Your Darlin' Mac.

Your Darlin’ Mac (1970) R.Smith/ T. Smith

One evening in my thinking
I came to realize
There’s more than this to living
So as soon as you closed your eyes
I packed my battered suitcase
Climbed into the car
And now I’m 600 miles away
Standing kneeling at this bar.

Your darlin’ Mac Aint comin' back
Cause he’s found somebody else.

I left you the television
The place you glued your eyes
And the bed alone in the corner
That you often said you despised.
Now you may think I’m selfish
I could have given you a whole lot more
But now the symbol of our love
Is just a note upon the door.

Her crooked smile spoke volumes
When she met me at the door
Yes I’m staying at our daughters
Just sleeping on the floor

The thing that drives me crazy
The thought that makes me scared
Is that she probably hasn’t even noticed
That I’m no longer there.

Shanna's Theme (2008)

The tangled origins of some of the tracks on the Unevolved CD are almost spooky. Shanna's Theme is one example.

This track started out as a tracker file that was started in about 1996. Trackers were free programs that allowed you to create sound patterns using samples. These sound samples were available on hundreds of web sites as well as the actual songs created using these tools.

The frustrating thing for me was that almost all of these files were dance music, trance, etc. Long loops of weird bass lines and disco like drums. So I learned how to make my own samples.

My first attempt was to digitally sample our old piano. Digitally sampled in my case meant sticking a cheap microphone under the hood and recording the results on a shareware recording program called Goldwave. On Goldwave I saved a number of short segments of various piano notes which the tracker programs then allowed me to play in any key and in any combination.

Tracker was fun technology because it allowed you to create as many tracks as you wanted (if you had the patience) on a very basic computer and create a very thick wall of sound using dozens of instruments.

At some point in 1999 I dumped dozens of tracker files I had created to cassette tape (which is a good thing because the computers hard drive crashed shortly after that). Then I digitally sampled the cassette tape to PC in 2007. At that point I loaded the file into Audacity and began adding guitar tracks. But I wasn't finished there. The song was too long so I cut out various sections in the middle and re-ordered some of the sequences.

So that track spanned almost 10 years, had dozens of digitally sampled tracks, six guitar tracks and numerous cuts and edits. It's one of my favorites though and that's why I named it after my daughter.

The trumpet sequence in the chorus of The White Dove Sailed was pulled from a license-free copy of a sample of the Indiana Jones movie theme. I grabbed four notes that I thought would fit and dropped them into the chorus expecting to have to play around with the pitch and speed of the sample. To my amazement, the trumpet blast happened to be in exactly the right key and even fit the pacing of the song. More serendipity. It’s not my favorite song but I love the trumpets, the sliding bass and the distorted voicing and the lyrics are strange, but they have meaning for me. Almost all of this string of words came out while driving. (Hey, I’m worried about my sanity too so you’re not alone.)

That’s the way it goes.
We pinwheel down
And then we eat the dirt.
How was I to know?
They were dreaming up
A new kind of hurt.
That’s the way it goes.
Feeling small
And standing even smaller
That’ the way it feels.
Standing tall But always evil’s taller.

I’m a sound hoarder. The good thing is that sound doesn’t crowd the hallways and stack up in the sink. My hoarding is almost invisible. A one terrabyte hard drive times two for security is all I need. The sound bite at the end of Unevolved CD was my mom calling down to the basement for supper in 1969 when we lived in Selkirk. Toivi does the same thing today. If someone didn’t remind me I might just go for days without eating. How I play around with songs now is quite unique (I think) from the sit-on-the-bed with pen and paper style most people are familiar with. I call it backwards writing because the flow of the process is exactly the opposite of the conventional ways a song might be written. First I record some sound snippets. Nothing purposeful, whatever sounds interesting.Then if they survive a few days on my hard drive, they get reorganized into longer strings. This becomes a much more computer-centric process of cutting and pasting sections of notes and drum beats together with the goal of stretching out the likeable stuff into a two to three minute piece. One good example of this is Spring. The musical bed is based on four different recordings. Then I took the parts I liked the best and stitched them all together. Then I added more percussion. Then I cut up the track again. I had no idea how this would turn out in the end. It was like throwing paint on a canvas. But then, I didn’t care about the end result and had no real expectation of a final result. It just so happens I love editing music too. I love the surprises you get. Then I record the piece onto a CD and listen to it in the car going to and from work. I sing along with the music. It’s intentionally a very distracted process. I’m looking for subconscious help. I have sung along with an instrumental for days, dozens and dozens of times, with no real results. Then suddenly, usually when I am focused on something else, like a lane change or a red light, a line or a phrase bubbles to the surface. I grab it. Write it down later. Yeah, I look like a fool in the traffic. And it hasn’t improved my voice either. Come to think of it, all of the lyrics I’ve used for the past five years on these projects were written while driving. I guess I could have called this project On The Road. I also thought of Writing Backwards as another possible title. (You may have noticed I also love titles.)

