Neil Fein's Blog

Blogger ate this post before. Will try again:

Recorded a demo of Welcome Home yesterday. I'm unhappy with the vocal, but I like the arrangement of guitars. It clocks in at over 6 minutes! I guess this is counteracting all the short songs like There's That Song and Eyes Up Front.

Bruce has gone and done mixdowns of ArtDiff songs Ouch, Imposing Potato, and The Bile Song. Bile is far from finished, but we have a good idea of where to go with the song now. The first two are finals and sound great!

Played a fun set, including:

Woke Up On the Fourth
Welcome Home
From the Beginning
Never Had a Brother
Eyes Up Front

This was the first time I played Woke Up On the Fourth in front of a regular audience, i.e., just me playing. However, there were a few people in the audience that had been at the guitar pull on Thursday, so it wasn't brand-new to them.

Oddly, I forgot the words to the bridge. I kept playing, and Martha fed me the lines. I guess she's my official prompter.

I have a headliner gig at Cleo's, coming up on September 18th at 9pm. Will add it to the calendar when I get a chance.

Played along with the Central NJ Song Circle last night. There was a lot of Dylan music, a lot of Beatles. I played In My Life, and Here Comes the Sun. Also played Woke Up On the Fourth for the first time in public. I'll play it this Saturday night at Cleo's if I can memorize the lyrics by then.

Just realized that I've not posted since Monday. Earlier this week, I worked on the third version of Woke Up On the Fourth, only to have the MD8 deck crap out on me; due to a spectacularly random disk error, there's now a bit of silence in the middle of the song. It's only 1/4 of a second long, but its very jarring. I guess this will be Demo #3.

Over in Artistic Differences we've been working on Edge of My Tongue, a blues-thing. Very cool material, and the 4th song we've done. Last night, I forgot to bring a capo and had to re-tune my electric guitar up to F#-B-E-A-C#-F#. It felt like I was about to snap a string with every strum. We did 8 or 9 takes and the guitar sounded good, though the tuning made it hard to do pull-offs on the heavier strings.

"User Friendly" strip

Played the same setlist as at Cleo's last time:

Eyes Up Front
There's That Song
Welcome Home
Never Had a Brother
Here Comes the Sun

The Internet Cafe in Redbank is about the same as the last time I played there, although the PA is a little better now that they have a dedicated mixing board.

The crowd was thin; 8 or 9 people in the audience, and 3 acts signed up. (Myself, a standup comic, and another singer/guitarist.)

Just found out that the open mike in Rahway is on Saturdays, not Sundays. I already have plans this Saturday night, but I'll try to make the next one. Will send out and update email and update the calendar page when I get home tonight.

Martha recently mentioned that she needs to look at some blogs. I was going to email these to her, but it's all nice and warm and fuzzy and recursive if I put this up here.

Slashdot
The original board-of-interesting-stuff.

BoingBoing
Self-proclaimed "directory of wonderful things". Cory Doctorow, writer, contributes to this.

Charlie Stross's Diary
Science-fiction writer and cynical guy.

Die Puny Humans
Warren Ellis's research weblog. Not work-safe.

The Beat
"Comics Culture" blog, by Heidi MacDonald

Michael Burstein's journal
Writer and a friend.

Neil Gaiman's Journal
Another writer, this started as a blog for his novel "American Gods" and became the general-Neil-Gaiman's-life journal it is now.

Not My Desk
Christopher Livingston keeps a Somewhat Daily Journal on this site, but he also posts articles from time to time. Funny!

ex machina
blog written by the father of a micropreemie named eric. this one sucks you in, and i've been rooting for the little guy. send him a postcard.

This Girl's Life
Amy Hemphill's blog. A friend and a student in film school. (Amy keeps up a separate log, A Director Prepares, with most of the film school-related things.) She needs to update this.

Where is Raed?
Two bloggers in Iraq. They hadn't posted in over 4 months, and I was about to delete the bookmark when a single, blank post showed up. I'll keep checking.

Yellowtext
Blog on the site Andy Ihnatko's Colossal Waste of Bandwidth. Andy is a "personality" in the computer world. He tends to go for Macs religiously, and he's funny, very funny.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume 2
Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill

In this, the second installment of Moore and O'Neill's world where all fantastic imaginings have somehow taken place, our heroes take on the war of the worlds. As in Volume 1, it is 1898. The league is on retainer to the UK spooks. And cylinders are landing throughout England, with Martian nasties popping out. It looks like our dysfunctional family of heroes may have met its match.

