arun in brooklyn

nada surf’s “fruit fly” came on my ipod on the subway today…when let go came out a few years back, i was pretty adamant that the song was a pretty big piece of trash on an otherwise solid indie-pop record…typically i skip by it when i’m listening to the album, but i let it ride today and it sounded pretty terrific…i’m not sure exactly what happened…good songs can creep up on you like that if you let them hang around long enough…

i spent the evening at shraddha’s bbq and then we all watched the fireworks on kent avenue in williamsburg…i haven’t enjoyed a fireworks display in a little over a decade…but it felt just right tonight…everything seems a little different these days…and it’s all been pretty good on the whole…twenty five on the 26th…i feel old…and it feels nice…

i spent  a few hours going through all of my old solo recordings…most of them ranging from poor to adequate in terms of songwriting or recording quality…but an interesting documentation of my life over the course of a decade or so…with marwan and ron out of town infrequently for the next few weeks, i’ve been getting some of my thoughts together for another solo record…i’ve enjoyed playing in a band so much over the last few years i haven’t put much effort into realizing any of the hamilton ideas i’ve had kicking around…marwan’s been persistent that i get an album together this summer, and so far i’ve been pretty happy with the demos i’ve thrown down…without getting too weighted down in production aesthetics and with a little bit of luck, i hope i’ll have about eight to ten songs in the tank by the end of august…when my last ep came out, i performed one show on KSCR before moving to nyc to work in band stuff…i’m glad i got a recording of that performance because i think some of those songs sound better live than they ever did on my recordings…and my favorite recording ever is still my cover of “some sinatra” by the secret stars…it still pales in comparison to the original, but it’s pretty impossible to fuck up a song so beautiful and well-written…i’m going to try and spend less time recording and mixing this batch of songs…should be an interesting project when it’s all mixed down…

owen’s good stuff by the way…i think i’ve listened to all five of his records over the course of the last two days…all of the brilliant…but the first is the best…indulge yourself…it’ll be good for you…

ooxx aa

i never really got music reviews…live or otherwise…it always seemed to me that the immediacy in which albums and live shows are reviewed, analyzed, and judged was a little retroactive…i don’t think i’ve ever been able to truly understand any of my favorite albums without at least a few years of listening mileage for my brain to digest…hell, it took me six years to write my review of emergency and i…so i suppose it’s only fitting that i couldn’t quite formulate my thoughts on the dismemberment plan’s reunion show last saturday until this morning…

when chris e-mailed me inquiring about the show last sunday, i replied that it was exceptional…not their best performance…but for some reason probably my favorite…all things said and done, that pretty much sums it up…last weekend’s show put a lot of pieces together for me and ultimately provided a nice conclusion to my relationship with the dismemberment plan and their music…i mentioned in my review of emergency that their songs are just now starting to really make sense…and their live show (and in retrospect, all their live shows before) also made a lot more sense…the plan always excelled at writing beautifully vivid narratives about the most mundane, depressing realities of twenty-something life…and their live shows married their music so well in their ability to take these realities, light them on fire, and then incite everyone to dance away their worries for the rest of the evening…last saturday was no different…except this time i got it…all of it…and it felt…complete…

i’m not going to go into detail about what songs they played or about the music in general…in many ways that’s not really the point…they played well…really well…there were mistakes…but they were oddly comforting…my favorite part of the entire show?…when “ice of boston” completely fell apart because too many people were on stage and all the instruments got unplugged…leaving joe easley to drum out the rest of the song while travis spit out half of the lyrics in about 15 seconds…the amazing part was that i’m fairly certain that joe new exactly where he was despite all the chaos going on around him…

peace etc

ooxx aa

cover #2: first release – karate

this is actually the 2nd time i’ve recorded this song…the first version was given as part of a birthday present to my friend azita…she never liked karate and we’d fight about it…i think all the (amazing) guitar solos and improvisation between the verses and choruses made her lose interest…in an effort to prove to her that the geoff farina’s songwriting (and lyricism) were nothing short of brilliant, i recorded a more song-oriented version…that was some years ago…this is pretty much the same version…cleaned up a bit and with a better performance on guitar and singing…

i recorded this song using a slightly altered version of a drop D tuning and played it in the key of D…enjoy…

cover # 1: trailor trash – modest mouse

there’s probably no band i’ve been obsessed with more in recent months than modest mouse…this tune appears on their classic (and best) record, lonesome crowded west…there are a lot of reasons why this song is terrific…but i’ll just pick one for now and tell you that the lyrics are so beautifully fucked-up and they’re married to a melody that’s utterly heart-breaking…

i recorded this song using an altered version of an open D tuning and played it in the key of F#…enjoy…

peace etc.

