I wrote "Gritty City Strut" in March 2024. I was going for a pitch opportunity that was looking for funky vintage 70s Afrobeat-style instrumental jazz like Fela Kuti and Hugh Masekela. I used to listen to a lot of that kind of music so I thought, why not give it a shot?  The piece didn't ultimately get used for the pitch, but I still like it so I'm sharing it here.

I usually try to teach myself something new when I'm producing a piece like this, and in this case the main thing I was working on was the horns. I really like music with big horn sections, but I'm not a horn player and I am not in the position to hire a half-dozen horn players every time I want horns on a song.

So I wanted to try to create a virtual horn section using sampled instruments. This is not an uncommon thing to do, but it's a lot harder than you might suppose. Even really good horn samples can sound fake and funny if you don't apply a lot of processing to them.

I had to watch a lot of youtube videos to figure out how to steer myself toward a realistic / vintage live horn sound, and then I spent a long time messing with it to get it passable.

I also asked one of my kids, who plays trombone, for a critique. They said I had made some of the staccato hits *too* staccato,  and it didn't sound realistic. So I adjusted until they were satisfied. I think it sounds pretty good now.

I created the cover art using an AI tool.

I shared a demo version of my original song "We're in the Place" a few weeks ago. Here's what happened when I showed up at The What Have You open mic and asked for a band to come up and play it with me. None of these folks had heard the song before. We ended up with both violin and trombone solos, which made for a great vibe.

Thanks to Carole Duval for filming this on her phone (which is much nicer than mine).

Part of the reason I've been creating so much music lately is that I'm trying to teach myself to write for film & TV. That requires being able to produce something 1) quickly, 2) at professional quality, and 3) to produce a specific effect. That's why I joined the songwriter's group (Sync or Swim) that I've been talking about in the past few posts.

"Hit It" was one that I didn't write for Sync or Swim. Instead I wrote it specifically to pitch to a music library that was looking for percussion instrumentals to use for commercials. They didn't end up picking it up, but I learned a lot from doing it, and anyway I think I ended up with a cool-sounding piece that I can still use for something else.

What did I learn? I was trying to create something that sounded natural and organic even though I don't actually own any drums. In the songs you've heard so far, I 've used a combination of algorithmic AI-ish drummers and my own MIDI programming to create the drum tracks. Which is a technique that I think I've gotten pretty good at, but it's one thing when you're using drums as a backing track to a song, and something else again when the percussion is all there is in the piece. You want it to sound really natural and top-notch.

So, this time, I used a mix of two techniques to create the drum tracks.

First, I set my phone to record a voice memo and then banged on the back of it with my fingers to create the main percussive rhythm that you hear throughout; I used my digital audio workstation to convert the resulting audio to a MIDI signal, then applied two different software instrument samples (a low floor-tom and a conga). This is what gives the track its sort of tropical, latin-ish vibe.

The second thing I did, which I haven't done before, was to use a step sequencer to create the rest of the sounds (the bass drum, tambourine, cymbals, etc).  Step sequencers are basically loop generators, and they are really useful for creating repetitive electronic beats, but I wanted to see if I could use it to create a more natural-sounding accompaniment that would evolve throughout the track.

The result is what you hear here.

I have this condition where I am always trying to play songs in a different genre from their original recordings.  

Normally, innocent people are not affected.  But I recently discovered this live-band open mic called The What Have You, where you can just ask for people to come up and back you up on whatever song you happen to be playing. You don't even have to tell them what it is in advance! So now I have an outlet for my delusions.

That's all the backstory you probably need to understand how this video came to be made. It was my wife's suggestion to play "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" as a country song, and I think it works tremendously well. (U2 already did a gospel version, so it wasn't that far of a leap I guess.)

The other musicians didn't even know what song we were going to do in advance, I just told them we were going to be a honky tonk band and we were going to play something in C. Big kudos to them for being good sports.

Also, mea culpa: despite having practiced in my basement beforehand, I started with the wrong lyrics and so the first verse you just have to mumble along until we get to "only to be with you."

The audio and video quality... is what it is. This was recorded on my poor old iPhone 8, which clearly was doing its best.  It was loud in there!

Hope you enjoy.

I have been really focused on writing and recording for a while now, and have not been playing in public all that much. But I recently discovered this awesome open mic called The What Have You, where they provide all the instruments and amps, and whoever shows up can form an impromptu band for any given song. It's my new happy place, and a great venue for trying things out.  So I decided to try out this new song.