Backwards writing and cut and paste creativity!

SPRING FLOOD 271 SCOTIA STREET

How I play around with songs now is quite unique (I think) from the sit-on-the-bed with pen and paper style most people are familiar with. I call it backwards writing because the flow of the process is exactly the opposite of the conventional ways a song might be written.

First I record some sound snippets. Nothing purposeful, whatever sounds interesting.Then if they survive a few days on my hard drive, they get reorganized into longer strings. This becomes a much more computer-centric process of cutting and pasting sections of notes and drum beats together with the goal of stretching out the likeable stuff into a two to three minute piece.

One good example of this is Spring. The musical bed is based on four different complete recordings. Then I took the parts I liked the best and stitched them all together. Then I added more percussion. Then I cut up the track again. I had no idea how this would turn out in the end. It was like throwing paint on a canvas. But then, I didn’t care about the end result and had no real expectation of a final result.

It just so happens I love editing music too. I love the surprises you get.

Then I record the piece onto a CD and listen to it in the car going to and from work. I sing along with the music. It’s intentionally a very distracted process. I’m looking for subconscious help. I have sung along with an instrumental for days, dozens and dozens of times, with no real results. Then suddenly, usually when I am focused on something else, like a lane change or a red light, a line or a phrase bubbles to the surface. I grab it. Write it down later. Yeah, I look like a fool in the traffic. And it hasn’t improved my voice either.

Come to think of it, all of the lyrics I’ve used for the past five years on these projects were written while driving. I guess I could have called this project On The Road. I also thought of Writing Backwards as another possible title. (You may have noticed I also love titles.)

One of my favorite songs, The Last Waltz was written in 1969. It was first committed to tape in the backyard of a friend and when you listen to it, you can hear the ambient sounds of a summer afternoon. I include a few seconds of the original recording on the 271 CD because it has that energy of goofy young guys fooling around during summer vacation. With a very serious song.


Why a waltz? Because I wanted to try to write a song in ¾ time. Why the Last Waltz? Because for some reason I had become convinced that the world was going to end in August. Could it be that I had finished high school and was headed to first year University? It never occurred to me at the time but now it seems abundantly evident that I was terrified about the direction my life was taking.

Where would I be
Without an alarm
Without someone there
Always shaking my arm.

I still remember writing those lines. Over forty years ago. That’s how big an impact a few words and a couple of chords can have on my strange little brain. Many of the songs on 271 and Unevolved and Too Long Stupid Too Short Smart are a composed of old archival recordings, some between 20-30 years old.

Baloney was first recorded in Oakbank one night in 1993 when my two daughters were away at piano lessons. I used a classic DIY drum kit that had eight very basic clunky presets that was built by Larry Korba, a high school friend who loved kit building. All I had at that point was a drum track and a guitar. I’m not sure why I kept it but there was something I liked about the dopey percussion sound.

Larry Korba working on some electronic project.

Then in 2008 I transferred the cassette recording to digital and added another guitar track. In 2010 I decided to either fix it or send it to the big trashcan in the sky. So I cut out about a dozen bars with Audacity and recorded a bass line. You can hear the same drum machine in the piece So Long, the basic track and voice which was recorded on a sunny Saturday in the living room of our home on Sun Valley Drive around 1988-89.

This was a case of desperatly wanting to just record the idea before I forgot it completely. The words were literally spontaeous to the recording and were never written down; one take on a beat up old reel to reel recording machine that I had bought used for $25. It died shorlty after that but I was able to transfer the recording to a cassette tape before it expired.

271 Scotia Street. Where This Addiction Began!

271 SCOTIA STREET.

I was hooked the minute a cheap guitar was placed in my hands, a used music school acoustic that my parents gave me. I never went to the classes, which upset my mother, but they allowed me to keep the guitar. It was impossible to tune and would only stay in key for a few minutes at a time. But I loved it anyway.

