Oh no the radio has got me by the ears and won’t let go
Back in 1999’ish I heard the name Owsley on the XTC Chalkhills mailing list. I bought the album based purely on that recommendation. For the definition of ‘power pop’ look up this debut album. The guitars are purposeful, the lyrics straightforward, the vibe energetic and direct.
Oh no the radio Has got me by the ears and won’t let go Oh no the radio Is playing that song again Oh no no no no the radio Follows me everywhere I go Oh no the radio Is playing that song again
Owsley is the debut album by American singer-songwriter Owsley, released on Giant Records in 1999.
Born and raised in a richly musical family, Owsley spent a majority of his childhood working as an unpaid roadie for his brother’s rock band and playing guitar along with the radio to such bands as Wings, KISS, and The Cars.
While touring the southeastern USA with different cover bands, Owsley was introduced to funk-pop pioneer Judson Spence with whom he played around the world, both literally and virtually, by appearing on MTV in Spence’s videos. Owsley then met another talented artist by the name of Ben Folds, who introduced him to Millard Powers. Millard and Owsley formed a band called The Semantics (featuring Zak Starkey) that would eventually dissolve, with each band member musically going his own way.
Jaded by the break up of his band, and disillusioned with the notion of fronting a band, Owsley opted to relax a little and accepted an offer to play guitar in Amy Grant’s touring band. This allowed him the financial freedom to pursue his own music and invest in a home studio where he recorded this album.
Owsley next crossed paths with legendary producer Mutt Lange, who hired him to play guitar and sing duets with Lange’s wife Shania Twain on several nationally broadcast television shows.
After two long years of recording, Owsley emerged with his eponymous, solo debut. Recalls Owsley, “I had heard the story of Tom Scholz of the band Boston recording his first album and taking it to the record company, where he told them that it was finished and they could take it or leave it. And I thought, ‘What a cool idea!’ I didn’t want anyone else coming between me and what I was trying to accomplish.” The critically acclaimed record was released by Giant Records in 1999 and was nominated for a Grammy in 2000 for ‘Best Engineered Album’.
While doing a little searching for forgotten details about Owsley I discovered that there was a follow-up album “The Hard Way” in 2003. I’m going to buy it but for now I’ve managed to get a copy to listen to. Seems he’s still on the road with Amy Grant , looks like a good deal to me – he plays for a living and then gets to record his own music when the opportunity arises.
Links are in the first comment. Password is imadethebbc
and breathe
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
How do other songwriters/musicians/artists do it ?
Monday… full day in work and then spent the evening getting stuff up onto ebay after doing some stuff with the kids.
Tuesday… full day in work and then a gym session… ‘poleaxed’ is how I feel… fixed a shower door that badly needed fixing… fixed a door that wouldn’t close… fixed a light fitting that wouldn’t light.
This morning I had a 3-way phone call with China, Japan and (here) Ireland. That’s just odd. Really.
I want to write & record & create & all of the above.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be different. After the meetings and conference calls there are some synthesizers I want to put onto a track. A gig I want to check out and an eBay item I need to package.
Piece of cake.
Our son Ben is 10 years old today. He’s a sweet, polite & good natured kid and we’re very proud of him.
When Ben was born he was a very sick baby. He spent the first week of his life in an intensive care unit, the first couple of days on a ventilator. Nothing has come easy to him. Ben had to work hard to achieve everything. In the past year we finally got to the bottom of a learning difficulty that has made school more difficult than it should have been. Ben’s non-verbal learning difficulty is being managed really well and we’re seeing him coming on in leaps and bounds. I received some texts for Ben today and he was able to read them aloud himself. That was a big step up for a little man.
Parent worry. It’s what we do best. Beats doing anything useful. Something has happened though. 10 years is a lifetime for Ben. It’s been a blink of the eye for us.
I remember as a kid being sick on my birthday. It sucks. Ben was running a 40 degree temperature yesterday at 6:00am and I had to bring him to the doctor to get some help with the bug he’s fighting. One of his classmates has ended up in hospital because he started having breathing difficulties. Our crosses are all relative.
