On Election Day

On the eve of November 6, 2008, four years ago, my life was quite different than it is now.

As the nation weighed in on deciding its next leader of the free world, I sat in a small room at my church teaching a small group of 11 year old scouts how to tie knots.  I was getting annoyed at one little boy in particular for not paying attention because he felt “I should be at home watching election coverage so that I can say I saw McCain get elected”. 

Just prior to that, I had made a few decisions of my own that changed the course of the next few years to me.  I had decided that I had enough of going to UCA and college in general and decided to re-enroll in BYU Idaho and luckily was able to get admitted for the following semester instead of having to wait till the summer like the track I was previously on.

In November of 2008 I was taking 3 or 4 classes at UCA, one of which from my Dad and things were pretty ok with the world at the moment.  I was catching up with a few old friends who were still out in Idaho that I felt better about going up there with friends waiting for me.  T3 was still really in its infancy with four shows under its belt, a big Juanita’s gig on the way, and a full album being recorded. I was also finishing up a second season of an afternoon radio show that was awful, but made me laugh.

There was no twitter or a timeline on Facebook.  I’m not even sure the news feed existed yet either. I had 2 more years of college to go. The most expensive thing I had purchased was my own computer

I had a lot of very political friends on my Facebook and at the time there was no option to ‘unfollow ’ their updates so it was either deal with them or stay off Facebook.   I didn't even stay up to watch the results and I had never even met most of the people currently in my life at that point.  My life as a whole was about to change very drastically over the next 6-8 months as well due to many choices I made.  Life is pretty much just that, a series of choices and consequences of those choices whether they be good or bad. 

A lot can change in four years.  It’s funny that I really don’t think much on a national or global scale, but on a personal world view.  Maybe that makes me selfish, but doesn't everybody do that anyway? 

Hard Times For The Hamburglar

Here he comes he’s homeless man Jim

Look as we all are just starin’ at him

He’s dirty and ragged, he’s bearded n’ stunk

But watch out cuz he’ll bring the funk

Comes to your house, he borrows your stuff

Gets real mad if you‘re givin’ him guff

He looks real bad he’s dirty and shakes

Cuz he’s full of lies and snakes

Give him a cheeseburger, maybe some fries

He just wants to be here it’s no surprise

People are everywhere all shapes and size

To make us happy, just give us some pie

Here he comes he’s jerk bag man Jim

Look as we all upset at him

He just wants to sleep on your couch

But you want to just kick him out

He laughs at your job, his tude is annoyed

Says you’re part of the system, yet he’s unemployed

Borrows some money, says he’ll pay you back

But you know he won’t, says hey man relax

Sleeps on your couch, eats all of your food

He has friends over, and you he’ll exclude   

Give him a cheeseburger,  or maybe some fries

He just wants to be here it’s no surprise

People are everywhere all shapes and size

To make us happy, just give us some pie

People are everywhere, diversity too

Some are real smelly, but not as bad as you

 

Space Adventure

Ladies come on let’s get in my ride

We’ll all jammy jam now on the inside

C’mon we’ll get on out of this place

Blast right off into outer space

Let it all go n’ leave the world behind

Just do your best it’ll pay off in kind

Buckle up now stay tuned for the show

Come on everybody yeah it’s time to go

  

Here we are now together in this place

Floatin around up in outer space

So what life’s not what you want it to be

Come on now baby and ride with me

Put aside the future, the present, and past

We’ll set out for adventure that’s sure to last

Check it out now, destination on screen

Warp speed wow everybody scream

Oh yeah, it’s a space adventure!

Oh yeah, it’s a space adventure!

Transmission on, we are the space tzars,

buzzing past meteors and quasars,

At the speed of light, yeah you gotta brace,

Seat belts on and baby crank up the bass,

Zipping around yeah we’re feelin free

Gonna shake you on down to your knees

Shoot past stars beam out and back

Brace yourself now for the great impact

 

3-2-1-BLASTOFF! (GO!)

Buckle up seatbelts on

Zoom ba boom , and then we’re gone

Look to the left, Look to the right

Get ready for universal flight

Close your eyes, hold your breath

No time to regret no no no

you gotta keep goin’ on goin’ on goin’ on goin’ on

Fixation? or Waiting Failure?

Is T3 a failed experiment?  Was it really worth it?  Does it continue to hold its own?

 This time around it’s really much harder to compare to where we are in progress.  Before we made the first album it was all new and exciting and writing new songs was progress all on its own.  At 3 songs in I think we had Black Rob, Mystery Box, and I dunno, Jimmy maybe?  They all blurred together and didn’t really come together that well till much later.  But there was nothing before this, so the idea of an album was there, but not in the realm of reality yet.  After that we for some reason had a real hard time getting around to writing new tunes and I don’t know why.  We did Unemployed and Momma’s Boy pretty quick, but then seemingly stopped and just focused on the live show.  Little bits and pieces of other things and rather than banking them for another album I was eager to release something if anything, resulting in the Feel Good EP.  Maybe it was because time was not on our side as I was about to head back to school I dunno. 

