Writing songs is one of my favorite things to do.  Over the course of a few days this past week I wrote two songs as well as took my first stab at composition.

Writing the composition was quite the adventure.  I didn’t even start working on it until midnight.  I “finished” at about 4:30AM… and then tweaked a few things for a couple hours the next day.  Inspiration just happened to strike at midnight and I couldn’t sleep until I had my ideas out.  It’s interesting how much late night energy I can get when working on something creative (juxtapose this to the fact that I can rarely stay awake to see a whole movie, and it really is quite impressive).  The composition is written for piano, violin, and cello - mostly focusing on the piano, with the stings just filling out the sound.  It is a fairly short instrumental experimental classical piece that depicts a day in the life of a spider.  I wrote it on a cheap version of the Finale notation software called NotePad.  The program allows me to hear what I’ve written on MIDI playback (it basically sounds like crappy keyboard versions of sampled instruments).  I enjoy listening to “Spiders”, but it’s probably not that good of a composition (it is only my first attempt).  I hope to one day record it though.

The other two songs that I wrote were pretty good though.  They’re both upbeat and fun to play.

I normally don’t do this, but I’m going to show you the lyrics (I usually prefer to have people hear the lyrics rather than read them, but “what the hey!”):

Beyond My Control (a song about the uncertainties of life after death)

I don’t want to die, but one day when I do, I think that I’ll be fine
I’m confident I’ll get through
But still I seem so scared, and oh so unprepared
For a new creation beyond imagination

So much is unknown and it don’t make me comfortable
So much is at stake and I just have to wait
So much is so strange; it’s so easy to complicate
Beyond my control, it’s beyond my control

There’s little information about the transformation
Into that second body, while the other one is rotting
So where do I go? And what is my soul?
How long is forever? How many meet together?

So much is unknown and it don’t make me comfortable
So much is at stake and I just have to wait
So much is so strange; it’s so easy to complicate
Beyond my control, it’s beyond my control

Better Man (a song about life change)

I was a broken man - a heartless beast
Among the damned and amid the least
You were beautiful
There was something new that I had to have that was inside of you
A quick and sudden change;
There’s really something strange about this

You’re a miracle. You’re the reason why I’m a better man.
You clear my mind
You’re innocent. I was so corrupt, but it balanced out.
You lifted me from the rut
I’m on the level ground. I’m never going down there again

And all you ever did was nothing else but live,
And teach me to forgive myself

I’m curious to know what you think.  Feel free to critique or completely tear me apart.  You can bluntly tell me which lines suck.  All is fair…  But if you want to say something nice, I like that too.   

Music is a powerful source of life and unity.  One of the many reasons I love music so much is because it connects people.  I recently found a website that promotes peace through music collaboration.  It’s called Playing for Change. There are videos of musicians and singers from around the world playing music together.  It is all edited together to create the full song.  You have to see it and hear it.  Here’s one of the videos, but go to www.playingforchange.com to hear more:

It baffles me how so many people avoid practicing like the plague.  No matter if you’re a singer, musician, photographer, painter, poet, or whatever, there is something about practicing that most people don’t like.  Isn’t this odd?  If you enjoy your craft, practicing should be a good way for you to get to do it as often as you have time for.  Practicing is doing what you enjoy… but you don’t enjoy it?  I don’t understand.

I have normally been the weird one who enjoys practicing and looks forward to playing music whenever possible.  However, I have recently struggled with it a bit.  I think it’s because I started practicing more than I used to.  I have recently tried my best to play through my whole set every single day.  This is slowly becoming a little boring - same old, same old.  But I have realized that I forgot about an important aspect of practicing.  I forgot about something that is very connected to the core purpose of practicing (which is to improve your skill).  I had forgotten about the element of challenge.  I need to stretch my abilities by trying to do things that I can’t already do.  Even just adding a couple different things to my regular practice routine has made it much more enjoyable and beneficial.  I have started doing vocal scales, stretching both my low and high range.  And I have started learning new things on guitar, like some challenging fingerstyle songs.

Yesterday I tried something new.  I went outside to a nice grassy hill and just played guitar in the sunshine.  I didn’t stretch my ability much, but I lived in the moment of enjoying life and music.  It was beautiful.  So my challenge to you is to experiment with your practicing.  Whatever it is you do, try stretching youself, add new elements to your routine, and occasionally change your scenery.  Happy practicing everyone!

I woke up this morning with a sense of awe in regards to peripheral vision.  I have these weird moments every once in a while.  Sometimes I’m amazed with all of the joints in my hands that make it possible to do so many different things with them.  I am continually impressed the the design of the human body.

So with peripheral vision, how is it possible that I can see almost 180 degrees when I look forward?  It’s like I have eyes on the sides of my head.  I guess it has something to do with the curvature of our eyes (although I would think the convex aspect of our eyes would give everything that “fish eye” lens effect).  I don’t really know how it works, but I think it’s incredible!

