I’m excited to say that I’m playing a show on May 28th at The Beauty Shop. Full details soon. It will be an all-acoustic lineup, and I hope to have some brand new material for this gig.
I’ll also be playing in this festival on June 22nd in Fairfield. Check out the video (and pardon all the thrusting at the end). This gig will NOT be acoustic :)
UPDATE — Here is the event page for the show at the Beauty Shop. I hope to see you there!
Writing music is like learning to ride a horse. You need some education, like how to establish communication with your animal, how to bring the horse from pasture to stable, where to put the saddle. You need a lot of coordination in your steep learning curve. How to balance, what to hold, how to tell the horse to walk, trot, canter. How to move from G minor to A major, how to balance lyrical meter with musical meter. How to move with the beast’s rhythm, to post, kick, tug the reins, signal him for turns. How to keep up the pace and keep moving. Maybe you’ll fall off. Maybe the horse will even get lazy mid-trot and stop, causing you to smash your balls on the saddle horn. But once you get the hang of all those crazy aspects, learn what your animal wants, how to listen to him, and how to make your statements confidently, galloping through that sunlit field feels like flying.
Is it weird that PA speakers excite me? Amplified music? The fact that a simple paper cone can take your mp3 and move someone’s bowels with it? The art of tightening that musical waveform into a compression of air particles that touch and pull your skin, by way of a copper coil shoving and yanking that paper cone back and forth, because its magnetic center shifts with the signal sent to it by an amplifier, and that center is strictly held by a giant magnet bolted to the speaker box? Is that weird? That magnetic center shakes your organs. Your tailbone. Your marrow has heard this music.
Take a glance over to your right. The column titled “Pages,” (soon to be called “discography” and contain a complete list) now contains a link to the info on the album. Info includes credits, track listing, and complete lyrics.
As time goes on I’ll be updating the discography with all my other releases, all of which you can find on bandcamp. Also at that link are links to my other music involvements, at the top in the banner.
Enjoy!
Where to begin?
Last night was a hometown-screening of the film I’ve been working on with writer-director Cullen Thomas and producer Donald Revolinski. I composed and recorded/produced the entire film score and have been working on the audio post-production for some months now. There are still some finishing touches to apply, but last night was definitely a blast. Like, seriously a blast. I don’t mean that something exploded catastrophically like dynamite, I just mean that, when I go directly from pulling a 36-hour work day on the final crunch to standing in front of hundreds of appreciative viewers in a tuxedo, it feels like a blast. As if one reality got blasted away by another. So, it was a blast!
All of that aside, several fans now hold soundtrack CDs, which are labeled with text directing the holder to davidjmurphy.net for complete information on the release. WELL GUESS WHAT I just added a whole page dedicated to it: Click on the “Soundtrack – The Vindication..” link in the column to your right. Failing that, here’s the link.
Enjoy! I will be posting the album to my bandcamp page for listening and purchasing very soon! Like tomorrow.
UPDATE: The Vindication of Ronald Clay soundtrack is now live on bandcamp! Included with the digital download purchase of the entire album is a PDF that includes cover artwork by Paul J. Morehead, album credits, song lyrics, and disc art! Please visit http://davidjmurphy.bandcamp.com/album/the-vindication-of-ronald-clay-and-other-fables-for-a-rainy-day-the-soundtrack
Something I’ve forgotten: To post the Persephone: A Rock Ballet soundtrack link on this site.
A petty note about this album: I bit off more than I could chew with the whole Rock Ballet project, as many can attest. One thing that didn’t receive as much time and attention as I’d have liked is the general mixing and mastering of this album. Well, it didn’t receive ANY real mastering, as the time required to get it through a mastering house wasn’t available in my Supremely Organized Calendar Of Events.
That being said, the mix definitely has a “character” to it. In other words, it’s less universal than a professional mix. A professional mix will translate well to any sound system. Some of mine do achieve that coveted status despite being more or less amateur, some do not as much. Many things factor into this, but regardless, the reality is that Persephone definitely sounds best through certain speakers. A good choice in this case is the inexpensive and trusty Sony MDR-V150 headphones. I will not recommend specific non-headphone speakers as the room you’re in affects things a lot as well and, well, let’s not get into audiophile shit right now.
Shall we talk about poop instead? No? Ok… that’s ok…
Despite the fact that, in my perfect mind-world, all the music I’ve made would be released chronologically in the order in which it was written, and despite that, because it’s not, the listener’s ability to track my “journey as an artist” is impaired, I am still pretty damn proud of this collection of songs. I mean why wouldn’t I be? They’re some of the best ones I’ve written to date, thanks to the whole artist journey thing mentioned above.
There’s been an eight-year gap since my last official “studio” (I use the term loosely) album as solo-artist-davidjmurphy, or David J Murphy or whatever the fuck my name is. Eight years! You don’t see it anywhere but in that time I’ve written A LOTTA MUSIC. At least a few albums’ worth of completed songs, in fact, plus a bunch of odds and ends. Most of the time I would record a prototype/working version of a song and post it on MySpace before MySpace went the way of a condemned, haunted, inner city asylum. These albums of songs of which I speak WILL be recorded and released, rest assured (I know you were really fucking worried about that).
None of the songs I wrote in that eight year gap appear on the Persephone soundtrack. All of those are fresh and new (well with the exception of the beat in The Dance of the Lost Souls whose riff was one of those ‘odds and ends’ until this show came along, aaaaand the instrumental Alone which not-so-secretly steals a theme from {guess which other soundtrack}). Anyway you’ll get the older stinkier davidjmurphy stuff soon, all spit-shined and buffed to a brand-new, still-stinky, little-too-personal, indie-produced sheen!
In the meantime, back to work on the Vindication of Ronald Clay soundtrack!
Today I sat at my drum kit for the first time in over a month, and beat the living fuck out of it to some of the greater and lesser-/un- known The Speeding Trees compositions. Got blistered and stupid sweaty. Feels good man. Bodies block energy in weird places. Under the small of my back is a nucleus of godhead. Free energy, trapped by beliefs that are fused into my meat, like a gold stash under a padlock. The key is a radio channel, my sense of mission the tuner, invisible wings the antenna. Fuck you it’s poetry.
Persephone: A Rock Ballet went over really well, despite technical flaws aplenty. It was incredibly gratifying to be able to create, manifest and perform that production. Hilary is a great organizer and her talented cast of dancers really brought the story to life. We tried booking it in Burlington (an hour east of us) but for several reasons it won’t be happening, I’m sad to say. The DVD of our Fairfield show will be produced shortly and available for sale.
Work has continued on the score for The Vindication of Ronald Clay and the film should be complete in mid-August! More info on this soon.
At moments I feel consumed by life’s challenges and left without a moment to put my conscience at rest. At other moments I feel like nothing more than a pair of eyeballs and a rattling mind drifting through the void of living. At others I feel driven by an unending force.
