I got the finished master of my new record two days ago. I drove around listening to it for a few hours, then listened a few more at home. I uploaded it to my music site for you to hear on July 7, and then did a bunch of prep stuff for its retail release on October 9.

Then I emailed Anton about getting started on the next album. Not next YEAR’S album – we’re already just about finished with that – but one for 2014, ’cause ya know, it takes a while to wrap these things. The record we’re about to start is called Schoolbus Coming At Me, and it’s a collection of all the songs I’ve written with Chris Hug. There are lots!

I almost suggested we begin recording the album I’ve written over the past year and a half, but it’s all about family and family-type relationships ending and I’m just not ready to live with the material as intensely as one needs to when making an album of it. I’d like to try being happy for a while before I revisit that shit.

——-

In honor of one project coming to fruition, I present a list of all the stuff I’m working on that hasn’t, in the order in which I expect to finish it (though I’m not gonna estimate completion dates – I learned that lesson a long time ago). This may be the last time you hear about some of this stuff for a while, especially since this space is about to be taken over by my July 7/October 9 release, Small Sacrifices Must Be Made! But I promise if you stick around, you will eventually get it all:

- A new Hanslick Rebellion single, “Dear Friends And Gentle Hearts”. This is recorded and only needs to be mixed. It’s part of a whole new Rebellion EP of six songs that’s about two-thirds of the way there.

- The 20th anniversary reimagining of Skyscape‘s Band Of The Week, containing the entire album remixed (with new bass from Mike Keaney and additional guitars and drums from Alex Dubovoy and Sheridan Riley) plus signature tracks which for one reason or another did not end up on the original (“It’s Always Christmas In Siberia”; “Mukhopadhyay”; “Hey Jude”).

- A whole new Skyscape album, Dr. Des Moines, which is already completely demoed and partially recorded and features a Skyscape lineup of Dom, Mike, Alex, Sheridan and yours truly, with special guests Reeves Gabrels and Jerry Marotta.

- Four more Sevendys singles, already recorded and just waiting to be mixed. Chuck expects to be back in playing shape later this summer (!) which means we’ll be doing more recordings thereafter.

- My solo album for 2013, Failing Upwards, which I’ve been working on since 2007 with Anton Fig, Reeves Gabrels, Tony Levin, Ralph Carney, Dweezil Zappa, Earl Slick and Avi Buffalo. It’s 95% recorded and in the process of being mixed by Tchad Blake. This album will also feature Tchad’s amazing mix of “The Bowery Electric” (the Ramones version), marking the first time that song has been formally released in the US.

- The Rebellion’s recording of the 40-song musical Rise And Shine. I recently cleared this with Arturo and we’re going full-steam ahead. Joe just tracked drums on a bunch of tunes a couple of weeks ago, and I’m working to reassemble the voice cast. It’s gonna take a while but it’s happening!

- My solo album for 2014, the aforementioned Schoolbus Coming At Me, collecting the dozen or so compositions I’ve written to Chris Hug’s wonderful lyrics over the years, plus a couple of instrumental pieces I wrote for Chris’s short films. I hope to continue with the same basic band from Small Sacrifices and Failing Upwards – we’ve done some pretty nice work so far. I know Anton is in for drums.

- Those 11 songs the Rebellion cut with Reeves under the band name Jeebus. It’s mostly done but when and how to put the thing out?!

This list doesn’t include stuff I’m producing for other folks.

“WORK IS GOOD” – Arturo Vega

I had to turn off the FREE on Shoot The Piano Player this morning, and I am having guilt over it. So here’s what I’m gonna do: Every day until August 7 (when my next new single comes out), I will set one random Song Foundry track to free download. You’ll have to hunt them all down, but once you find ‘em they’re yours forever. All I ask is that you tweet or post the song link on your FB wall after you download (and say something nice about it, would ya?).

There are 22 albums in the music section of this site (and some, like my In The Presence Of Presents and Single of the Month comps, are already set to free download). Finding the free tune each day will be a bit of a scavenger hunt. Here’s a tip, though: it’ll be marked in the track listing as “(free)”.

