song 12 of 14: Cafe Avenida

When we lived in Tuxtla Gutierrez, I found this favorite spot by means of my friend Edwin and went as often as I could.  It was a streetside coffee house that was alter-everything coffeeshop that we’ve all come to know. The counter consisted of a couple burlap sacks of different beans, a roaster and a grinder.  You could only order espresso drinks.  For another peso you could have a piece of pan.

The tables were simple and worn and there was a fuzzy tv that always played soccer.  Across from the coffee counter was a lotto/cigarette counter.  Not surprisingly, the place was only patroned by old men, but it opened to the busiest street of Tuxtla with roll up doors so that the entire front was good for gazing at the dizzying contrast of pace happening outside.

I went as often as I could, to get out of the hot afternoon sun and have my fix.  The men sat routinely and nothing ever happened.  The waiter wore all white and never spoke.  It was so hot you could drink the same americano until the evening.  The atmosphere was as stimulating and authentic as I have ever found.  It had to be the muse of a song.  I finished plenty of other writing there, but still haven’t said what I want to say about the place itself.

If we had ever shared coffee, I wondered what the conversations would be like between the old men and myself.  The song is my guess, but I can’t really say because it has to be in my imagination.

This recording is a run through of a couple pages of lyrical ideas.  It’s not developed completely, as is obvious when I just start humming sometimes. I tracked it yesterday to hear back for ideas, and coincidently I needed a song to share today.

cafeavenida729

song 11 of 14: black coffee

home of friends, my Chiapas studio

This song isn’t really as much a break up song as it is a pick-me-up tune for guys who’ve ever found themselves wound in the web of a woman’s games. Not all women do this, but I knew the misfortune repeatedly and scripted the fail safe conditions in which it will always happen:  It’s a girl used to getting a lot of attention and an uber nice guy who doesn’t act very often.  Observe it, it’s true.

Eventually I learned to be mysterious and bad, and when Ashley came along I had her convinced I would only clean up with some work.  I was so bad it appeared I didn’t have a future besides rock n’ roll in post college life.  She was surprised, as I was, when my badness landed me in banking and financial services for a while.  But I’m bad again now.  Not a nice guy at all.

a mullet and a corolla. that's bad

This was recorded in Don Pepe’s house in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico.  We were on the run.

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she's bad too

song 10 of 14: Questions

When two people consider entangling their lives together, they begin by asking questions.  While the questions get more serious, they begin to look like one big question.  Are we going to do this?  And if so, what are we going to do?

Ashley assists me on an odd job day

We are still asking, often adding expletives so that it’s more like, “What the blank are we going to do?”  On days of stronger adversity, the expletives may be stronger.  In effort to keep an exciting blog, we often leave the day-to-day leg-work undocumented.  Legwork like oddjobs, the bureaucratic mess of residing in three states and two countries, being a landlord, and all the job interviews that haven’t been going so well.

Ashley and I are asking a serious question about our work.  What does the business of art need to look like?  We can brand and hype ourselves, but this blog has been created to share.  For the year and a half since the existence of it, we’ve operated on the scale you can read about, with Starbuck’s salaries, odd jobs and pieced together coffee shop gigs and small art hangings.  Boldly adhering to creativity and resourcefulness is the high road attitude over scrambling in desperation and sulking in self entitlement.  Oh, there’s good days and bad ones.

This song “Questions” is an earlier song I wrote when Ashley and I hadn’t been married long.  I recorded it yesterday just to have it to post today, and I’ve been thinking about the questions we’ve been asking since then.  If we are to be artists, then we must use our work to carry a message.  We can only survive as well as we can expose ourselves to a market.  So we are asking, if we have inspired, interested, or even entertained, please share us with those you know.

Here are some easy ways we have thought of:

1. write noroomforhipsters.com in bathroom stalls

2. stencil Ashley’s artwork on prominent buildings

3. blast my music in your car and the office

4. ringtones.  I don’t know how, but ask a teenager

5. go to our Youtube channel, tap refresh, repeat

6. write Itunes reviews, leave fascinated comments, rude comments, then argue between them

7. recommend us on Facebook

Thank you for reading today.  It was a little self serving, I know, and that makes me bashful.   We appreciate everyone who encourages and supports what we are doing.