The thing about peripheral vision, though, is that I rarely pay any attention to it.  Maybe something will catch the corner of my eye, but then I’ll turn my head and look at it with my full gaze.  But that is not an often occurrence.

There are a lot of things in life, and perhaps even a lot of people, that are in the peripherals.  Things that nobody pays attention to.  People that no one even notices.  In Vancouver, for instance, there is a whole community of people living on the street in the downtown east side.  Many people just walk on by when they see a homeless person begging for money.  They pretend like they don’t even see them.  They keep the homeless in the peripheral, where it is safe.  I am very guilty of this myself.  Part of the problem is that I don’t know what to do to truly help them out (because obviously, for many of them, money will just go to drugs or booze).  But I think the bigger issue is that I have kept my life so busy so that I can use the excuse: “I can’t help because I don’t have the time.”  Who does have the time?  And homeless people are only one group in the peripheral.  What about people with special needs, or the elderly, or pregnant teens, or refugees, or prisoners?  What about sickness, or disease, or under-funded public transit?

There is a lot in the peripheral and we need artists to turn our heads.  We need paintings, songs, dances, films, and writings to catch our eye so that we may look with our full gaze.  We need people who are willing to miss an episode of their favorite show in order to have the time to help someone in need.  We need to look around and see what’s going on.

I got a call from Adam late one night,

“Jeff, me and Tony are coming over tomorrow morning at 9:30. Don’t shower or eat breakfast. We’re going to make a stop-motion music video for ‘Shame on Me’. It will be a day in the life of Fawker [his “clever” nickname for me… I don’t really mind it]. We’ve worked out the storyboard and everything.”

“Well… okay,” I said, knowing that I didn’t really have a say in the matter. I was actually pretty excited even though I had no idea what the plan was.

Adam and Tony came barreling in a half hour late and likely running on pure caffeine. My roommate and his fiancé sacrificed their quiet Saturday morning for our crazy antics (I guess I probably still owe them for that). We started shooting right away. Adam told me to climb into bed and slowly reach for the alarm clock. He shot at rapid-fire speed to get the stop-motion effect. We proceeded to shoot scenes all day. Most of the music video actually involved what I needed to do that day: eat breakfast, brush my teeth, practice music, etc.

There was one scene that is allusive and artsy where I am just standing completely still at the bus stop. We actually completely lucked out with this beam of light shining where I was standing. If we shot that even half an hour later, that light would have been gone.

The annoying part of making the music video was the editing process. For the longest time we struggled with the math of how long each of the 669 pictures should last for the 3 minute song. Then once we figured out the equation, the computer program wouldn’t work properly. So we gave up for the night and just poured drinks and shared stories.

A few days later we tried editing on a different computer with different software but the computer kept crashing. So we tried a third computer with yet another program. It ended up being Windows Movie Maker (a bottom of the barrel, free program) that worked in the end. It took three different computers and three different programs to get this short video to work. Editing engineers in the film industry have my sympathy.

Check out the video here or on my Media page.

My friend, Adam Roper, came to visit for a few days and we wanted to experiment with making some videos similar to the blogotheque style. If you’ve never seen a blogotheque video, go to www.blogotheque.net right now and be inspired (you can also type “blogotheque” in the search on youtube). I can’t say that our day of filming was a major success, but we had a lot of fun and learned a fair bit about filming.

We just wandered around the city and spontaneously shot footage of me playing some songs.

We actually had a meeting with a former professor of ours, Nelson Boschman, and on our way to the coffee shop, I played “Shame on Me” in the back of the city bus. Then after hanging out with Nelson for a bit, we wandered down to the beach and I played “More of Myself Without You” on top of a boulder that sits under a city art piece. That one didn’t work very well, so we searched the area for a new location. I saw a cool mural on the wall of an alleyway and wanted to shoot there, but we almost got hit by a truck, so we decided against it and just started heading to my house. On the way, we stopped at a skytrain station and shot “Tired Eyes”. The train dominated the sound as it came it, but it looked pretty cool. The other downside was that some chauch dove in front of the camera as he got off the train. Somehow that didn’t get caught on tape though. As we continued heading toward my apartment, we saw a violinist busking at Waterfront station. He was really good, so I asked if he would jam with me for a few minutes. We played “Numbed” together. He was a nice guy. I think he said his name is David. He had a thick foreign accent that I couldn’t pinpoint. Finally after a short sea-bus ride to the north shore, we walked up to the look-out and filmed me playing “Won’t Wake Up”.

When we got to my place we uploaded the videos and watched them over a late lunch. The sound quality wasn’t great and there were some things to be learned about simplicity with videography, but we had so much fun and it was an adventure. Perhaps art is supposed to be adventurous – breaking forth into unmarked territory with creative attempts.