Despite being wiped out and not feeling 100% he got stuck into the bowling & Qazar games before we headed to TGIF for a birthday meal with his friends. Personally I cannot stand the place but the kids like it.
Dopamine
This album came to my attention a few years ago because Ron Sexsmith contributed. I was going through a ‘get everything Ron Sexsmith recorded’ phase. I didn’t realise that one of the tracks (Noodletown) was used as the theme for ‘Sessions at West 54th’ which of course could be because that show didn’t get syndicated in Ireland or the UK.
Released in 1998 this out-of-print album is a bit of a curio. A well known producer & arranger (Vega, Crowded House, Costello, Sexsmith, McCartney) spends 3 years on an album that appears to be a mish mash of styles which sit together in a strange way. Or is it just me ?
The only names that were familiar to me (apart from Sexsmith) were of course Froom’s former partner Suzanne Vega, David Hidalgo from Los Lobos, Mark Eitzel from American Music Club, Sheryl Crow and Lisa Germano. Of these people I can only say I am familiar with Vega & Sexsmith’s work.
American Music Club is something I know I should investigate someday but will need a chaperone I think.
I see Pete Thomas from the Attractions played on this too.
Here’s the track listing
1 Tastes Good (Featuring – David Hidalgo)
2 The Bunny (Featuring – M. Doughty)
3 Kitsum (Featuring – Lisa Germano)
4 Dopamine (Featuring – Suzanne Vega)
5 Watery Eyes (Featuring – Mark Eitzel)
6 Monkey Mind (Featuring – Sheryl Crow)
7 Noodletown
8 Wave (Featuring – Miho Hatori)
9 I’d Better Not (Featuring – Louie Perez)
10 Permanent Midnight (Featuring – Jerry Stahl)
11 Overcast (Featuring – Ron Sexsmith)
12 Fruta Prohibida
Link in the first comment. Password is imadethebbc
Song Sung Blue
I’m in an email discussion with another Irish singer-songwriter.
It seems that many of us hold ourselves back creatively and we were sharing our frustration and experience.
Demons & fears are the single thing that holds back so many songwriters and I include myself in that. Some days I’m confident and others I just wonder who I’m trying to kid. I’m even going through it now with my album recording. On MySpace there is a simple guitar+vocal+cello demo of a song called “Holding On”. I started recording a master of it last week and have almost completed it. The problem is that I’ve recorded it with a full band arrangement. Although I like it I’m not sure if I should stick to the original simple arrangement. I’m trying not to sound like a whiny acoustic folksy singer-songwriter stereotype (I’m looking at you Damien Rice!). I’ve done this with my song ‘Be Alright’ which on MySpace is a simple acoustic demo but the ‘album’ version has more in the arrangement.
I’ve decided to just get on with it. If I make the wrong decisions on the arrangements and style then so be it. Nobody dies because of it.
Fortunately I have my own studio which means I can spend entire evenings working on this stuff. Until last year I hardly used the studio for myself and seemed to be always doing stuff for other people and trying to hire it out.
Many of my friends are musicians (regularly mentioned in this blog) and I have to stop comparing myself to them. Sometimes it feels like I’m only ‘pretending’ to be a songwriter. They’re doing it full time so I’m really only pretending to be an artist. That’s a hard one to get over – that feeling that they’ll come to the gig, hear the CD but will know that it’s not the real deal.
I think a songwriter needs to set goals and deadlines. I’ve set myself a goal of having a launch gig in the small room in Whelan’s for a CD. Ideally in the autumn. Given that I will be away for 3 weeks this summer and have a demanding day job it’s quite a stretch. There’s also the small matter of paying for the duplication and hiring the venue. With the goal in mind it’s focusing my mind on getting this album done.
The person I’m corresponding with has set themselves a goal : write a good song this year. But I think they’re not giving themselves a fair chance. My message: If I may be so bold as to make a suggestion: set yourself a target to write as many songs as possible this year. If they’re all shite then so be it. But I’ll bet you a bottle of your favourite drink that there will be more than one gem in there.
Back in November I tried the NaSoAlMo project. I blogged about this back in November 2008.