I hope this introduces you to stuff you’ll like. And who knows – perhaps as you search some of the song titles will pique your interest or spark a memory. There are worse things than finding new music to enjoy!

One track is already set up for ya. Why are you still on this page when you could be downloading that shit?

It’s the 7th! My Single of the Month for May is “The Breeze”, recorded with Skyscape over two millennia.

I wrote this song when I was 17 years old; my friend Chris Hug and I had been debating whether it was possible to write an emotionally resonant song lyric without including any human (or anthropomorphized) characters. I thought this was possible. And maybe it is… I couldn’t do it, though.

My approach involved a Rube Goldberg chain of cause and effect, but in the end the only way to make it worthwhile was to introduce people – to have it all impact human beings. Ironically, “The Breeze” turned out to be my first love song, albeit a really goofy one. It’s also the first song I ever wrote on a guitar, which probably shows in the chord progression and the opening riff.

Skyscape recorded “The Breeze” that summer (1993… ouch!). At the time we didn’t know whether we wanted to be Pavement, They Might Be Giants, The Doors or Dream Theater, so we sounded pretty much like Pavement, They Might Be Giants, The Doors and Dream Theater all playing at once, and not necessarily the same song. “The Breeze” ended up a casualty of our non-approach, crushed under, like, 50 tons of mëtal.

With the 20th anniversary of Skyscape’s first album, Band Of The Week, approaching, a bunch of us got together to reimagine and rework some of the old tunes. “The Breeze” got the most dramatic facelift; almost nothing of the original recording remains. We kept Steve Theater’s hyperkinetic drums in the choruses, and Sean Gould’s ringing chords in verse two, but the rest is new. Alex Dubovoy added a more textural set of acoustic and electric guitars, and Mike Keaney – who had joined the band about a month after we finished Band Of The Week – finally got to record the bassline he had played live so many times in the early ’90s. I put down some piano, B3 and mellotron (the only keyboard on the original was a now-dated synth pad), and Joe Abba made his Skyscape debut with an entire section’s worth of 11/8 percussion.

The biggest change is in the vocal track. Instead of my dorky solo lead, my friend Maryann Fennimore joined me to make the song a dorky duet. (Maryann is on April’s Single of the Month, too; no matter what weird-ass shit I’ve asked her to sing, she’s always been such an awesome sport.) And since no Skyscape song is complete without Dom, we added a triple harmony at the end: Dom, Mike and Alex.

I definitely have a soft spot for “The Breeze”… with its odd time-signatures and chord structure quirks, the track represents a turning point in my understanding of songcraft. It’s nerdy and a little silly, and it reminds me of how little I’ve actually changed since I was 17!

——-

Don’t forget, the 7th of every month is Single of the Month day here at the Song Foundry. We’re already hard at work mixing next month’s track, which will be brought to you by the initials A.F., R.G., G.M., J.S., and L.B., and the word “kalimba”!

I keep hearing that the ’90s are “back”. I can kinda see it… I mean, there’s flannel plaid on every mannequin at the mall. But it’s like when all the hair metal bands reverbed up their drums, strung half a dozen blues riffs together and claimed to be channeling Zeppelin. C’mon, Led Zep was about so much more than that.

Reality Bites was available on demand so I watched it last night. I had never seen the movie… at the time it got too much hype, so true to my Gen X roots I passed on it. Watching it now depressed the living shit out of me. I don’t know that the film really captured the essence, the energy of the time – in fact, nah, it didn’t – but it did serve to remind me how cool the ’90s were. How cool we were. How cool we’re not now.

I’ve beaten generational demographics to death in other posts, and that’s only a smidge of the story here anyway. This is really about nostalgia.

I spend a lot of time dicking around in my own past. Not just musically. I use Facebook every day. For people my age, Facebook is a Ouija board through which we contact spirits from our past. You send out messages; ghosts reply from beyond. You can correspond with them, recount memories, share inside jokes. But you’ll never encounter one in person. They don’t exist in the real world – they’re spectral apparitions of people whose bodies still walk the earth, but are now being used for different lives, with different interests, different priorities, personalities marked and molded by experiences that did not include you.

