getting high on my own supply - 1. songs about food pt. 1
episode 1: "ketchup" / “yogurt” / "snowcone” (spring 2007)
i don't know if i'll stay roughly chronological with these or jump around but these are the next earliest recordings i have, from the next few months as i started to learn how to use my gear. my studio during this era was a small bedroom in a four bedroom house a few miles south of the university. i had a single bed with a wood frame, the same bed i had slept in my entire life (save for my freshman year in a dorm with its own bed). my comforter was a light blue fleece (you do not need much of a comforter in tallahassee). i never used my overhead light (i have always been a lamp person) so i installed a blue bulb in that which looked cool when it was dark and i was high.
one way of trying to avoid the cringe of writing "real" lyrics that i chose as a generative device in those days was writing songs exclusively about food. when i was a teenager even before i started playing guitar i had loved the band shonen knife who made a repeated practice of this (see also: cibo matto). i also always liked the title of the album more songs about buildings and food by talking heads (more than the music if i'm honest which is).
"ketchup": i think this is the second song i recorded, a day or two after the previous one. it's not quantized or looped, vocal and guitar live to tape with a punched in guitar solo at the end. i would often use this particular dry telephone vocal the spoken word bits now feel a bit olivia rodrigo but also there's something where i'm almost like holding my breath a little or doing head voice or something. the lyrics are a true story.
"yogurt": this is the first recording i have with percussion and i think guitars looped by the app rather than me playing them over and over for the duration of the song—i still hadn't figured out how to use the recording software (at this time i was using an app called sonar) well enough for drums so this is me thumping a book and shaking a plastic egg filled with sand into the mic. the yogurt i ate most at this time was yoplait fruit on the bottom blueberry (it was not a great time for yogurt).
"snocone": from later in the spring, this recording is already way more sophisticated than the others—the first appearance of keyboard, quantized and sequenced with sync delay, actual (if muted) drums. (the lyrics are prosaic to the point of being just kind of simple declarative statements about my snocone preferences and experiences). i thought of this as like a melancholy underwater take on “ice cream man” by jonathan richman, a song i liked to cover.
i played music with friends throughout college which was a great source of joy (the music and the friends) but i usually stuck to guitar and was too shy to sing (and when i did sang i sang in a shy way). the mediation of recording / the privacy and safety of recording myself in my bedroom was how i found my voice.