Now here’s the tune:

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song 9 of 14

01 Mark Your Words

This is one to me feels half like a Cole Porter tongue-in-cheek number for a musical, and half like a furious Ben Folds pounding.  This demo is very shaky on tempo and has some sloppy fingering, but it manages to get the song across.  I play it now on a wurlitzer and I’ve slowed it down into a groove.  Still, I think it could be a Springstein or Billy Joel sounding arena-rock sort of song if I had enough guitar players and a drummer that played with bicycle gloves.

at the Square Room, right about when this song was written

song 8 of 14

whatabouthetime.7210 1

I mentioned there would be break up tunes on here this week.  Songs about broken hearts are an exercise of empathy for me, for fortunately I fell in love once when I was twenty and once was all it took.  Still, a songwriter has to write from the all angles of the heart and I try to be convincing.  This one is from some jibberish I wrote in a high school journal and later made into a ballad.  The chord voicings continually diminish and resolve to resonate between hopeful and betrayed.  Later I added a slow swirling organ and Jack Fretwell’s harmonica.  The vocals and piano a track from the 2008 Nightsong sessions that didn’t make the No Room for Hipsters EP.  Those songs were about marriage, a breakup number would have been confusing.

CD design by Dustin Addair

But for anyone who buys one of these this week on Itunes or orders it from the paypal store this week, I’ll mail you all other 5 on a separate CD.

song 7 of 14

07 Life Experience mp3

This one dates back to about 2006 and was written during an insurance sales/ waiting tables/ banking transition that rattled me up.  It was for a musical I was writing that needs some work and rehearsals, but could otherwise be pulled off if I had to.  For anyone who frets over a difficult to explain resume, this song is for you.  It almost made the EP “No Room for Hipsters,” and was recorded at Nightsong Studios in Knoxville during the same sessions.  I did eleven songs there but decided that would be a long CD of solo piano and vocals.  I picked the six that felt like they could come across best without further instrumentation.  As for the others… come back for them this week, plus some really raw Mexico stuff and some break up tunes I wrote just for the exercise (because I never got the chance).

available on Itunes and at the "hear Levon" link above

song 6 of 14

Today’s song is a fuller version of “D.C. al fine,” which is one I wrote for my brother and sister in law’s wedding.  I just cut short a family reunion with my inlaws to drive 5 hours to my high school reunion here in a few minutes.  I shouldn’t be blogging right now, taking time away from them to write about them, but I commited to sharing.  Here’s the new version:

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Ashley also made a video to an old demo of this one when we were in Mexico:

Since I need to get on the road, here’s a description I wrote back when we posted the video:

“In music composition, there is a directive given by the publisher: D.C. al fine, which stands for Da Capo el fine (pronounced fee-nay).  It tells the musician to go back to the beginning and repeat until the “fine.”  It literally means “from the head to the end.”  When Dustin and Cortney got married in January of 2009, they asked that I write them a song and play it.  Looking back over four years at the time of marriage to Ashley, what I wanted to say then and now is this: two people without many answers are going to be asked to make a lot of them up, and their everydays together will be tangible space that fits the hands which have made it.

I called the song “D.C. al fine” for a few reasons.  For one, the butterflies and eagerness are at the beginning.  It’s good to revisit the first movement for that.  Secondly, the new beginning is the one that will complete the song.  But most awesomely, D.and C. are Dustin and Cortney’s initials so I pretty much got to name the song “D.C. al fine” just like you may write “D C 4 Ever” in your grade school notebook.”

D. and C.

she wont let them, song 5 of 14

Early on a Saturday in New York City, Ashley and I were already on the subway with bags of wood block paintings, embroidered pictures, handbags, guitar, dog, and laundry hanger.  We’d crowded into the back of a near empty car when the train picked us up in Harlem.  As we bound closer to Union Square, the bags and objects were strewn around the ankles and annoyance of several people.  I didn’t know how we would ever get off.

The Union Square farmers market is a large one.  The vendors’ tents are claimed by a system unknown to me, although I think there are underworld connections necessary.  A delta of craftsmen and artists funnelled the congested row of farmer tents.  In the early hours of the morning it seemed there were orderly rows, of which we snagged a spot on the 4th.  Later the artists and vendors of other non edibles had gradually inched into a maze devised to trap a hungry New Yorker into disruption from the smell of apple wine and cheese.

Ashley and I don’t possess the aggression necessary to sustain life in these situations, and maintained our Southern manners.  The back row vendors had plenty of time to talk shop and buy each others wares as to give enocouragement.  I pretended to be a street performer with my guitar, but there are some top notch buskers as well as hollywood casted performances that occur at these occasions.  We spent the day gaining our respective educations.  A truckload of displays and a bum to hold our spot from Thursday were decidedly what we needed to do better next time.  Crowding back on the subway, we were one wood block and a couple CDs lighter but the experience and enlightment we would file away forever as one of the successes we had come for.