 Things were slow the next year at first as well.  We had the framework for Fowl Play 4 months before we officially wrote it out and then sat on things for a bit longer.  Some time that fall things started to fall into place when we wrote Bovine Revolution.  It wasn’t until soon after that I got my heart back into writing again and willing to go that far into new songs.  Previously I was ready to call it a day and walk away from the project satisfied with what we had accomplished as I went on to other things in life.  Instead, ideas started to come to me and lots of inspiration was well under way.  I guess a lot of it stemmed from not wanting to be left with nothing to do while I sat around and looked for a crap job to start paying back my student loans.  However, the more I poured into it and made the decision to not book shows, just write, proved fruitful as quickly we had Bovine, D.T.A, and Teef written and performed within a few months.  As I browsed around at my hard drive a few weeks ago, I honestly remember things differently, but apparently we also started playing Like Like Letters and The Leafy Illusion as early as December of 2010 when we didn’t actually sit down with them until later the next spring.  That’s pretty rare for us to pick something back up that we leave behind sadly.  So many in my opinion good songs have been left behind that way.  But when we do pick them up we end up with songs like Unemployed, Fowl Play, Aguas, and Derek’s Friend. Kinda hard to imagine the T3 catalog without those if you ask me.

 So it was a hard hitting writing near year and I was ok with that.  We played a few shows here and there, but didn’t do much or enough when we got most of them written and eventually released the album.  And we don’t really play shows now either for a variety of reasons, so now it feels like that whole time making that album was a waste of time if only for the therapeutic value and feeling of accomplishment of not only doing it again, but feeling like it was a superior album to the original.  At least I feel it is anyway, some people disagree with me and enjoy Your Music Is Bad better, but whatever, to each their own.  Flash forward to now and we’re teetering on finishing up 3 songs right now: Hard Times for the Hamburglar, Like Butter, and Space Adventure.  3 very different sounding songs from what we’ve done in the past and very catchy and bouncy.  I really like them, but my question is if anyone will ever hear them or we’ll ever get a chance to do anything with them. If I remember correctly none of these songs existed before at least January of this year and considering how infrequently we practice now and only for 2, maybe 3 hours at most a week when we do, they seem to have turned out pretty well.  I try not to compare writing periods in terms of time however or at least I don’t want to. In these 10ish months that we’ve kind of sort of been writing we have 3 with ideas for a few more.  For the last album we had the album completely written and recorded in that time.  For the first album we had at least half or more written and that was with periods of time where we had no guitarist. 

 That’s not to say we’re doing a piss poor job either, because how we write now is honestly far different than in the past and we’re getting more and more involved and in-depth than ever before.  It just begs the question if it’s worth it.  I love making music and I love working with these guys to do so.  It’s my outlet and what has been one of the few things keeping me sane since its incarnation over  five years ago, but there are days when I wonder if it’s worth it anymore or if it’s past time to let it go.   This question always creeps up after a particularly negative experience in band related terms, usually a consistent amount of not practicing or something, but it is something I’ve been thinking about for a number of months now as I see everyone’s life’s shifting around and becoming more involved, more permanent as I like to put it.  More settled.  Something I know that I’m not and won’t be for a long while, if ever.  I’m not talking about relationshippy, but just an overall thing.  I don’t picture myself in my same position in life for the rest of my life, no way.  But at the same time I can’t picture what I would rather be doing either.  It’s just sort of blank.  Maybe that’s ok, but at the same time it makes it hard to continue to want to share a dream with people who don’t share the same thing anymore and are making other dreams a reality and this a minor priority if one at all.

                 These are the things I think about when I lay awake at night after a crappy day I suppose.  I have ambitions of continuing making my own music with the mentality of if you want something done then do it yourself.  Sadly I get frustrated at myself and my inability to not execute the full picture as I can with a group of other people.  I have the idea, but lack the talent to pull them off on different instruments or the limitations of my own voice.  When I feel particularly inspired however I find loopholes, like the drum machine program I purchased awhile back, but then again its not the same thereputic feeling when doing T3 tunes.  Probably because its not a bunch of goofball weirdo music, but things I actually feel passionate about and come right around and say them instead of burying them underneath weird topics and faces.  Maybe that’s why I don’t do much of my own music and just keep it on paper and in my head, its too scary to put out there.  Because that’s not for other people, its for me. Its not to make people dance and have a good time, it’s the selfish I want to express this, I want to say this by and for me.  I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually, but will probably just shelf it and feel good knowing that I did it for me.