I don’t mean to say that a Facebook seance isn’t enjoyable and comforting – it is, or we wouldn’t all engage in them every day – or that you wouldn’t appreciate the person your old pal has become if you got to know each other again in real life. But for the most part, the interaction is less a friendship than a mutual haunting.

My favorite musical endeavor lately is Sevendys – I think I’ve made that clear. Fresh music, wonderful new collaborators. I find it exciting and energizing. But my second favorite right now is Skyscape. Maybe it’s because the ’90s are back, or maybe it’s because, for Skyscape, they never ended.

Dom and I (and our legion of bandmates) generated so much material so quickly, and recorded so much of it, that I have albums’ worth of Skyscape music stored in bite-sized lo-fi chunks on old 4-track cassettes and floppy discs. A lot of it is terrible. Most of it is badly performed and indifferently recorded. But it’s full of energy and ideas which are begging to be harnessed and shaped by experienced hands.

When we work on Skyscape music, so much of it is about the people we are today – the skills we’ve developed, the attention to craft and context. But just as much of the process involves the people we were in the ’90s, the kids who built this foundation of ideas and sensibility, who laid down the trail of breadcrumbs by leaving so many recorded artifacts behind. On a Skyscape record, instrumental components are sourced from 20 years of material, as though everyone who was ever in the band is still a member – eternally young, free and full of passion.

For me, bringing these tracks together is like living in all times of my life at once. I think that’s how so many people my age are desperate to feel; I’m grateful to that younger version of me for the opportunity.

Here’s a perfect example in progress. This track started as a Portastudio recording made live at Dom’s 1992 high school graduation party. I was using my 4-track as a mixer and took the opportunity to pop in a cassette. The band was horrible… it wasn’t even really a band. Dom, Rob Hill, Sean Gould and I set up in a line – two guitars, no bass or drums. But our attempt at covering “Hey Jude” was as hilarious as it was awful, and I decided to see what I could make of it.

I thought adding a deadpan full-band arrangement would help the vocals seem even funnier and more absurd. Step one was to add drums. My preference was to have drums that sounded similarly 4-tracked, and sure enough I was able to find a suitable performance: drums from early 1993, when we were demoing songs for Band Of The Week. In this case, we pointed one microphone towards Loren Wiseman’s basement kit and he played “Age Song” at a tempo which was, coincidentally, a dead match for “Hey Jude”. I flew the drums in, added some tambourine, piano and a couple of backing vocals, and here we are. Still needs bass, guitar and more backup singers, but it’s turning into something listenable and fun!

Skyscape | “Hey Jude” | rough mix
Domenic Maltempi: vocals
Dom’s cousin Tina: vocals
Jed Davis: keyboards, backing vocals, tambourine
Lisa Brennan: backing vocals
Loren Wiseman: drums
Rob Hill: guitar
Sean Gould: guitar
Adapted from a live recording at Dom’s house, July 1992

This Green Plaid shit is awesome fun. I’ve found more than an album’s worth of very decent Skyscape material I didn’t even know existed; a 4-track demo of Physics in its entirety; two Pavlov’s Dogs songs; several live performances multitracked on the Portastudio; all the raw components of Jed Has Too Much Free Time. A lot of it is so poorly performed and recorded as to be unusable, but the ideas are there. Combined with takes from other recorded versions of the songs, original MIDI sequences and brand-new elements, these tracks could be the foundation of something really special.

I’ll be working with Jerry Marotta on adding drums to a few of these songs next week. The basic idea: bring the 4-track Portastudio to a real studio and record the kit to cassette through three good microphones and proper outboard gear. We’ll probably Pro-Tools it simultaneously, but I think the low-tech versions will sound fantastic and more in the spirit.