James Cameron and I

And I later wrote this song.  It is about the resolve of Ashley and her dauntless approach to living by her art.  Musically it was co written by James Cameron, my cohort in Virginia Beach landscaping.  It was recorded on the hill in Tazewell, VA.  You’ll notice the space in the track for a guitar solo for whomever should choose to join my band, which will soon take over the radio charts and spill over Union Square to the ears of those buying apple wine and cheese.

Here it is:

shewontletthem723

song 4 of 14

Grandmother's organ in the trophy room, Tazewell, VA

Let me set the scene for this one.  Ashley was working out the end of her two week notice last December as a nanny for a family in Chesapeake, VA. My landscaping had already slowed to a halt.  We were living with an artist we had met at the oceanfront and making plans to head to Mexico.

organ collection in Virginia Beach rehearsal space

It was also during my bi annual convictions that grad school might be the answer to the career difficulties I have known.  Could be sound wisdom, however it’s never the same graduate work that initiates the fits.  I remedy them with good books and long walks to see if they stick.  This time I was convinced that we should go back to New York where I would study Economics and Ashley any Art program of her choosing.  Economics?  Why, to underpin future essays on land, labor, and capital and their prospects in the hands of the hipster.  Economics is a science that expounds the tendencies in contemporary culture, which should interest the artist dealing with implications of aesthetics or the musician trying to make money from a peculiar industry that “shares” but leaves the artist out of the sharing.

an old ebay shot of my sold wurly

My reservations of generation hipster are clear in “uncle pete’s clock”, song 2 of 14.  Ashley had reservations of her own about the likelihood we could take on the city again, this time with tuitions to NYU, Columbia, or the like.  Instead, I opted for long walks to the Chesapeake library and spent her two week notice there.  On one of those walks home, stimulated by Liaquat Ahamed’s “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World,” I began to write this song.  It’s rowdy, untitled, shrewd, and the blues.  Major blues, not minor, which means it isn’t sad, only patterned so that something can easily be said.

two tier keyboard stand. for sale

The guitar and vocals were tracked at once by an overhead microphone.  The organ, wurly and piano are all out of my Nord.  The electric bass is the keyboard through a midi patch.  The acoustic is my pawnshop Conrad.  The song was mostly done on the hill in Tazewell, VA.

The working title may be, “please delete me from forwarded political emails of any sort,” but that’s a bit lengthy.

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at the Boot in Ghent district, Norfolk, VA. Photo by Dustin Addair

wrong as the right

photo by Dustin Addair

The most recent mix of another one:

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photo by Dustin Addair

Undoubtedly the track needs further mixing, some vocal touchups, and drums.  I’m sharing this one anyway today because the challenge for myself is to share the process of making recordings and writing songs.  This is the 3rd of 14 (previously unreleased) that these two weeks will feature.

This song began in Virginia Beach early one morning as I was having coffee and staring blankly at the coffee table which still carried the remnants of the night’s festivities before.  Like the strewn table, my mind was bewildered as to what I was supposed to do now that New York City had sent me on my way.

photo by Dustin Addair

I was far too busy in the final recording and mixing phase of “New York City Spanks Levon Walker” to finish any new songs at that moment.  With the late summer I became a landscaper, and by the end of the fall I had almost enough cash to send the CDs off for duplication.  By then we were living in a cheap motel, paying cash under the table by the week, and taking most of our meals at a nearby soup kitchen.  In a further state of bewilderment, I sat down and finished this song one day on my balcony of the motel overlooking the closed up pool.

photo by Dustin Addair

The song was later recorded on an old Conrad acoustic guitar that I discovered in a pawn shop on State St in Brisol, TN.  The Conrad is rickety and robust, with a neck that is true.  I traded a piano tuner for it from an old side career I never got running.  The song also has about 9 organ tracks with different drawbar settings and vibratos.  The bass is an overdriven wurlitzer.  A good friend Scott Lashinsky, of Vagrant Moon drove up from Richmond to meet me at Grace Acres and lay down the resonator guitar parts on the choruses and the end.

photo by Dustin Addair

“with the times on my side, didn’t know me at the time, on my way to my way then, needing somewhere that i’ve been…I’m not passin by or wasting time or always right, or afraid to try.”

Check back tomorrow for #4 of 14.