music

Static

Rizzo and I hit on interesting sonic vocabulary with this one. Somehow, playing this song by myself, I was sounding like a jazz combo. So we played that up with sharp guitar and “room”. Room plays loudly on this track.

Which tends to make a song sound like it was recorded live, in a club. This usually helps the listener hear heaviness and sweat and import in the performance.

I find that it’s best to leave the track alone at this point, so that nobody begins picturing the fifteen musicians that’d have to be on stage in order to make all this production possible. In other words, once you begin erasing overdubs, you know you got the core presentation right and should just walk away.

Billy thinks Static is about my friend Mark who died last year. I don’t know, really, but Billy’s usually right. Mark will never seem dead to me, just…gone. I like to think of him tearing down roads in the sun and rain, still having bones and hope.

Love,
Kristin

Find this song and all my recent work, in multiple formats – including lossless, free for download on my CASH Music pages. Information on how you can support the creation and distribution of this music by becoming a subscriber is here.

Krait

Rizzo says this song is “big”. I agree, as it uses big imagery: Garden of Eden, primordial ooze stuff. It goes humanist biblical on your ass, with a little Raising Arizona thrown in.

Which life tends to do too, sometimes. Not a bad way to be here on this planet, really, if you can stay wide-eyed. So far, my eyes are still wi-i-i-de open.

Krait’s a happy song, I think, calling children, “the crawling milk-fed”, “ids”, and asserting their need to be strong in the face of “wasted time” and “naked shame”.

The production technique is small-to-big and the sonic vocabulary unrelated to the natural world. A lot of distorted and backwards and run through this or that. But the feel stays organic, which is part of Rizzo’s genius.

Love,
Kristin

Speedbath

I love to watch musical passages in a song diverge. When the down beat of a melodic phrase falls on a different chord each time it comes around or when listening to the drum pattern and guitar part together feels like doing two math problems in your head at once.

This song is all about half steps and rhythmic skips. It was crazy/exhilarating to play and is crazy/exhilarating to listen to — at least for me. It’s a nice little “yay!” and “f*ck you!” when music shouldn’t work but does anyway.

“Speedbath” is the title of one of my son Wyatt’s comics. It seemed to fit this song, which has the word “speed” in it (that counts, right?). Both Wyatt and the song are equally wacky, anyway.

Love,
Kristin

Morning Birds

We stopped somewhere in the south on the last tour to put my band in a motel and park our tour bus outside of it. On tour, Billy and I sleep with the dumpsters and the parking lot animals.

I like dumpsters; you can throw garbage in them. And I like parking lot animals ’cause they have a hard time but they make the best of it. They’re also fun to watch in the morning while I drink my tea and wait for the band to wake up and bring me oranges and little boxes of cereal from the breakfast bar.

Sometimes parking lot animals are excellent: giant roaches, squirrels, peregrine falcons, snakes. Sometimes, they’re just fine, like the morning birds that wake all southerners at dawn. Morning birds (there are many different kinds — all they gotta do is wake up and start singing in order to fall into this category) remind me of my childhood in Georgia. I love lying on my bus bed and listening to them, wondering where the hell I am.

Except the birds that sang to us this particular morning began singing at a time that was only technically morning, like three minutes past midnight or something. And they sounded awfully…agitated. We spent a restless night hoping they were okay and wishing they’d shut up even if they weren’t.

Somehow, they made it into a song.

I especially like the hypnotic repetition in the first part of this track. Each instrument is playing its own loop; only the rhythm guitar and bass are playing together. The resultant cacophony is not as unsettling as you might think, given that your ear learns a bit more of each part as it goes by.

The quiet part, I couldn’t make quiet enough. I just pulled instruments out, then pulled out more until I had only sweet/sad left. Something about a “purifying sin” demands a certain amount of respect and, for a musician, that usually means get out of the way.

Love,
Kristin

Around Dusk

My latest song from “Speedbath” is here. It’s called “Around Dusk” and I hope it treats you well.

Now that CASH is a viable entity and not just an amorphous blob floating around in our heads, those of us who work here are becoming increasingly aware of its quieter gifts. I knew this construct was necessary in order for us all to share interesting music, but intangibles like political implications are now sneaking into my world view.

I’ve always believed that what I do has more in common with the field of research than the field of entertainment. Of course, from the beginning, I knew that in order to reach people with sound, I had to make records and play clubs. Sounds simple, gets ugly.

In order for someone like me, (The Artist) to reach out and grab the Music Business Experts who in turn, reach out and grab someone like you (The Audience), they ask you in not-so-subtle ways to play by the “rules” of the entertainment industry.

These rules are not mysterious, nor are they difficult to follow. In fact, there’s only one real rule: be attractive. If you work in the recording industry, you must play attractive music, you must be an attractive human. If you work in the film industry, you must make attractive movies, you must be an attractive human, etc.

The definition of attractive is where we all fall down. Healthy people view it as a melange of sensory, intellectual and emotional input. Healthy people are attracted to music and film — and humans — that move us.

The wildly unhealthy entertainment industry views attraction as: easy. That’s it. Just like high school! This is how bimbos happen and I don’t just mean the Barbie doll kind. Male bimbos, female bimbos, musical and filmic bimbos…a bimbo is anything one-dimensional enough to be taken at face value with no potential for insight or growth on the part of the consumer (oooh…scary…insight!)

Every time Nothing is wrapped in Fashion and sold to the Public, a bimbo is born. Bimbos can always make someone money. They’re e-e-e-e-easy.

I’ve watched musicians I loved buy into this insidious phenomenon. The idea that to bring their music to more people they’d need to dumb it down. Whether they believed in their own success or their own failure didn’t matter, the end result was the same: something imaginary killed their art.

The “experts” ask, are you a bimbo? If your answer is no, then you flunk the music business and eventually you disappear. If your answer is, “well…I could be…here’s a picture of me ‘looking cool’…here’s a flimsy song…” then you’re allowed to share your music with the public. But what music? You dumbed it down! Why bother? For twenty years I lived with this quandary.

Thank you, CASH people, for removing me from that ugly world, for taking our amorphous blob and running with it. I make records, I play clubs, I’m in the music business, but I no longer have to answer to some vague idea of a “market” or demographic. I no longer have to play by the crap rules of the entertainment industry, I only have to answer to my stake-holders.

Now my job is to throw myself, body and soul, into my research and share it with you.

Love,
Kristin

Note: As of this writing, Kristin’s CASH subscribers come from 12 different countries on 5 different continents.