The fact that this prompts Griffin, the Invisible Man, to join up with what he sees as "the winning side" will surprise no-one. Griffin has been more or less tolerated by the league, particularly Nemo, because he has stealth they do not.

Much that was planted in the first book comes to fruition. Hyde reaches his zenith in power and in mind. And Mina Murray and Allan Quartermain take a side trip to see a gentleman who is making monsters out of hybrid animals.

While the story wraps up nicely, there is plenty of room to continue the saga should Mr. Moore choose to do so. Given his comments in recent interviews about his feelings to wards writing comics in general, this does seem unlikely.

The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, volume 2 is a great read, a smart read. Like its predecessor, it presents a believable world inhabited with fascinating, if mostly unsavory, characters. Highly recommended to all.

Forgot to post this when I wrote about our trip to Woodstock:

In Hurley, off Route 28, we found a coffee shop with blends like "Zanzibar" and "Jump Start" (tried the latter, it's a very good coffee). Needing a break from the road, it was a good place to stop.

But the weird bit was that, since they're also a coffee roaster, they have a tub-sized roasting mechanism in the back. Graz and I stood staring at all the coffee beans like the addicts we are, agape and amazed.

Thanks to Graz for finding the link.

While I've previously posted to the effect that Craig and I have been working on some of the Ten to Nine material, it might be of interest that we've put some samples up on the studio log page of the band's site.

The "Ten to Nine" stuff was mostly written for a "band" sound -- multiple singers, and multiple egos. I'm somewhat uncertain about revisiting this stuff. Ten to Nine never finished the album it was working on, due to several factors within the band. I don't know if we'll finish what we're playing around with. And of course I have an album of my own to finish writing.

On the other hand, the creative differences were a tremendous learning experience, and we did write some good songs. It would be a shame for them never to see the light of day. We've decided to work on a couple of songs to try this out. If we get some good tunes out of it, we'll make a further decision then.

After several uncertain Saturday afternoon rehearsals, an excellent set tonight at Cleo's!

Eyes up Front
There's that Song
Welcome Home
Never Had a Brother
Here Comes the Sun

...the last song is one I played at a wedding last weekend, and it works well in a regular set.

The set before me involved a guy who, for his first number, played an acoustic guitar into a pedalboard chock full of, well, pedals. He set up a sample loop and then kept playing over it, adding oddness and airy embellishments. At one point he cut his guitar out of the loop and (I later found out) he retuned into DADGAD tuning for the next song. If anyone remembers his name please tell me and I'll put it up here.

Messenger Launch (time exposure)
See the link for details (click on the picture), but this is a probe that will end up in orbit around Mercury.
Photo from Astronomy Picture of the Day

Some time back, we planned a 2-day vacation with Grazina. The intent was to drive up into New York state, and not have any other plans. Graz has done this before. On Monday morning we headed up 287.

After seeing several little towns, we ended up near Woodstock, NY and parked in the parking lot of the Woodstock School of Art. There are trails there and we, on the advice of a woman who was standing there and painting, took a walk into the woods to see stone sculptures. This is easily worth the walk.

We ended up spending Monday night in Woodstock. It's a smallish town, large for the area. (Downtown Woodstock reminded me a little of downtown Quebec.) We had fun there and went downtown Tuesday morning for breakfast. I bought a chromatic Harmonica and played it in a downtown park square.

Making our way back, we drove up some mountains. Graz showed me a section of bedrock that's been turned into impromptu art, mostly by local kids. We left some temporary rock sculptures and headed back down to the car and drove home.

It was a lot of fun, although I'll bring better hiking shoes next time.

More about the NY State trip in this later post.

Played two songs at the wedding of a friend, during the "first dance" bit. In My Life and Here Comes the Sun.

Have been spending evenings in the studio this week. With Artistic Differences and with Ten to Nine.

After spending much of the afternoon finishing the demo Bruce and I did for Woke Up on the Fourth, the multitracker started giving me disc errors while I was recording takes, always the takes that were going well (of course).

I was able to finish most of it by 9pm. We had plans, so I left it as-is without the keyboard track. Martha had a headache, and we cancelled our plans for the evening (sorry, Anita & Memo; seeya tomorrow, though).

It seemed to me that the deck needed to cool down (it gets hot while recording) and so did I. I left the house with a book, and after picking up excedrin for Martha, I went to West End cafe in New Brunswick and ordered a double espresso. I came home a couple of hours later and laid down the keyboard track.

Here's an MP3 of the mixdown. (about 1.3 megs) There are errors in the recording, and the drums don't fit with the rhythm yet, but I think this is the feel I want for the song.