Symbolic Dog Blues
Attack of the Kazooka
When I was a little dog,
carried my bone all around.
That is the opening line of my song “Symbolic Dog Blues,” though this AI rendering is not quite what I had in mind.
I didn’t set out to create a song. I had been playing music and singing all my life, when I discovered that the twenty-first century had made it feasible to record professional studio-quality music on my laptop in the basement. For an 80s teenager accustomed to recording his “band” on analog tapes with cheap microphones and a low-bandwidth mixer, and then coaching friends on how to appreciate the musicianship distinct from the tape quality, this was an amazing development, and I wanted to try it out.
In August 2008, I ordered three decent microphones and a FireWire audio interface to connect them and my other instruments to my MacBook Pro (mid 2007). It takes me about two years to act on something like this, so prior to that I had
researched the gear,
mused over how much money to spend,
attended my twentieth high school reunion (my first, their twentieth),
reconnected with other old friends online and in person,
noticed my voice was slowly deteriorating,
begun occasionally admitting that my marriage was not entirely stable.
When I was a little dog,
buried my bone in the ground.
I already had a soundproof music studio, built by local contractors to my design when finishing the basement about seven years prior. It was great for practicing and listening, with a triangular shape that killed off most standing waves to give it very neutral acoustics. It just didn’t have any recording gear.
The new gear arrived Aug 28, 2008, and I took it down to the studio. As I carefully opened all the boxes, I did not yet know that my mom had died in an accident a few hours earlier. Apart from the obvious impact, there was another curtainfall: I found that—even in my late thirties—I was still anticipating the day when I would “do my creative stuff” for my parents to see. That was a heavy deadline to miss.
I placed in her casket a CD of a tune that I had helped my son make in Apple’s GarageBand on the family iMac (it included a couple of kick-ass guitar riffs I had played for his use), along with a copy of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, one of my favorites that she had read to my brother and me many times and I had read joyfully to my own children.
For when they were little, up till about 2005, my voice was like a chameleon, quickly taking up the qualities of any character that came along. I read them Winnie-the-Pooh, Dr. Seuss, and The Wind in the Willows with distinct, memorable voices. I even read the entire Lord of the Rings to my oldest—alas, by the time the younger ones were ready, the family evening hullabaloo could no longer sustain such a thing. I’m sure I was a middling voice actor, but my voice would go high and low, thick and thin, smooth and crackly, with mysterious ease. Discovering it and delighting my children with it was one of my treasures of fatherhood.
But in 2005 it began to fade, and by late 2008 it was flickering and sputtering.
Now that I’m a big dog,
that bone is nowhere to be found.
Confession: I did not write these lyrics to mean anything. I made them up in one thoughtless moment as a generic expression of “the blues,” for a single-verse throwaway song that I intended to record “real quick” for the purpose of learning to use the new gear.
But perhaps that is why these lyrics mean everything. Did tossing them up so spontaneously, without a care, make them a pure reflection of my shredded spirit of late 2008, shrinking from disaster and searching for connection? Or are they a perfect bidirectional inkblot, easily taking on the projections of reader and writer, singer and listener? They sure fit nicely into this telling of the story.
Brit and Jimbob’s excellent adventure
The throwaway twelve-bar blues line accidentally grew into a real song. “A real goofy song,” you say, to which I reply, “Exactly, a real song.” I sing karaoke to Weird Al with a surprise kazoo in my pocket, so you may need to recalibrate.
This song has three character voices, situational comedy, inside jokes about mixing, a classic-rock dad joke, and an electrified kazoo that will kick your ass. If you play music to prove that you are cool, then make sure none of your friends will ever know that you’ve been anywhere near it. That’s not what it’s for.
Besides the three vocal tracks, I played the following actual instruments live from analog sources (no programming):
acoustic guitar,
electric guitars,
electric bass,
keyboard synthesizer (organ),
plastic toy kazoo through electric guitar effects.
Drum set? I totally programmed it tediously note by note. I can get by on bongos or a little hand drum, sure, but I don’t do the drum set. At all. It’s way harder than it looks. My patterns are probably naïve and humanly impossible, making real drummers laugh. Let’s pretend it was AI. Say it with me now: “Wow, AI! It’s almost realistic!”
Scavenger Hunt: Listen for these sounds!
handmade drum from a t’ai chi festival,
“1800” tequila bottle, empty,
sour note that I ended up liking and keeping (hint: acoustic blues riff; always bluff your way out of improv mistakes by repeating them),
Mexican Coke bottle, empty,
long stepwise progression of organ chords, glued together with sevenths (cah-razy! Hint: the bridge),
brief Tchaikovsky allusion (hint: electric guitar near end),
improperly played mirliton.
The chameleon is long gone. Due to some kind of throat condition too mysterious for THE SCIENCE, my voice has only one voice now, sometimes less than one. I had to work around “bad voice days” to capture these vocals in 2008 and 2009. Good thing I finished before the chameleon wriggled free.
Speaker excuses
Now I must ask the most clichéd favor of the amateur audio world.
Second most, actually. The most clichéd is “use headphones,” but this song is mixed to shine on full-size speakers. I’m pretty proud of that, because it was the culmination of many months of self-taught mixing. You can actually hear the mix improve as the song moves along. I even inserted some frequency-clash jokes where Jimbob fights to be heard over a really bulky guitar. The whole song sounds exactly how I wanted at any volume on full-size speakers and is also good in headphones or earbuds.
What’s a full-size speaker? One with three circles on it. The big “woofer” at the bottom, a little “tweeter” up top, and a mid-size tweeter in the middle. They’re usually a couple feet tall, like your kick-ass dorm room speakers of the 80s.
What, you were a toddler at the end of the 80s? That means you’ve never owned a speaker bigger than your hand probably, so I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not your fault that big speakers went out of style before you had a real allowance. It just makes my job harder. Making small speakers sound big is another whole level of mixing skill that I don’t have. And this song is really glued together by deep, grinding bass, so we can’t go without.
Laptop speakers, mobile Bluetooth waterproof thingies, same deal. If the speakers are small, and they’re not right up in your ear, they’re bad.
Full-size speakers, headphones, and earbuds are good.
After you have heard the song a few times, it will sound okay on small speakers if you turn it up. I actually included a few of those small-speaker tricks and did a halfway decent job. Your brain will fill in the missing frequencies once it is familiar.
What’s this got to do with twadpockles and narratives?
Well, that whole inkblot question with the song lyrics was real. That’s meaning and symbols in narrative, perfectly good for the Twadpockle Narrative Collider.
Also, if you dare listen to this song for your first time on your little laptop speakers, then you’re a COMPLETE twadpockle! Don't do it!!
▶️ Play
And now, Brit and Jimbob, my two special diamonds formed by the pressures of 2008 and 2009, await your click.
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I love this even though I’m not allowed to listen to it yet.