Now, my point here is that I’m looking back on the songs I wrote and recorded for that project and have decided to keep two of them live on MySpace. I created an ‘experimental-me’ MySpace at http://myspace.com/iLIVEinAsuitcase . I think I will do something with those 2 songs. Each of them took less than 2 hours from opening a blank page in my notebook to finishing the demo.
So making yourself just keep outputting songs does yield results.
I found the open mic scene in Dublin to be very supportive (with only 1 exception really). Just getting out and playing your songs is a great learning process. You find out which material works and you also develop confidence. Most people look in awe at anyone who can play music in front of an audience. Even more people admire anyone who writes and performs their own material.
My song writing friend mentioned the inner critic: “As songwriters I know a lot of us wrestle with the ‘who wants to listen to me & my ****’ mentality.
Every time I sit at my piano or take up my guitar I think ‘oh, what’s the point?‘ “
”why oh why do I limit myself by jumping the gun from idea to fear of doing anything with result of said idea. The result too often is No Result, because I limit & criticise myself from the moment of conception. ”
Very valid points. They’re not alone in this. All I can say is this: the point is that you can do this and others can’t. Nobody can write a ‘Peter Fitzpatrick’ song (not even Ron Sexsmith – he can only write Ron songs).
That moment of conception is where your best ideas are. They don’t need to be complex ideas. For all it’s complexity Jazz is still just 12 semi-tones.
Here endeth the lecture.
People never read the airwaves
Now that I’m on Blogspot I would like to start giving back some music. For some reason I dont associate ‘spaces.live.com’ with sharing unavailable music.
[You’ll find the music in the first comment on this blogpost.
They’re rar files and you’ll need a password to open them.
Use winrar to open them and enter the password imadethebbc to extract the mp3 files.]
I found this linked album a few months ago. It’s out-of-print and quite rare.
The only reason I was interested was because it features an early Thomas Dolby recording of ‘Airwaves’. To quote Thomas Dolby from his blog in 2006:
Possibly the rarest of any of my releases is this one. It was a (cassette-only) compilation released in 1981 by a Belgian label called Crepuscule. It included a demo version of ‘Airwaves’, recorded in my back room in London well before I got a record deal. I was approached recently by a company that wants to re-release it on CD and is trying to clear all the rights. I own the masters (unusual!) so I plan to say yes. The line-up on the album is terrific:
John Foxx ~ Duritti Column ~ Harold Budd ~ Richard Jobson ~ Gavin Bryars ~ A Certain Ratio ~ Martin Hamnett ~ Michael Nyman ~ An Interview with Brian Eno, etc
I have one copy of the cassette, resplendent in its soft plastic cover. But I don’t own a cassette player so I haven’t heard this recording of ‘Airwaves’ in years. It’s probably quite amateurish, as I used a little Boss Dr Rhythm box for the drums: but I bet it captures the essence of the song. I admit I cringe a bit when I listen to the version on The Golden Age Of Wireless, which hasn’t aged well: the production is far too ‘AOR’, with its chorused piano, glittering guitar chords and big drums. It was much better when I played it live. I regret not having had time to do a new arrangement of ‘Airwaves’ on this last tour. Maybe in the Fall?
When I finally got to see Thomas Dolby live in 2007 he didn’t play ‘Airwaves’ but maybe next time?
Notice the Factory alumni present on that album. Read a retro-review here.
‘Airwaves’ is of course on the album ‘The Golden Age Of Wireless’ which was one of the first 2 CDs I bought. (The other was McCartney’s ‘Tug of War’).
I really like this song. That album kept me going when I was 18 years old doing a night-shift in a supermarket saving money to go to university. My saturday nights were dull and not what they should have been for an 18-year-old. Albums like TGAOW were a glimpse into another world.
With lyrics like this how could Mr.Dolby go wrong ?
Strange how the scale forms
in tiny patterns
on my antenna
and the Five O’clock Show, hello hello…
Brooklyn is crawling with famous people
I turn my vehicle beneath the river, West from South
Through the airwaves –
people never read the airwaves
do we only feed the airwaves
or stamp them out of street level?
