Musing on the Consumers and my bass playing with the band:

after reading some of Norah's blog (the singer) it's no joke that i haven't given her the amount of respect deserved as far as the songwriting process goes. matt and i will come up with a bridge verse chorus, etc... and norah will fit whichever lyrics she's working on to what we're playing. this works, although i have to admit i haven't given the actual 'songwriting' process much thought in the beginning. more and more lately, now that we're recording, i'm paying attention to what norah's singing. i'm becoming more and more insterested in what she's actually singing and how it relates to what i'm playing. this is impressive considering the songwriting process for our songs has consistently lasted in the span of about 1-2 hours. every song we've written so far has been born like this. one a rehearsal would be ideal, and more and more the process becomes second nature. the band's writing is getting better, as the process gets more familiar as well. each time i write some bass lines, and matt starts playing i think it's real great, and then when norah's lines come together i think that this is the greatest thing we've written so far. and today for the first time, chills! chills down my back at 4:21 PM. the song will be called waiting for ethan. good stuff. norah had a date with a guy named evan when she wrote it.

my playing basically comes from three things: peter hook (happy belated, btw) simple duotone harmonies and minimalism. the theory minimalism is inherent. we're just bass, voice and drums. i'd like to try some minimalism in practise, but when you're playing dive bars in boston, you don't want to fuck around too much with the "1, 2, 3, 4!!" approach at Rock & Roll© until you've made a name for yourself. of course being experminetal is one way to make a name for yourself, but i'm trying to raise an army of fans. not a few nouveau-intellectuals. at first it seemed as though the possibilities were endless, becuase i had some degree stating that i spent a lot of money to call myself a composer. as time went on, though i was thinking that there's not a lot left to offer after some 9 or 10 songs. the tempos were all pretty much homogenized, and the style of my playing (eighth notes - 2 notes at a time) was static across the board. lately i've been playing with simple effects; delay, and distortion. i guess that's a tiny step away from minimalism as far as my sound is concerned, but it will be a long time before the playing or god forbid, the lineup of the band changes.

and now for the ramblings:

i think i'm performing a service to people by not writing too much on here. i've decided that i'm a boring writer. i try to reread my posts, and i just end up skimming, because it's THAT boring. OK, to be fair, my first posts on blogger were pretty entertaining. that was almost a year ago. my post on the gay music that was listening to is hilarious in my book. yeah, the two first posts are genius. i could write about how i still think of my ex-girlfriend from time to time, or how i'm never really sure if i'm in the right relationship currently, or how i'm totally paranoid that she's thinking the same thing, but who doesn't think that stuff? who would want to read about someone else thinking that shit. that's why livejournal makes me furl my brow with simian-like confusion. i read that stuff for about 2 minutes, and i don't know whether i'm amused, or just a few more IQ points in debt. hey, look. i'm posting on a "live journal" of sorts. feh. it's not a goddam journal for me. hmmm....2+2. "i've decided that i'm a boring writer." i just put them together. all my questions asked have been answered. by me. why am i even writing this now. i could just think it, and save the both of us the pain. great. now it is a journal. one of the requirements of a journal, i think, is where the writer addresses the reader while pondering a subject that nobody besides the reader should really care about. my name is pete. this is now my journal. crap. i knew it would end this way. i need to write all up in this shit more.

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