ooxx aa

hmm…covers…these are interesting things…and for the most part, i’ve stayed away from covering other people’s songs…but this is a little project i’ve always wanted to try…and i finally have some pretty good ideas of how to do it without making these songs completely redundant and pointless…inspired by friends and artists who have done similar projects, i will be recording a cover song in my home studio approximately every week or so…we’ll see…since i’m bad at making lists, i’m not covering my top 100 favorite songs or anything like that…instead, i’m just going to cover any song that seems to be in my head on any particular day or series of days that i think i can do something interesting with…

most of these songs will sound little to nothing like the originals…the originals will (always) be way better anyway, so trying to imitate them would be wholly foolish on my part…generally, i will be recording these songs using my acoustic guitar (a martin dx-1) which will more than likely be tuned to some weird tuning that i’ve concocted (because i don’t know how to play the guitar in standard tuning)…this will also likely lead to songs being played and sung in different keys and with slightly altered melodies…you have been warned…

all songs will be recorded in my home studio using my old m-audio mobile pre (which totally sucks, but is awesome because it still works), a shure 57 microphone, and an intel imac running digital performer 5.0…i will make all the songs available as mp3 files encoded at 192 kbps here on this site…

i thank (and apologize to) all of the wonderful artists whose songs i will no doubt defile as part of this experiment…

thanks for coming along…enjoy…

ooxx aa

the clouds erupted early this morning…brooklyn is a chaotic mess of delayed traffic, broken umbrellas and mini-floods cascading down broken streets…i return from band practice, missing the 48, and getting caught in the rain at the corner of nassau and manhattan…my umbrella flips backwards about four times before i finally give up on it altogether…i’ve come to strangely love situations like this…i wait on the corner while people rush around me…ducking into the nearby dunken donuts or the liquor store accross the street…one lady waves for me to get inside…i smile and tell her i’m fine…i appreciate the gesture…but i’m listening to “blonde on blonde” by nada surf…and in the pouring rain, it sounds like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard…lovely…

i remember quite vividly the day when chris pushed his cd player into my hands, handed me his headphones, and said “learn this keyboard hook!” during another monotonous (and ultimately useless) day of gym class circa may of 2000…the hook he was referring to is the subtly-infectious synth lead that drives much of the dismemberment plan’s “the city”…and being sixteen and completely obsessed with synth hooks at the time, i was immediately impressed…although, things that impress you when your sixteen are not necessarily the most deserving of anyone’s attention…but even then, i knew this album was something else…and now, seven years, two college degrees (almost), several musical projects, and one record label later, i’m more impressed with this record than i ever was before…and i don’t even know how i appreciated it as an ignorant sixteen year old who’s musical tastes were (at best) limited to a relatively narrow string of punk-rock and indie-pop (classical music and jazz withstanding)…

emergency and i always served as an artistic inspiration…it’s courageous in every regard and stretches across a palette of music that i didn’t even know existed when i first listened, all without being the slightest bit redundant or derivative…i’d venture to say that the first two years of my relationship with this album were mostly pure admiration in that “this-is-so-mind-blowingly-awesome-that-i-totally-don’t-get-it” kind of way…and i suppose, when you’re a teenager you don’t have the life experiences to really relate to an album with so much depth and magnitude…still, it was a moot point at the time, there were enough incredible keyboard hooks, melodies, guitar rave-ups, and unprecedented production aesthetics to warrant a complete obsession with this record, even as a teenager…

somewhere over the course of the last seven years, emergency became, unequivocally, my favorite album…ever…its imagination and innovation are easily the biggest reasons why i spend 12-15 hours a week holed up in a small room in greenpoint fiddling with guitars, keyboards, pedals and various recording equipment…striving to create something that even brushes up against the level of its inventiveness…i don’t know when the last time i even listened to this record was, but listening to it has strangely become completely irrelevant because it’s significance has woven itself so gently into the fabric of my daily life that i can’t help but think about the album without having to listen to it…the narratives in “spider in the snow” and “the jitters” capture the daily routines and observations of city life in astonishing detail…the daring (and near-insanity) of tracks like “i love a magician” and “8 and a half minutes” exponentially increase my will and desire to raze all modern musical conventions when i’m working in the studio…

the bitterness, pessimism, humour, and occasional hopeful glimmer of “post-collegiate life” (pitchfork media) are captured so distinctly and personally in travis morrison’s storytelling…collegiate “friends” slowly slipping away into oblivion, growingly depressing parties featuring even more depressing acquaintances and pseudo-friends, the limitless minutiae of everyday life (bills, loans, temp jobs, trash pick-up etc), loneliness, alienation (half the time by choice), and in the end just managing to hold all the spiraling pieces together in the midst of life’s dizzying, inclement weather…these are unwaveringly realistic, cynical, and acutely inspiring anthems for the twenties…speaking first hand, i wouldn’t want them any other way…

the dismemberment plan’s reunion show in washington, dc (april 28th) came at perhaps the most welcomed time…two years into a “real” job, living on my own, bachelor’s degree in-hand, and working harder than ever to stitch creative expression into my daily life, the plan’s masterpiece work is more interesting, relateable, and beautiful than it’s ever been…i don’t know if i’ve anticipated a show with this much unbridled excitement since i actually was sixteen…waiting to see the plan for the first time…strange, indeed…

peace etc.

ooxx aa