The Musical Diary of Greg ScheerHere’s an outtake from the previous post, Doghouse. I had originally planned to include a big mess of rising guitar lines at the end, creating sort of a punk Shepard Tone. In the end I decided that it added volume to the mix, but decreased clarity. So I had to cut it.
But I couldn’t bear to keep it from you, my faithful blog devotees. Here is the one that got away.
A few days ago Simon and I sang for you our new song, “Clouds So Fluffy and Free.” The next day I saw an ad for a CD Baby jingle writing contest. Suddenly, “clouds so fluffy and free” became “CD Baby and Me.” Serendipity? Fate? You be the judge.
Speaking of judging, if this doesn’t win the contest, it will prove, once and for all, that there is no justice in the world. It’s a bonafide earworm. Of course, I’ve been listening to this 30 second bon bon over and over again for two days, so it may be more a matter of it being stuck in my head than the song being catchy.
After recording it in pristine 24bit sound, I decided that an old record player version was also called for. Enjoy them both for maximum enjoyment.
They don’t get much fresher than this. This little ditty was written about 12 minutes ago.
I was sitting on the back porch working on a soon to be completed Evanescence-esque song for a singer in New Zealand, when my son Simon joined me. I tried to get him to enjoy the clouds floating overhead (instead of asking me if he could play Connect Four on the computer), so I wrote this little song to encourage him to relax and enjoy nature. Now you, too, can join Simon and me in our little paean to our fluffy friends over our heads.
When I was an undergrad at URI I had access to a small recording studio with an 8 track reel-to-reel machine. On reflection, it was probably some seriously sweet equipment, but at the time I had no idea what was going on. I would just hole myself up with the instruments I had available, stick a mic in front things, and hit record. In this case, the instrument I had available was my electric bass, so I recorded track after track of the bass–sometimes slowed down, sometimes sped up–and then layered a fledging Choir of Greg on top of it, singing the hypnotic and groovy “Swimming.”
No one said this was going to be pretty…
In this demo of “Who Can Know What Will Be,” you will find Greg at his most navel-gazing of musical moments. And “pitchy,” as Randy Jackson would say. I doubt I’ll ever do anything with this song again, but if I did, I could imagine it morphing into an extended tabla and sitar improvisation at the end.
I’m a little reluctant to even include this song in my Spring Cleaning series. On the other hand, if you’ve stayed with me so far, you won’t be too surprised that some of this music is, indeed, dirty laundry. So let me air it and be done with it.
During the Gulf War, I was sickened to see a seemingly endless stream of young people heading off to fight a war that appeared to have no noble cause. Back in the day, the people making the decisions rode out on the front line into battle. That would make you seriously consider what you have to gain and lose when declaring war. But in this war, the decisions were being made by people who had nothing to lose, and the price was being paid by young and generally poor people who were moved into harm’s way like plastic chess pieces. But now I’m unveiling my pacifist leanings…
In response to all these frustrated thoughts I wrote a musical satire called “Dancing in the Sand.”
If you know the infamous PDQ Bach, then you know the geeky delight of classical music insider jokes. I decided to try my hand at creating a fictional composer, as Peter Schickele did with PDQ Bach. My composer’s name was Yang Gonzalez Bergermeister Heinz, the song of a Chinese naval officer and a Bolivian tin heiress. When young Yang made his way to America, he looked for a great librettist with whom he could collaborate. He didn’t find a librettist, but he did find a poem published on a plastic produce bag, and he immediately got to work composing music for this riveting new text. The result? Warning. A masterpiece of Sturm und Wrong.
I told you I was going to air some dirty laundry. Here it is: an early iteration of The Choir of Gregs. In this instance, we’re singing a song that I assume is called “Grace.” We sang it before every meal at Camp-of-the-Woods, where I worked for three summers. At some point, I wrote a barbershop arrangement of it for some of the male waiters to sing, and I later recorded it on my little Fostex four track cassette recorder.
The Choral Scholars, Norma de Waal Malefyt and I produced a CD with 22 tracks (Cry Out to God!). But we also recorded all the “B Sides” you’ve been enjoying here over the last few weeks, as well as reading 200 some Psalm settings in preparation for the recording. That’s pretty exhausting stuff, and there are bound to be some moments in which things get giddy.
Here, in a “choral scholars gone wild” moment, is our reading of Psalm 2. We were chanting through the Psalm and it occurred to me how funny it would be to not only chant the text “The God whose throne is in heaven is laughing,” but to also chant the laughing itself. You can hear the ridiculous result here.
Disclaimer: I did not make up the character Theo Dumb Dumb, nor did I endorse or encourage it. (Except writing this theme song…)
I don’t know how the super hero Theo Dumb Dumb came to be, but it seems he is a likable character whose clumsy foibles always save the day. My favorite part of this recording is Theo’s spoken introduction: “here’s a true story that I made up.” Very funny.
It is fitting to end our 12 days of Christmas with a rousing little earworm that finds the whole Scheer family singing along. Won’t you join us?