Electric Music
Everyone wants to be a rock star.
I mean, ain’t it the truth? My favorite bands in high school were Pink Floyd, R.E.M., the Beatles, Yes, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Queen, Simon and Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, the Flock, Daft Punk, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and William Orbit—among others. Basically, prog-rock and alt-rock were my usual haunts. I definitely went through an indie rock phase (it was so cool at first—these bands were doing exactly what I had wanted to do!—and then it got a bit old) and pick up some new favorites along the way, but I have found that, although my exposure to music is probably more varied than ever thanks to the internet, I don't absorb things quite as deeply. I mean, back in high school, I'd listen to the same damn CD for weeks on end. Internet radio and the random button on your MP3 player just don't do the same thing. Anyway, I played in some groups, and I have a lot of tracks I hope to get done someday. Everything I have available is attached below.
Afternights
Afternights was my very first rock band. It consisted of myself, Dave, and Kevin. We formed in our senior year of high school when we were all discovering rock music and wanted to do it ourselves. I really owe a lot to this band—before Afternights, I never had any respect for the bass, and only chose it as my instrument because Dave called guitar first.
We had a spotty history of intensive work and periods of stagnation, but not without results. In our first year, we wrote quite a few songs that I still consider to be good. I also took bass lessons and Dave learned a bit of guitar. We never found a drummer, and Kevin developed carpal tunnel syndrome from playing too much piano, so we eventually ended up with a bunch of good songs but nobody to play them.
A Cool Night in the Pumpkin Patch
Two years later, in 2002, I was living with Dave again, and my interest in the band renewed. Now that I had Dave's computer to record copious amounts of music on, I started learning ACID and recording songs. Dave and Kevin were soon on board, and we found ourselves undertaking our first big project: a full-length album with all the songs we had written the last few years. The recording process was long, slow, and tedious, and consumed much of my fall and spring semesters, but eventually we released A Cool Night in the Pumpkin Patch in April 2003. The album is definitely flawed—we still didn't have a drummer, so all our beats were crudely programmed in ACID. It was also my first time mixing down an album (without any prior knowledge of how it's done), and there are definitely flaws. That said, I still feel proud whenever I pop it in and give it a spin. It was truly one of the great accomplishments of my life.
We culminated our band with a live show in August 2003, right before I left for Egypt. The preparation was a lot of work; Dave was starting to lose interest, and we were pretty inexperienced to be putting on a full-length concert. Still, we persevered, and the concert was a full success—41 people came solely to hear us, and the music was not half bad (I listened to the tapes; they're really pretty good!). It was another first in my life—the first time I got to sing and play songs I had written for a crowd.
Since the concert, we've pretty much disbanded—I was gone for a year, and Dave never really picked up guitar again. I would work with Kevin again, but in a very different setting, Tastes Like Burning. Afternights is gone; however, we got our concert, and we have our awesome CD, available for anyone to download. It was definitely a great first band.
Track List: (download the full album here)
- Encounters
- Midnight Orchid
- Captain of the Purple Grass
- Rain
- A Cool Night in the Pumpkin Patch
- Heaven
- The Gothic and Being in Love
- Venus in Furs
- La De Da
- A Warm Pumpkin Day
- Interludin'
- About the Beautiful
- MacDonald's March
- Floating Downwards
- Same Old Memory
- Electronic Sky
- Violet Sunlight
- The Real Western Experience
Tastes Like Burning
For the last year of my time in Colorado, I played in a band called Tastes Like Burning. It has a long and slightly convoluted history, revolving around myself and my friend Jon, a drummer I met while working at Fiske Planetarium. It lasted about a year and ended when I moved to Chicago; however, we wrote a lot of cool songs and played a bunch of fun gigs, the most memorable of which were a rockin’ show at the People’s Republic of Boulder and a laser show at Fiske Planetarium. The band consisted of myself on bass, Kevin at times on piano, Ania on vocals, Jon on drums, and Jed on guitar.
Studio Recordings:
- 8 Feels Gr8: Early garage recording of the tune with Kevin playing, just to give you an idea of the origins of the song.
- Exposed: Recorded at Fiske Planetarium, this is, to date, the highest-quality recording we've produced. This features both Kevin on piano and Jed on guitar.
- You: Kind of a side project, but it features three of the four of us, so I'll put it here. I wrote this song for Rea's birthday and had Jon and Jed help me out with it, for which I was extremely grateful. I would have loved to have done this as a group with Ania singing it, but we never got around to it.
Live at People's Republic:
- 8 Feels Gr8: One of the two songs wrote when Kevin was in the band. I wrote the basic riff(s), Kevin added the chorus and finale, and Ania put in some awesome lyrics. It's a wierd song—Ania and I heard the song differently, i.e., her beat 1 was my beat 3, and after some inital surprise and confusion on my part, we worked it into the song seamlessly. One of our best.
- Contrary: An early song. It's actually not nearly as complex as our later stuff, just good ol' reliable Am-D and a chorus, but it was always a fun song live.
- Green Lights: Written in a desperate attempt to get enough material for the Republic Show. I really like how this turned out. A very strange guitar-bass interplay that works somehow.
- Paste: Based off a song I wrote on the acoustic guitar, one of our finest moments in songwriting. This is when bands are at their best—I thought it was a good song before, but once it had been processed through the band it was far more powerful than anything I could have come up on my own.
- Excuse Me: The first Cam/Jed collaboration, mostly Jed's creation. It was a fun song to play, but I think we were still getting used to each other and our songwriting substantially improved after this one.
- Unwanted: I had little to do with this song—it was mostly Jed and Ania being brilliant together. In fact, I never really found a bass line I liked until our very last show—probably because it's extremely dark and heavy, a style I normally don't delve into.
- Paystub: I wrote most of this on the bass before taking it to the band, so it feels much more like a Cam tune than something like Unwanted. I even got to fumble through a bass solo on this one!