I wrote "Strength and Peace" at the beginning of this year, for a Song Writing and Recording Challenge. This is my favorite song that I've written in a while. In writing it, I was thinking about how 2024 looks to be a year full of loud voices yelling at each other, and this song is a simple prayer for the fortitude to make it through.

It's basically a simple singer-songwriter folk song, at least originally it was, but in this performance it turns into a nice little Indie Rock tune. I think this version has a lot of potential, so I might make an additional studio recording that sounds more like this.

The performance recorded here is very much a first take... I had only ever played the song a handful of times in my basement, and none of the other musicians had ever heard it before I started playing it in front of them. So, big kudos and respect to them for making it sound as good as it does here.

I am not entirely sure what key it should be in, but I think this was too low for me... you sort of lose my voice at the end of the chorus, I think. We're playing it in G major, which was the key I originally wrote it in. The SWARC recording was in C, which was a bit too high for me, so I think maybe it needs to be in A or so. That's one of the things I need to figure out before finalizing a studio version.

Oh, and here are the lyrics:

Shallow vision
Keep it away from me
Deep division
Keep it away from me
Can’t win, just keep it away from me

Give me strength and peace

Bad intention
Keep it away from me
Mad religion 
Keep it away from me
Don’t know why they need what they take from me

Just give me strength and peace

Empty feeling
Take it away from me
Secret demon
Please take it away from me
Sorry if I'm not where I’m supposed to be

Just give me strength 
Give me strength
Give me strength and peace

"Sugar High" was the first tune I made for the weekly Song Writing and Recording Challenge I've been part of for the past several months. I did this one in August of 2023. 

It's a fun, sparkly, kinda retro instrumental rock song where I was mainly experimenting with how to build up layers upon layers of synths.

This one started with the bass intro, where I had the idea that I wanted the bass to kind of count off the song by playing one note, then two, then three, then four (did you hear it?), and the rest of the song builds from there. 

Once I got the song to the point where it is now, I couldn't think what else I wanted to do with it, so I decided it was done.

The main challenge was coming up with a name. The original name when I made the first draft was "Everything Is Harder Than It Looks," which I still think is a cool title but doesn't really go with this song very well. The image I saw in my head to go with the music was of a cartoon rocket ship taking off, like maybe on Little Einsteins or a show like that, and I thought of dozens of titles that had that theme of rocket/orbit/robot/etc, but I didn't like any of them.

I also thought it sounded so positive and happy that it should have a title that incorporated a word like "lucky" or "good." So when I submitted it to SWARC I called it "Good Luck Machine" ... but then everyone thought it was talking about gambling, so I scratched that. Then for a long time I called it "Good Luck Space Truck" ... but that seemed to hang loosely and I was never really sure I liked it.

Finally I landed on "Sugar High," which is fun and a bit cartoony, and I liked it well enough, and by then I had kind of stopped caring. Now I've put it in a video so I'm not changing it again!

What makes scary music scary? That's what I was thinking about when I created this piece, which I made in response to a one-week songwriting & recording challenge where the prompt was "fear."  

I started by listing the things I thought would make for a scary song.

First, the tempo would gradually speed up throughout the song, to echo the way your heartbeat speeds up when you're afraid.

Second it would have voices but no words, with the singing sounding like shouts or screams.

Third, it would have some unpredictable, cacophonous elements, like loud, cymbal-heavy drums that start and stop unexpectedly.

Fourth, it wouldn't always have a clearly defined key, so that the listener would feel like the musical tension is never quite resolved.

And fifth, it would incorporate tritones. These are intervals that used to be called "the devil's chord" because medieval composers thought they sounded evil. Nowadays the tritone tends to get used in heavy metal among other places.

(Music nerd alert: I actually didn't quite do the tritones in the end, I just used a lot of minor thirds stacked on top of each other to help create the atonal effect I was describing above. This is kind of similar to a tritone, because the tritone interval (a flat fifth) is the same interval as a minor third plus another minor third. But doing it the way I did it results in something more like a bunch of diminished chords, which are not quite the same thing, even though they also can sound unsettling. But tritones is what I was originally going for.)

So anyway! When I combined all the ingredients described above, I ended up with the recording you'll find here. My buddies in Sync or Swim assured me this has a near-zero chance of getting placed in film or TV, because music supervisors reportedly find it difficult to use songs where the tempo changes throughout.  It was fun to make, though!

My original title for this was "Too Late, Run!" but my colleagues said this didn't really match the music. After waiting a few weeks and then giving it a cold listen, I decided they were right. What really comes across to me in this recording is that the vocals sound like demonic/schizoid/insane voices; it's like a nightmare of insanity more than it's like a monster chasing you.  So I changed the title to "Funky Madhouse."

