Hey, Zombie!

This song is actually a left-over from the Pizza! era. There were several song ideas that we had floating around before we broke up, but most of them were just instrumental jams. This song, however, was the result of a recording back-n-forth between Duncan and me. He created the backing track – as a sketch for something more complicated later, I guess – then I wrote the vocals, then I went to his house where I recorded my vocals and he sang the background parts.

I guess we would’ve put it through the full band process after that, but we never got there.

Album artwork by Champ. [http://champoyhate.tumblr.com]
It’s fine like it is though, right? It’s more simple than a typical Pizza! song. That’s not a slight on Pizza!, because complexity is both awesome and worthwhile. But simplicity has its own charm. Anyway, I released it last year on the Vanity Projects compilation. You can download that here, by the way. It’s got some good music on it.

I don’t have any idea what this song is about. If you think of something, please let me know.

Remote Collaboration

A while ago, I noticed this band on Soundcloud called Lovevalley. They’re from Tokyo. I thought they had cool music, and they’d “liked” a couple of my songs.

I’d always wanted to collaborate with a stranger over the Internet, and this seemed like a good opportunity to try something like that. So, I messaged Lovevalley and they ended up sending me Garageband stems of this song that the singer, Tokimune, wrote a long time ago but never finished to his satisfaction.

I played a little bit of guitar, made the beat, added effects to the parts the band sent me, and sightly rearranged the order of the parts. We exchanged messages back and forth the whole time, with him giving me feedback as I tweaked the production.

It was so fun. I like collaboration in general, but doing it over wires and waves with people in Japan was very special. And it really shows the power of music as a community-maker.

Here is what we did: