Just a few notes from the Red Pill, aka my living room, before I hit the sack...

I've had an Acer Aspire 3620 laptop for almost exactly three years. The main reason I purchased it was so that I could use it to record and play music. I have used it to mess around with Reason a bit in the past, but it gradually replaced my whole desktop computer once it went belly up. The Acer was the computer I used while I lived in Toronto. For almost the entire time I've had the thing, I've typically had to point an external fan at the processor to keep it from overheating. The internal fan is probably caked with dirt. I've never squirted the vents with compressed air or popped it open for a closer look. I don't have a small screwdriver or the willingness to buy one, especially since I bought the huge Mac desktop last summer.

I've wiped the hard drive clean several times to try and restore its functionality. Now, I'm finally getting around to seriously wanting to use it for music purposes. I've taken most of the non-essential program off the hard drive and installed Reason, plus an ASIO driver to cut down on signal delay from my MIDI keyboard to the computer. I'm now downloading FL Studio for installation, which should complete the software end of what I need it for. A next step is picking up a powered speaker that I can run from my mixer and the laptop. If I can get the software to work well in conjunction, I'll be pretty well set.

This doesn't change the fact that the laptop isn't the greatest, but maybe I can get a show out of it. I've got it raised on a stack of coasters right now to allow ventilation and it seems to be helping it tremendously. I really should have taken better care of this thing.

I think about what I'm going to do with the music a lot. Right now the plan is to put it online and play a show. Small steps. I've been thinking about hard copies to send out to places and how hardcore I want to go on designing/printing them. Over the next few weekends I'm planning to finalize the tacks, design a website and finish a music video, with everything coming together for a launch on Tuesday, May 19th. Once my equipment comes together, I'm going to practice my ass off and schedule a show. And then, well, I guess that's when I'll see how serious I am about this.

I spent the week in Peterborough with a lot of ideas floating around in my head. I came back with some poems written and ideas for poems and a short story brewing. It felt like the vacation kind of threw off the rhythm I had going of working, songwriting and review writing, but at least I have a lot to aim for. If only work weren't getting in the way.

I'm still listening to a lot of Wilco. I've got four of their albums. Some of these songs will be with me forever, I think. As long as I get to listen to a song like "Poor Places" as often as I want, the world can't be all bad.

Tomorrow night I'm going to check out a set by Adam Saikely at the Avant Garde Bar. I want to spy on his audio setup. It feels like my ego has kept me out of a lot of venues in Ottawa over the last few years. I'm trying to get past it because it's bullshit and I'm too old to be concerned with things like that. Andrea helps me out on that front. The world is hers to hold while the rest of us are just trying to stay standing.

I've been listening to a lot of Wilco lately. Pretty well exclusively, even. I got a hold of three of their albums. Tonight I went out for a walk around Centretown in the snow, listening, listening...

I think part of my new fascination with Wilco is stripping away each layer of their production, trying to listen to their records on separate levels. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a record that places noise and ambient soundscapes upon fairly straight-ahead acoustic and pop rock numbers. The newer Sky Blue Sky record is one that lead singer Jeff Tweedy called an album of songs, pure and simple - a lot of guitar progressions and jamming. The other day I picked up A.M. and it's different than I thought it would be. I had heard so much about the influence of country music on Wilco's earlier stuff, but it's different from country music. Sure, they use slide guitar, but it's taken out of the context of the country music style and put into one that sound more like 90's alternative rock.

I've been trying to wrap my head around Jeff Tweedy. He's a huge punk rock fan, yet he fronts what a lot of people have called an alt. country band. He collaborates with a guy like Jim O'Rourke and has a predilection for noise and art rock, yet from what I've heard of the Wilco albums, they only scratch the surface of how different that style can get. I think part of the reason for that is Tweedy's love for writing lyrics. I think he regards himself as a poet who happens to be a songwriter.

I've always been a little bewildered by noise, but experimenting with Reason has turned me on to some of its possibilities. I'm still a much bigger fan of structure and melody, but I love the challenge of crafting something out of both. I'd really like to try something drastic with noise while still keeping an identifiable rhythm and lyrics as elements. I'm really interested in songs like "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" and "Radio Cure", songs that shift in structure yet still hold together as beautiful pieces of music that start at A and end at Z.

The problem with the way I currently write songs in Reason is that I'm still married to writing overly segmented arrangements. I need to mix them up. I need to take a hammer to them and shatter them somehow, yet avoid the problem of them turning out too "weird". A lot of folks are into music that I find "weird". The music I make has to make sense to me. I don't want to write a song and feel like I didn't try hard to shape it appropriately afterward. I also need to spend more time on writing lyrics. Right now I'm writing words off the top of my head to gel with the songs. I'd like to try working on stuff that's more imagistically rich.

I started working on a new song today. These days listening to music feels more like a process of deconstruction to me. It's impressing me on a whole new level.