"DROPBOXING" (AND BLOG-A-DAY TWO)...

66 of the songs mastered (to equalize the volume) and archived in the “Dropbox” program Jane turned me on to. When I copy a file there, it automatically sends it to the rest of the band (Clint, Jane and Ken). I’m basically doing everything I’ve weitten—I needed to re-master and archive the songs anyway, since most of them were on “Alice” the ‘puter’s now-deceased hard drive. Clint, Jane and Ken can decide which ones they’re interested in us performing. Ultimately, we should have three hours’ worth of performable stuff (if we’re going to do the Manzanita Farmer’s Market, which I think we should)—and it shouldn’t be all mine.

The band’s got standup bass (Clint), rhythm guitar (me), “whiny lead” (Jane on fiddle) and “non-whiny lead” (Ken on guitar). That’s sufficient for both performing and recording. I expect I’ll be the front man for this band too; it’s not a position I particularly relish, but I can do it the way I think it ought to be done (which is not the way most bands do it), and I don’t really mind doing it, and I think I can do it well. And to the extent the others don’t want to mess with it, it’ll still get done. If, down the road, they get more comfortable with it, we can divvy the job up.

The mastering-and-Dropboxing exercise was an opportunity to listen to some songs I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I’d completely forgotten “The Footballer’s Prayer”; it’s cute—and definitely appropriate for a “family” audience, since it’s got no tongue-in-cheek sexual or political references. It isn’t even religious, except for the “O Lord, let me come back as a football” line in the chorus. It was written for one of those “challenges” of the Coventry Songwriters group over in England, and I did remember I’d worked hard to make it appealable both to Brits and to Americans (the two cultures define “football” differently—outside the U.S., “football” is soccer). What I didn’t remember was that I’d managed to do it pretty well.

“Take Me Back to the ‘Sixties” isn’t bad, either—a nice, nostalgic lament (also written for the Coventry folks, when they wanted songs about drugs). I think that one only ever got performed once—at the coffee shop in McMinnville whose open mike I used to go to while I was being the interim city manager in Lafayette. There are, I guess, not that many people left who remember the ‘Sixties—and as we age, there are fewer all the time.

And my Tascam recording of “Selling Off My Body Parts” is better, I think, than the one from the Influence Music Hall. (And I wasn’t that impressed with my Tascam recording, either.) So I sent the Tascam one to the band. Hope I haven’t overwhelmed them with material.

There are three of my songs where the only good recording exists only as a soundtrack for a video: “Leavin’ It to Beaver,” “50 Ways to Cure the Depression” and “Me and Rufus, and Burning Down the House.” Task for next week, I guess, is to strip the audio track off of those. That’s supposed to be possible in Audacity. And there are a handful more songs that I need to re-record, because the only recordings in existence were on “Alice”—“Born Again Barbie,” “Paradise: the Columbia Gorge Song,” and “Ballad of the Dodson Drifters.”

Still have lyrics to typeset—I’ve got only eight songs done thus far. That task is more work than mastering the recordings. And I still have no idea what to use for photos this time around.

Joe