Songs I’m considering for next week’s session, some by request:
- Skyscape’s “My Family”
- “Deep Deep Down”
- “The Yellow Wallpaper”
- “The Boy Who Tripped On His Mother’s Head”
- Skyscape’s cover of “I’m Too Sexy”
- “Smoke More Crack”
- “Autopsy”

If you were around in my early-90s demo days (or if you were a deep-cut user of the Collider Jukebox) and there’s something from that era you’d like me to revisit, just let me know. You can comment here or reply to the Green Plaid post on the wall of my Facebook music page.

——-

My friend Joe Aversano e-mailed me this excellent question: How do you know when a mix is done?

First of all, if I’m the one mixing, it’s never done. I’m not a mix engineer. A proper mix involves mathematics I don’t understand, gear I’m not qualified to use, and better hearing than I possess. Proper EQ of each element, balance, and application of effects are the baselines for which I trust an engineer. That said, a lot of it is subjective, and as the project’s, uh, “creative director”, I’m supposed to know what sort of thing I want to end up with.

Part of my job is prepping the track for what I consider to be a proper mix. Eliminating stray noises, making sure all the edits are clean – or at least intentional, maybe indicating where I’d like things panned (though that sort of thing should be flexible). Marking sections if necessary. Making notes. I also include only elements I want in the mix… and I should be confident in making those calls. The arrangement I give to the engineer – what sort of instrumentation and how it’s recorded – will go a long way towards dictating the timbre of the finished track.

Then, when I listen back to a mix in progress, I try to go in with more of an ear for what’s missing than what’s right, and I compile a list of things I still want to hear. Could be anything from “more bass” to “less of the vocal double” to “that one snare hit should have a delay, with an automated EQ sweep on it, that moves from center to right as it decays”. Once everything on my list is checked off, the mix is finished as far as I’m concerned.

At this point, I feel like I should give some well-deserved props to Eric Jarvis, who mixed the Sevendys material. He’s been getting the most out of my tracks for a while now, and when you add the mastering might of Dave McNair (under whom The Jarv once apprenticed), the result is some unstoppable shit!

——-

With all this Mets-Madoff crap going on, I have a thought I’d like to share regarding New York City sports teams. I don’t expect they should win it all every season, but New York franchises ought to be built and run well enough that year in and year out, the New York team is the team everybody else has to get past if they want to be the champ.

There was a period of time when every sports movie climaxed with the protagonists taking on the Yankees. To get where they wanted to be, they’d have to beat the scary New York team. With the resources available in NYC, I think that’s about right, and anything less should not be acceptable.

Of course, I feel the same way about New York City architecture and infrastructure, but the city is a reactionary disgrace on both counts…

I’ve been sick all week… flu or something. Whenever I lie down, my nose clogs up and I get too uncomfortable to sleep. The lack of rest is making it tough for me to get better. I was using nasal spray earlier in the week, but you can’t use that too many days in a row so I put it aside. Decongestant pills don’t seem to do much of anything. This is a tricky one!

This is the worst I’ve felt since my 2006 pneumonia, which was really bad. If you want to see something rough, search for The Hanslick Rebellion’s Checkerboard Kids performance on YouTube. I was just beginning to recover from pneumonia when we did that gig. I’m wearing like a dozen layers, I couldn’t speak or sing, and half the muscles in my body were pulled from coughing so every movement unleashed bolts of pain. Even after I got over that pneumonia, it was still two years before my immune system worked properly – I was sickly the whole time. I don’t want to get anywhere near that point ever again.

I’ve been trying to relax at home, do a little tidying up. I moved here way back in May but the unpacking part never really ends. I came across this old J-Bird Records box tucked into a milk crate; I assumed it was surplus copies of We’re All Going To Jail! or some shit, but it turned out to be full of 4-track Portastudio cassettes.

I thought I knew where all my old 4-track tapes were… this was a secret stash of about twenty cassettes dating all the way back to 1992. There are Skyscape tunes I had totally forgotten about; collaborations with old friends like Joe Aversano; some of my earliest solo demos; the only existing recording by Pavlov’s Dogs, my freshman-year band with Mike Keaney; even multitrack takes of live gigs where we used my Portastudio as a mixer. I’ve started dumping them into Pro Tools and playing around – the perfect way to pass sick time at home!