I've always wanted to get better at guitar solos. Back in the 90s when I was in Dog Legs & Feet, I played lead guitar in the band but I never really felt like I knew what to do for guitar solos. Although I grew up in the days of Van Halen-style pyrotechnics, I never could really play like that. I was pretty comfortable with rhythm guitar, but for solos I would just play up and down the scales I knew, and sometimes I would throw in random extra notes that sounded cool. What else was there?

Later on I learned that there's more to guitar solos than scales and showing off. You can have a solo that's just two notes, and if you play them with enough emotion, it will communicate a lot more to the listener than a million 64th notes played at Mach 5.

Anyway here's me playing a "one finger" guitar solo for two golden, self-indulgent minutes. Not trying to impress anyone, just trying to create a fun, trippy vibe. I wrote this piece for a one-week Song Writing and Recording Challenge in December 2023, where the prompt was "inspiration."  The guitar sound is a little bit inspired by The Edge (from U2), one of my early guitar heroes, who generally played it simple and used a classic dotted-8th-note delay like I have here.  I have been listening to a lot of Flaming Lips recently, and this also kind of reminds me of them.

I wrote this rock instrumental for a Sync or Swim Song Writing and Recording Challenge in September 2023. In SWARC you have one week to write and record a song or instrumental based on an emotional prompt. This particular week's prompt was "Tension."

So "Fight or Flight" has a kind of spy-rock vibe. I was imagining this would be music you would hear behind a movie chase scene or fight scene.

I usually try to give myself a particular focus in SWARC creations, and in this one I was trying to create a full, meaty guitar sound by playing the part three times with three different effects.  There's one that's a sixties sounding crunch guitar, another that's more of a heavy fuzz sound, and a third that has a lot of delay and other effects that makes it sound almost like a synth.

I wanted the piano to sound kind of anxious and un-nerving, so I just sort of banged on it in a high octave and put a lot of reverb and delay on it. I remember I put down the whole piano part in about 5 minutes when I was about to run out the door for work.

My favorite thing about this piece is the time signature. It's in 7/4, which is a music-nerd time signature that most people wisely avoid because it tends to sound off-kilter, as if you forgot to play a beat every once in a while.  Which, however, also makes it a good place to go when you are trying to create emotional tension with your music.

I really like odd time sigs like this, and one of my personal musical challenges to myself is to write things in odd times that don't SOUND like they are in odd times.  Good role models in this regard would be, for example, Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" or Pink Floyd's "Money," both of which are perfectly groovy despite having unusual meters.

So I like the fact that, when "Fight or Flight" gets going, it rocks along quite nicely even though it's doing it on a seven-beat structure.

I wrote this song in November 2023 for a Song Writing and Recording Challenge (SWARC for short) in the Sync Or Swim songwriters' group. The prompt was to write and record a song in a week that conveys the emotion of "Love." So this was what I came up with.

To write and record a song in a week - If you are like me and have kids, work, and other obligations taking your time - you really have to write and record it in a few hours, though that might be spread over a couple of days.  I find that I have to basically go with the first idea that catches my attention. In this case it was the line "Yeah, You're the One" which came to me while I was in the kitchen (probably doing the dishes).

I feel like this has a little bit of a U2 vibe to it.  That's partly because of the delay I'm using on the guitar, but also because I was trying to sing in an intimate, breathy low voice that, to me, sounds a bit like I'm trying to channel Bono.  I had gotten positive feedback in the group about some of my tunes that had an indie/alternative vibe (usually with a bit of a dark twinge) and so I was consciously trying to go that direction with this one - using lots of layered guitars and reverb and delay, and mixing the harmony vocals way back.

I like this recording but I do think I'll probably do more work on it before I try to release it - in particular I want to give a little more thought to the lyrics since these ones feel a bit placeholder-y to me. But here they are for now:

----

Let the record show
I know all I need to know
There's no doubt in my mind anymore
I've got everything I need

Yeah, you're the one
Yeah, you're the one
Yeah, you're the one
You're the only one

You could take my life
Keep it by your side, yeah
There's no doubt in my heart anymore
We've got everything we're ever gonna need

Yeah, you're the one
Yeah, you're the one
Yeah, you're the one
You're the only one

Yeah, you're the one
Yeah, you're the one
Yeah, you're the one
You're the only one

Have you ever gotten a word stuck in your head and it suddenly sounds like you've never heard it before? That was what got me started on this song. I got stuck on the word "particularly" and how cool & weird it sounded... and how it contained the name "lily" in it if you pronounced it in a certain way. In fact I clearly remember sitting at a red light, after dropping my kids off at school, saying that word over and over to myself, and by the time I got home I had created the main lyric of this song.

