturbing lyrical vision underneath. Classic and tragic.
12. Queen – A Night At the Opera
Queen at their most focused and diverse. Not only do you get “Bohemian Rhapsody”, but a seesaw between bone-crunching rock, lovely ballads, and kitschy romps through rooty-tooty pop music. God Save the Queen, indeed.
13. The Door – The Doors
What other band could start out with a bossa nova and end with an Oedipal nightmare? The organ may sound a little cheesy to modern ears, but nobody conjured up dark visions with more conviction than the Doors.
14. Beck – Mutations
In a way, this is the most unassuming of Beck’s albums. For once, he dispenses with the cut-and-paste hip-hop distractions and plays music with his band. Every song is great, and less monotonous than the lusher-sounding “Sea Change”. We get country, tropicalia, raga-rock, and 60s-influenced ballads before the whole thing is punctured by the hidden final track, the psychedelic fuzz-guitar attack of “Diamond Bollocks”.
15. Radiohead – OK Computer
This album, the greatest thing Radiohead ever did, manages to be melodic, hummable, psychotic, and deeply disturbing. Like the car wreck in the first track, “Airbag”, we are horrified, yet can’t look away.
Last night I had a dream about trying to play some Beatles song or other, and at one point I was rehearsing the chord progression, which was something like G-B-Bm-C-D+. Well, when I woke up this morning I still remembered this, so I thought I’d try it on a real (non-dream) guitar. It didn’t quite work, but with a few changes and additions, I came up with a viable chord progression for a verse and a chorus, and a melody to go on top of it. As usual, I have no lyrics. Most of the time in these situations I use either nonsense syllables or words off the top of my head as place-holders until I get some lyrics together. One of the recurrent words in this one is “Saturday”, but I don’t think I’ll keep it. Maybe it will be a song giving thanks for weekends!
It’s been a while since the muse visited me; I think I last wrote a song a year ago. That’s normal, though; it has always come in fits and starts. Usually if I’m working on a recording project it stimulates my creative juices a bit more.
I don’t really have a set process for writing a song, but the way it usually goes is as follows. While playing the guitar, I have a flash of inspiration and come up with either a riff, a chord progression, or a chord progression plus a vocal melody. I then go to the computer and record what I have, because I’ve learned from hard experience that I’ll forget it if I don’t record it. Sometimes I’ll have several flashes in a row and end up with several short recordings that make up the skeleton of an entire song. Then at some point days, weeks, or years later, I will find a way to make a song out of it. Or not!
So I have had a chord progression since June but had not figured out what to do with it. The initial recordings are in kind of a slow shuffle, and I envisioned some sort of crooning jazz-type song, especially since the chord progression is complex and kind of jazzy. I had a verse chord progression and part of a chorus chord progression, but no good idea for a melody. Then, a month or so ago, I decided that the rhythm should change to a Latin kind of feel. I carried the idea in my head for a while, but didn’t make a breakthrough. Finally, yesterday morning a melody came to me. First it was the chorus, and I was able to complete the chord progression with the melody guiding me. Then I wrote some tentative lyrics for the chorus, and after playing with it for a bit, settle on something I liked. Finally, a melody and lyrics for the verse followed. Right now I have the chorus and two verses, with another verse or bridge or something likely, because I haven’t said all I want to say. So it goes.
I’m not sure what the title will be. So far the phrase that stands out it “Your world can’t compare”, so probably some or part of that will become the title.
My (Blurry) Ashiko
In the past week I have finally started re-recording New Heart. First on the agenda is re-doing all the drum parts; one of the reasons I wanted to try New Heart again is to fix the drums. As a do-it-yourself musician with limited drumming skills, I have always had to resort to artificial drums for my one-man-band stuff. I first started with a Boss DR-550 drum machine, which served me well for years. However, it was very laborious to program a single song, and I usually didn’t have enough memory to store more than one or two songs at a time. Then I graduated to controlling the drum sounds on my Alesis QS-6 synth with MIDI. This gave me a lot of flexibility with timing, and the ability to cut-and-paste. Plus I could store as many songs as my hard drive could hold. This is what I used on New Heart as well as most of Machine Dream. However, the sounds were not terribly realistic, and the rhythm was still stiff at best.
Enter Jamstix, made by Rayzoon. This is the most amazing program I have ever used. It’s sort of like having a drummer (or several) in your computer, ready to do your bidding. It uses real drum samples and sophisticated algorithms make it about as close as you can come to the real thing. It sort of has a mind of its own; you give it the idea of what kind of rhythm you want, and it adds its own accents and fills. Of course, you can arrange and change what it does if it doesn’t suit your taste. It is so much better, and easier, than either of the methods I used before, and adds real life and character to the recordings. I used version 1 on Transposition, and am now using version 2, which seems even better.
Now don’t get me wrong. I still prefer real drummers, and always have. There is just no substitue for a really good drummer. But for those dry spells when no drummers are available, I’m glad to have Jamstix. OK, end of commerical.
Another thing I have started doing is adding real percussion instruments to the mix. I didn’t have the luxury of extra tracks to do this in the old four-track recording days, but now that my computer allows me to have nearly unlimited tracks, I can indulge. Pictured above is an Ashiko (which I built sometime in 2003), and I also have various shakers, tambourines, and other stuff that, when played by an actual, real, live person, add a lot to the sound of a song.
The hardest thing when starting a blog is writing the first post. So here it is. My name is Brian Hearl and I’m a musician and songwriter living in northeastern Tennessee. Just today I have finished the basic pages of my brand-new website, http://brianhearl.com. It’s not the first web page I’ve had over the years; unfortunately, I neglected my original page because the server it was hosted on was limited in capability and space, and frankly, also because I had a number of more important things to attend to. But now I’m back and hope to do a better job at keeping the site and this blog current. I have plenty of blog ideas and additonal content for the site, which I will be talking about in future blogs.