Airwaves – the dampness of the wind
the airwaves – the tension of the skin
the airwaves I really should have seen through the airwaves
Electric fences line our new freeway
here in the half-light, the motorhomes leave
knee-deep in water under a pylon
how slow my heartbeat, how thin the air I’m breathing in
Control has enabled the abandoned wires again
but the copper cables all rust in the acid rain
that flood the subway
with elements of our corrosion
cabled in to me…
Be in my broadcast when this is over
give me your shoulder, I need a place
to wait for morning.
No it was nothing – some car backfiring –
pleased don’t ask questions
I itch all over
let me sleep.
Through the airwaves –
people never read the airwaves
do we only feed the airwaves
or stamp them out of street level?
Airwaves – the dampness of the wind
the airwaves – the tension of the skin
the airwaves I really should have seen through the airwaves…
His majesty’s sarcastic request
I’m in the middle of republishing all of my old blog posts from MSN to blogspot and I get this error:
The server reported an error with the following URL:
http://www.blogger.com/feeds/4442091455711856893/posts/default
400 Bad Request
Blog has exceeded rate limit or otherwise requires word verification for new posts
Well isn’t that special ?
Now that I’m posting directly I can see that it says:
If you make a large number of posts in a single day, you will be required to complete word verification. After 24 hours, the word verification will automatically be removed.
Bigmouth Strikes Again
With Windows Live Writer I think I may have found a way to get all of my old blog postings from MSN and copy them there. We’ll see…
For now, here’s another test.
Hello World.
In an attempt to make commenting possible on other people’s blogs I have created this blog.
However for the past few years I have been blogging on msn spaces.
I’m going to try and work out how to import and/or link that blog to this.
I don’t really want to maintain both.
Always something there to remind me
I wanted to do something but hadn’t really decided just what that something was.
So I decided to make a start on a properly recorded version of ‘Holding On’ (there’s a demo here on myspace and a link to a live video here).
Originally I thought I’d do a small intimate version with just a guitar, cello or string section and maybe use the harmonica. What came out of the 3 hours was rewardingly creative. The track is , I hope, close to a George Harrison ‘All Things Must Pass’ vibe. There are some real drums, bass, hammond, acoustic guitar and strings. I slept on the track and on Tuesday night I replaced most of the acoustic guitar with electric guitar and used a roto-vibe type sound (think the guitar sound Harrison used during the Get Back sessions in the ‘Let It Be’ movie). I layered a second guitar sound and was really pleased with the results. I also edited the drum track to map it closer to the track – making sure the rhythm complimented the track. I’m really happy with the dynamic in the song now and still get a little thrill when it hits the solo.
Right now there’s just a guide vocal which is pretty much as it is sung on the demo and how I’ve been singing it live. Listening to the track I know I’m going to have to rethink the vocal line. I will need an evening for that and might end up revisiting it a couple of times. The lyric & vocal is so critical. I’m looking forward to doing the backing vocals. I really enjoy stacking up backing vocals because it can really lift a track. The middle eight section needs some work. The middle8 is the bit in the middle of a song that sounds different to the verse or chorus. Example: Beatles ‘Girl’ : “she’s the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there you feel a fool, when you say she’s looking good she acts as if it’s understood..”.
And that was it. Wednesday night I sat in the sunroom with my laptop, small keyboard and headphones. No matter how much I tried the middle8 didn’t progress. I think I need to sit with a guitar in the studio for a bit to develop it. It might need backing vocals too. So I’ll keep an open mind.
The truth of the matter though was that by Wednesday between the day job, 2 visits to the gym and 2 nights of creativity I was spent.
I’d probably have been more frustrated with this in the past but I accept that sometimes it just doesn’t happen. Like songwriting you can just hit a wall or a dry spell. I recently had a spell of not writing and over the course of the last 2 weeks I started to eek out some song ideas. It never disappears.
Like physical exercise I need to do it regularly to keep it ‘happening’.
The middle-age spread isn’t disappearing but my energy levels are better and I feel healthier.
More importantly I see an album on the horizon. A real album. I’m already dreaming about a launch gig.
That’s got to be good.
blue eyed dressed for every situation 