That way of pronouncing "particularly" sounded like a British invasion rock song to me, and put me in mind of the Monkees, so I am kind of going for that vibe here.

This is a first-draft demo so I have not really fleshed out the lyrics beyond that one line, I'm afraid. The other placeholder lyrics I sing in this version are traditional rounds I learned in my community theatre days; they just happen to fit the chords here. One of these days I will get around to writing real lyrics & then I'll share an update.

Lily is not a real person. I do actually know a couple of people with this name now (whom I didn't know when I wrote this song), and lovely though they are, it's not "particularly" about them. (See what I did there.)

I mentioned before that I was working on a bunch of new music as part of the sync licensing group that I joined. I said I would update on how its going, didn't I?

It's been great! I've written a whole basket of new tunes, which are in various stages of demo-ness. 

I have been pretty lax about sharing them with the world, I confess. When I've had to choose between sharing something on social media or writing and recording another song … making music always wins!  

Anyway I do plan to start sharing more in the coming weeks. Honest. 

So, what's “Lucky Breaks”? 

This was a song I wrote with TV/film in mind, but it wasn't for the group I mentioned in my last post. I wrote it in answer to a call for material by a company that provides music to film & TV producers. I don't have any idea whether they'll end up liking it, and I'm probably one of many people submitting to it. It frankly feels kind of like entering a songwriting contest, with similar chances of success.

But anyway, submitting to one of these briefs has been a goal of mine since I started looking into doing music for sync. You can't win if you don't play! And this was the first pitch I've actually made, so yay for me.

They were looking for an indie rock tune, and they provided some reference tracks that it should “fit on a playlist with” … and when I listened to them I thought, “I think I can do that.” All in all it took about 3 weeks (in my spare time) from start to finish. 

All the references had what I would describe as a kind of charming bleakness, wrapped up in a catchy indie-rock sound with lots of guitars and subdued-sounding vocals. So that's the vibe I was trying to create with this production. I like where it ended up. 

Here are the lyrics: 

Some days I just want to punch the clock
Tell me when it's over
Tell me how make it stop

I don’t remember
Where we thought we’d be by now
I wonder if we made it

We got everything we want 
So why aren’t we having more fun?
We run from the past like shooting stars
But what we were is still what we are

We’re looking at nothing
Nothing at all
Saying here we are
All of this is ours

I hope you get some lucky breaks 
Nobody notices your mistakes
Or they do and they love you anyway

We got everything we want 
So why aren’t we having more fun?
We run from the past like shooting stars
But what we were is still what we are

All this is ours
All this is ours
All this is ours, Is this all?

I wonder if we made it
I wonder if we made it
Nobody knows, nobody knows

I wonder if we made it
I wonder if we made it

This is ours, is this all?
This is ours, is this all?

Over the past several months, I've slowly started to gravitate closer to something I've wanted to do for a long time: getting my music placed into TV, film, commercials, video games, etc. That's not to say that you can currently hear any of my music in any of these places, nor that you will any time soon. But it does mean I'm actively working on leveling up to that place. 

To do this kind of work, one has to develop the skill of writing and producing songs and/or instrumental pieces quickly and at professional quality. 

So I'm now part of a group of musicians that works together to help each other achieve success in “Sync Licensing," which is the technical term for the slice of the industry that deals with music synced to video footage. The group is called “Sync or Swim.” Every Monday we get a songwriting challenge prompt, in terms of a target emotion that we want to conjure.  Whereupon we have seven days to write and record a song and share it with the group. Then the group meets and gives each other feedback on the previous week's efforts. 

I joined the group in March or so, but I just lurked there while I was working on the Dog Legs & Feet album release. Then in July I submitted two songs. In August I committed to doing one every week. And I did it! Yay for me! It's been a fun challenge so far and I've learned a lot each time I've done it. 

I've definitely had to scramble to get this done around day job commitments, raising kids, and a summer that has been full of travel. (Also, the room that's normally my studio has been full of my kids, playing video games because they've been out of school.)

But I've started to figure out how to integrate this kind of music production into my life during the little slices of time that I do have. 

So for example, on Monday when the prompt comes out, I usually spend just a few minutes coming up with an initial sketch of what I think the piece should be like. I use voice notes on my phone to capture whatever ideas I have. I create a project file in Logic Pro X and start collecting snippets in there, then I spend my spare time during the week editing them together and revamping or rerecording pieces as I go. 