I’m no mix engineer, but the raw material is lo-fi enough that even I can’t mess it up. There is a lot of charming stuff here. I’m polishing and putting snippets online as they catch my ear. Here they are, with more to come – a work in progress, 19 years and counting.

I particularly love “Wheelbarrow Rosebud”, the Joe Aversano track. Joe was (and still is) a really unique guitarist, and he writes such pretty stuff. His delivery on this tune is totally 1992, straight out of “Valerie Loves Me”.

Then there’s “Hippies On The Road”, which always started as Skyscape’s cover of “Riders On The Storm” but inevitably morphed into whatever Dom wanted to sing about that day (most often something concerning the Brady Bunch). The drums were recorded mono, so I shoved them into one channel and compressed them until they blew up… then I dropped them out in spots and added some 909 kick and snare. The bass is the keyboard bassline as I originally played it, but dumped into Melodyne, converted to MIDI and now triggering a Fender Rhodes Bass sample. I then EQ’d the bass out of the keyboard track so only the new Rhodes part remained. I guess I could just do clean, faithful mixes of everything, but this isn’t about preserving history – it’s about making cool shit!

Dom and I have been secretly working on a new Skyscape record: Dr. Des Moines. Like Zetacarnosa, it’s a mashup of hi- and lo-fi sounds from the present and the past. I recently unearthed a couple of unfinished tunes from 1992, “Poetry Read-In At Bob’s” and “Motorvate”, with the intention of slipping them in amidst the newly-written material. We’d gotten far enough with them that keyboard sequences exist, but I couldn’t find lyrics anywhere. Turns out there were 4-track demos of both songs that I’d completely forgotten – so not only do we now know the words, but I’ve got classic takes of Dom singing them that I can weave into the 2011 versions. This is awesome.

I lost about half my wardrobe to water damage right before I moved upstate; what remained when I got to Albany included a number of green plaid shirts that I hadn’t worn since college. Some had purple accents so I busted ‘em out and started wearing them to work on Fridays. School spirit thing, purple on Fridays. Anyway, I’ve named the project after these shirts, which, like the 4-track jams, originated in the early ’90s, sat in the dark for almost twenty years, and are now back in action. These are my Green Plaid Recordings.

Been thinking about four-track recording a lot lately. I had two Portastudio 464s; I recently gave one to a friend and he’s been using it to create some crazy shit. Now I meditate upon the four-track. OMMMM. One benefit of this exercise is that it helps keep me from thinking too hard about the red velvet cupcakes LB and Crazee Joe baked on Thursday. The cupcakes lurk deliciously in the fridge and if I dwell on them for long, I will end up eating many and everyone will be pissed at me.

Four-track cassette recording is synonymous with lo-fi, but you can make a whole album on a Portastudio without compromising fidelity. Plenty of bands have managed this; Ween and Whirlwind Heat are two examples that spring immediately to mind. (The latter mixed their four-track recordings at Tarbox, though, so I’m not sure if it counts.)

I weave Portastudio material into many of my own recordings. It’s not strictly a sonic choice, but also about selecting the takes that mean the most to me personally. I might spend years working up one song; it follows me from format to format as technology advances. If I consider a guitar solo from 1992 to be the definitive take, then that’s what ends up in the final mix. For example, “Statement Of Intent” on Skyscape’s Zetacarnosa:

The guitar solo was played by Rob Hill, as recorded on four-track cassette in the summer of ’92. The rest of the band was tracked in 2002 and 2003. (The banter with acoustic guitar at the top and end of the song, and that quiet moment after the solo, is from a 1993 videocassette.) To me, Rob’s solo summed up the time in which the song was written, and the exuberant energy which propelled us in lieu of the chops we hadn’t yet developed. No listener need know or care about any of that, but it makes the finished product more satisfying for me.

Zetacarnosa was about compressing the then-15-year history of Skyscape to a single point, so the emphasis was on context; it was okay for an element to retain its lo-fi grit because that would tell the listener something about it. The result is a superdense hi-fi/lo-fi hybrid where the Portastudio almost serves as an effect. The sound is colored, but it’s all there.

