Tag: (all the) Sceneless Hipsters

I was thinking today about how short these little write-ups have been so far. It occurs to me that they’re short because things are moving so quickly, so there’s really isn’t much to say, short of, “we got together and wrote another sketch of a song.”

Or, in the case of this week, two.

It really is just bizarre. But every week things go faster and this week we already had the first one in place after about 30 minutes, so we went ahead and tried again. And, poof!, there was another. It also felt different this week. Before, I think, it still seemed sort of iffy, like it could end up not being anything in the end. But this week it felt much more definite and I felt a lot more confident in the ideas I was having. I think it has passed an imaginary point in the time line where it is an actuality, now.

All of which is good, since my mental state is still not the best right now, and the last two rehearsals with my band have not been good ones. It has nothing to do with them, and everything to do with my brain. Everything sounds tired and dead, and even attempts to revamp some songs sound flat to me. I’m not sure what it is I’m playing on them anymore and I don’t feel the confidence I once did in how it all sounds. I know it’s all tied to my current depression, but it doesn’t help to get around it.

May 02, 2003
(all the) Sceneless Hipsters, day 3

It’s sort of silly, making a post about this, because there isn’t much to tell as far as details go. It was day 3 (finally, I kept having to cancel) and we got through another skeleton of a song, in even less time than usual. Somehow I am beginning to suspect this will become a full-length record, which is a good thing.

I could tell you how it’s gone, for the most part, and hope that Ryan will correct any memory lapses on my part… We set out to try and make this as collaborative as possible, so we work with the same method, more or less, every day. One of us starts with a chord change or riff, the other comes up with some semblance of a melody for it and we start building out the rest of the verse, chorus and bridge. I thought about telling who came up with which on what, but have now decided to just see if anyone can tell once the record is finished. Past the initial music and melody the rest of each song has been about as mixed as it could be, I’m not sure I could pick out who came up with what, and that’s the way it should be, I would think. But so far all three songs flow into each other well. It definitely sounds different from my usual stuff, though it’s definitely still pop. The main thing is that I wouldn’t think that the final CD would be a tough sell to college radio, unlike Camera Obscura.

I’m looking forward to working on the lyrics once we’ve got the songs in some form and seeing how the idea works out.

Day two and things are still going well on the mystery side project. Another skeleton of a song came together with relatively not much effort. We talked about the direction and how we were going to go about this and decided to keep coming up with these skeletons each visit, working on some lyrical ideas, and then once all the songs exist in some form getting them down as rough demos. At that point we’ll flesh out the lyrics and figure out how we’ll go about recording them and who we might have in to play on them. He also floated the idea that if things keep moving so well maybe we would do an entire album rather than just the EP.

It’s a very different process from how I usually write and I’m glad… It’d be nice to change my habits and be able to write more frequently.

Still, however, no band name.