Here's what AI thinks I look like doing this (though I don't have a beard):

Anyway, so far, it has kinda worked. My goal is to keep at it, at least for the next several weeks and see where I get (although: never promise anything in a blog). 

And I have a pool of new music now building up on my hard drive, and I'll start sharing some of the demos here, once I find the additional time to put them up on the interwebs. 

When I decided to remaster and re-release “Bottom,” it was the first time I’d released an album in, uh, about a couple of decades. Back in those innocent days, I didn’t have a structured way of thinking about how to approach an album release, or what to expect from it. One just sort of hoped that each release would be The One That Makes Us Rich.

This time, being the tempered and thoughtful adult that I am, I actually did some cogitating in advance about my goals for the release.

I mean, goal number one, obviously, was just to make the music available to people who wanted to listen to it. And maybe to make myself feel good about having more music on the wires!

But beyond that… what? What would I consider a really successful launch?

To be honest I was not trying to be super-ambitious. The larger goal definitely wouldn’t be to match the sales for Taylor Swift’s latest album, or to top the Billboard charts, or to sell out Madison Square Garden for a DLF reunion tour; I believe the technical music industry term for those is “daydreams.”

And I can be realistic here: “Bottom” is, I think, a very good album, but it’s also a 25-year-old bootleg recording of a band that’s not together anymore. So I approached this question with some humility.

I thought of basically three things I wanted.

First, to reach new fans for Dog Legs & Feet. When “Bottom” came out on CD back in 1999, there was a small but enthusiastic core group of fans who bought and listened to it. Obviously it would be great if the online version of the album could reach beyond that original group and endear DLF to a new generation of fans. I didn’t have a specific target number in mind, but I feel like doubling our listener base would be a modest-yet-satisfying achievement.

Second, to connect listeners to my other ongoing Jerome Freely projects. I wanted to find a way to let people know that, if they like this music, there’s more where it came from, and I’m making new music all the time!

And third, to test out the machinery of indie-music-album-release-and-promotion that exists here in 2023, and see if I couldn’t learn something about how it works. I basically wanted to make a Lessons Learned guide for myself to use for future album releases.

So in my approach to releasing the album, I’ve tried to keep these three things in mind and not worry too much about other possible metrics of success (like, for example, making money).

In future blog posts I’ll delve a little bit into how things are going on each of those three fronts. 

When I was growing up, my dad was in a country & western dance band called “Stallion.” It was the 1980s, so they did a lot of George Strait and Randy Travis and Dan Seals covers. I didn't really listen to country music on purpose back then (I was more into rock and pop, and, for a while, elevator music) but I still got a lot of exposure to the country hits of the day. 

In my 20s and 30s, I did go through a more intentional country phase. I've done a lot of guitar karaoke with my wife (who was a country fan all along) playing these old 80s and 90s country hits. During the pandemic, this was one of our main forms of entertainment. 

And it was during one of those lockdown singalong sessions that we came back to this old tune by George Strait, which was originally a swingy country waltz. But once I learned how to play it, I instantly felt like I wanted to do a funk/soul version. It's because of all the minor sevenths. It actually has quite a similar chord progression to "Easy" by the commodores (which, I know, is not a funk song, but still). 

I recorded this open mic version just to get it out of my system. But if I get ambitious I might do a full-band funk demo later on. Obviously drums and bass would make a huge difference.

For comparison, here's the original George Strait recording:

With the Dog Legs & Feet album release, it has been quite a while since I posted about any of my solo projects! So let's rewind just a bit.

In March, NPR was accepting entries for their “tiny desk” contest. You submit a video of yourself playing an original song. They judge all the entries and the winner gets something something something. I think it's like a tour and promotional package, but it doesn't really matter. Anyway, there's only one requirement: the video must include a desk. 

I decided to submit a version of my song Beautiful Time. But I wanted to change things up a bit to distinguish my song from Willie Nelson's song of roughly the same name that just won him a Grammy. 

So for this version, I changed two things. 

First, I renamed it “If the Day Comes Again,” based on a different lyric than the original title. It felt a little weird, I admit, to rename a song that has been called “Beautiful Time” since 2002, but then I just waved my magic wand and POOF, it was done. 

Second, I played it different than I usually do. It was originally kind of a country waltz (probably, let's be honest, at least partly inspired by Willie Nelson). But Willie's Beautiful Time is also a country waltz, so I wanted to try out a different feel. I actually tried three or four different things before deciding on this one, a folkier 6/8 time that kind of reminds me of Ray DeLamontagne a bit.

Anyway give it a listen and see what you think. I'd love it if you left a comment (either here on YouTube) to let me know whether you like this direction for the song.