No one told me what notes to play or how to tune the six strings and this was before Google and the Internet, so I just tuned the first three strings to something that sounded cool to my ears (I’m guessing I was twelve at the time) and strummed away.

Here’s what’s weird about my brain - I never tried to play a Beatle song on that guitar, even though I was nuts about their music. Partly because I had no idea how. But more so because I wanted to write my own songs. I never really got a kick out of playing someone else’s music, even to this day. It was always about some novel sound that I was trying to create and some words that would hopefully fit in some unexplainable way with the notes.

When my dad brought home a new Sony TC-155 two track reel-to-reel tape recorder, I fell in love with the idea that I could now record these snippets of songs and not worry about ever hearing them again. I could also double track, add a second voice or another guitar sound. Just thinking now about that tape recorder makes the dopamine flow. And it all happened up in my bedroom at 271 Scotia Street.



My brothers probably have a lot of great memories of growing up there. We had a huge yard, a boat down by the river, and summers seemed to go on forever. But for me it was all about the tape recorder and that crappy guitar.

The potential for creativity in that simple combination has always been impossible for me to describe in words.I have known a number of musicians through the years, some of them pros, who have spent a lot of time writing songs they hoped would be hits. They remind me of shinny players dreaming about being Wayne Gretsky. They tell me they never enjoyed the process very much though. It was hard work. I feel sorry for all the hours they spent missing out on the opportunity to just enjoy the process. In the beginning we all fell in love with music because of the way it made us feel. Then we lost some of the best parts because we got fooled into thinking that as reasonable people we needed to find a way to squeeze some profit out of the whole process. We don’t.In my case, I do this simply because it’s fun. I have no audience to pander to, no agent to make happy. When I play and record, I do it for the personal satisfaction I get from creating something, be it ever so humble.

North American’s spend billions of dollars every year trying to be happy. They buy toys and trips and when that doesn't work they turn to books and seminars on how to find their inner bliss. For most of us the bliss is right there in front of us. It might be knitting, or playing the piano, or bird watching. It’s totally unproductive work that will never pay the bills. But it makes us feel good.

When I pick up a guitar today, I do the same thing I did when I was twelve. The first thing I look for is a new sound, a new combination of notes or a new effect. And then when I hear something I like, I click on the record button on a personal computer and lay down the track. When I play it back later I am usually surprised. I never know what to expect. There is no pattern to recognize, no genre, no style of music that I stick with.

You might call these things I build sound snippets. Or remnants. Maybe just sound effects. You can’t build a conventional song out of most of them. They sound interesting to me though and the process of organizing and cataloging them is also very satisfying. They also serve as markers to memories, which music is very good at.

There are some pieces in here that almost look like songs. They have lyrics and words in some cases. But I no longer have a desire to punish myself to try and make them fit into a longer structured format. If they don’t survive the commute ‘audition’, they just get erased. In 2010 I recorded over 100, of which about 40 remain.

My Darling Mac was written when I lived in East Kildonan in the 70’s. It was a song that just popped into being one evening. I love that experience. I imagined a guy who wasn’t very happy with his life and just took off, leaving everything behind. Maybe my parents were arguing that day, which they did a lot of then. It wasn’t long after I wrote this that my Dad left home.

I packed my battered suitcase
Climbed into the car
Now I'm 600 miles away.
Standing / kneeling at this bar.

Oh yeah. I was also breaking up with my girlfriend of several years. Think my subconscious was trying to tell me something?

I have no idea where that line came from. But I’m proud of it. And since I never had to work at creating it in any serious way, also a little surprised. Everyone should have that experience. It’s a fantastic from of serendipty.

Here’s a few lines from a song that is lost (audio-wise) but I scribbled the words down while it came to me, sitting on my bed with my guitar and a blank piece of paper. I still remember the transcendent feeling of playing complex jazz chords (which I had just learned from a music book I had photocopied at the library) and then having these words just fall out onto my lap. Like there was a ghost in the room feeding them to me. (I don’t believe in ghosts so don’t go spiritual on me.)

Clamped hand on the car door
Poker face in the drug store.
Women never needs anyone.
Anymore.

Oh yeah. I was also breaking up with my girlfriend of several years. Think my subconscious was trying to tell me something?