On the other hand, when the point is just to make a great-sounding track, a skilled mix engineer can work wonders with even the murkiest raw material. Andrew Weiss managed this with those classic Ween records; Dave Fridmann with the Whirlwind Heat stuff. Here’s what Tony Doogan was able to do with “Let Go”, which was recorded mostly on an eight-track Portastudio:

Everything but the piano, bass and guitar is from the eight-track cassette. Technically, each of these waveforms was squeezed into a smaller space – containing less information – than if it had been recorded on a four-track, since the width of the tape is doubly subdivided to fit twice as many tracks. Yet you’d never be able to tell which sounds came from the cassette, and which were recorded digitally; Tony sculpted the material into a hi-fi whole.

There was a time when the cassette Portastudio was the key to the recording kingdom for thousands of teenagers. It was affordable magic – you could at last let out the music in your head, arranged almost exactly the way you heard it. In mass application, though, the machine eventually became its own built-in excuse: if your music was shitty, you could blame it on the small number of tracks or the poor recording quality. It’s one reason why there were so many awful fuckin bands in the ’90s, bands whose lazy approach unfortunately continues to inspire people who should not bother making music today.

Anyway… I’m thinking about busting out my old 464 and tracking some shit. One thing I’m curious about is what it would sound like to bring a Portastudio to a real studio and use it with great mics and outboard gear. Would the result be a mess? A waste of time? Or would it realize the ultimate dream of every suburban songwriter circa 1991?

Welcome to the Song Foundry. There’s a lot of music here, so if you don’t feel like reading a bunch of bloggy crap just click the MUSIC tab at the top of the page. I’ve unleashed 17 albums and you can listen to them all on demand. Do your best Bruce Dickinson: STREAM FOR ME!

Don’t know where to start? Try playing one of the five songs in the sidebar under “LISTEN TO THIS”. If you like what you hear, click the name of the song to get more.

The music library’s been up for a couple weeks now; as of today there’s a new addition: The Cutting Room Floor. It’s so new, it’s not even out yet… but I put it up here for ya. You’ll be able to get the album on vinyl later this year – I could never squander such a gorgeous piece of Victor Moscoso art by confining it to 300 pixels by 300 pixels forevermore – but the music is with us now, so please have it.

In addition to the hundreds of finished recordings on the other side of that MUSIC tab, I plan on sharing work in progress right here in the blog. It takes me a long time to get a record done; here you’ll learn why.

Right now I’ve got a couple of albums working. One is called Small Sacrifices Must Be Made! It’s an eleven-song solo album, on which I’m joined by a stellar band: Reeves Gabrels on guitar, Graham Maby on bass and Anton Fig on drums. Reeves was just here in Brooklyn for a week, and we got all the guitars done.

Wanna hear a rough track? This one’s called “Lose Me Forever”.

Jed Davis | “Lose Me Forever” rough mix | March 8, 2010

In addition to Anton, Reeves and Graham, “Lose Me Forever” recording features Bruce Kaphan on the pedal steel and Stevie Blacke, one-man string section. My vocal and keyboards are scratch (that hissing noise is on the vocal track).

I’m also working on a new Skyscape album (entitled Dr. Des Moines) with my longtime comrade Domenic Maltempi. Reeves sprayed scalding guitar all over this very raw track, “Swerve Griffin Moods”.

Skyscape | “Swerve Griffin Moods” rough mix | March 13, 2010

“Swerve Griffin” obviously still needs drums and bass, backing vocals, more keyboards and some rhythm guitar.

I’ll have more on these pieces of music later, and maybe I’ll also write a bit about why I’ve returned to blogging. But now it’s 3am and I’ve been working on this site since dinnertime with the saintly Nick Edwards, who coded the WordPress template from my exacting design and then sat patiently and competently as I bade him tweak every pixel of it in the ensuing 8 hours. Nick is a gentleman whom I cannot thank enough.

And I thank YOU for coming by. I hope you’ll be spending a lot of time here with me. Whatever you’re doing online (or off), let the Song Foundry provide your soundtrack!