                 Whatever the case may be, its still of worth to me that while I get frustrated with one avenue I have others to turn to and I rarely let myself sit still and not create something and that’s ok.  If I ever stopped writing or singing or making videos or creating something, that’s when I’d actually become a sad and lonely person.  That’s probably why I keep my to do list so long as well, but a plan’s a plan right?

Rehash

Oh hey, it’s time for my every once in a while put my thoughts to the page of what I’m doing musically. Is it important for anyone else to know? Not really, nor does anybody read this, but hey it’s interesting to me and that’s what matters.

In the last week or so I’ve for some reason regained the spark of writing again. Maybe not so much just lyrically, but overall music in general.  I honestly don’t know where it came from but I’m glad it did.  I recorded most if not all the tiny ideas I had and left it at that. Then a few days later started pecking at them again and putting the songs I did have together with melodies and started to imagine how they would play out.  Then, I came back to the sampler programs I have and starting making drum beats and there you go.  It’s kind of funny how things turn around when you’re on the verge of quitting something because nothing’s happening.  Speaking of nothing happening, slowly but surely I’ve even gotten back to writing again with my band and what’s coming out, what little that does, is shaping up to be pretty exciting.  Maybe we’re all growing as musicians or maybe we’re finally in that groove of working together that I noticed while writing for the last album I dunno.  Either way, the few things we’ve come up with in recent months are groovy and I’m really enjoying them.

Today I was looking through old notebooks of lyrics and abandoned songs and realized that I’ve written far more than whatever actually came about which made me feel a little better about just jumping on songs as they’re written.  My idea for our last album was to write a good 20 or so songs fully and pick and choose which ones were best and record those.  Sadly that didn’t happen and we ended up recording the first 10 or 11 we came up with, cheating because 2 were already written previously.  This bummed me out a bit because I was left wondering, what if we were to come up with something better that we never came back to or was just on the tip of the tongue. I’m still really proud of mostly all of our songs, but the what if still lingers. Well until today.

Not even a correct total, but I count that for Your Music Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad we wrote about 20 songs more or less.  These were pretty much all at least jammed on once or twice and we only used 10 for the album.  11 if you include the cover.

Feel Good. Make Ya Sweat had around 10 which is surprising because we were just playing shows and virtually not writing at all during that time.

Don’t Just Stand There while really only worked hard on the ten from the album, we had actually jammed on around 18 or so.  I’ve got lyrics for at least 20 or more written during that time.  A lot of which I’m going back to and have decided that unlike the first run, these aren’t all total crap.  A lot are, but that’s beside the point.

So now at least I don’t feel like the last album was a rush job.  It really started nearly a year and a half before its release after all. Now a days it’s taking a slight different approach as well.  I’m starting to come up with my own melodies along with the lyrics, record them, and send them to the band or play them at a practice myself to see what they think.  Take a more active role in the writing in other words.  Nick is doing a lot more writing and sending it to me alone beforehand as well which has churned the beginnings of a lot of songs including Momma’s Boy, The Leafy Illusion, and The Ballad of Jimmy.

Needless to say I feel good about music again for the first time in a long time.  Time will tell if any of this either my own or band related stuff will see the light of day, but for now I feel inspired.

Video Games Might Just Save This Soul

It's been a minute since I've been extremely focused on a particular project.  A few months ago I was living and breathing the music video for D.T.A we did and it felt great to be working and creating something.  Before that was months before when I spent literally everyday for a few months working on our album.  There have been a few projects here and there around those but they have been on such a smaller scale.  Always after a big project I get kind of burnt out and spend a few days just loafing before having the energy to start something else.
Lately I've made a few attempts to get back on track with a ton of little projects that I've been meaning to work on but haven't been able to for one reason or another.  Probably because a lot of times I'm a lazy piece of crap.    I started to get on the up and up in the last week or so with a few things but then, after some pushing from friends, downloaded the game Diablo III for my computer.  Not too far into it I decided all is lost and this is me for the next few months: going to work and playing this game.  When I was a kid and all the way through high school I played A LOT of video games and it always seemed to take up all my time.  I stopped playing as much in college and since then, pretty much only jumping in to play a particular game or two when they come out and then I generally step back from them.  In other words my creative juices tend to suffer when I get into game mode, yet strangely something weird has happened this time.  It's actually doing the opposite.

I'll start to play the game for an hour or so, then get not so much bored with it, but tired of playing and turn it off.  In the middle of playing a game I get the itch to be creative and get something accomplished.  When I get frustrated with whatever I'm doing, usually a video, I use the game as a reward system.  Finish this crap and go play the game for awhile and vice versa. Sort of. I dunno, I've just seemed to notice a larger influx of work getting done this past week despite playing a lot of this game.  Maybe it was just the right amount of distraction that I've needed to get the blood flowing.