Uber-standards

It was a glorious feeling to wake up this morning feeling mostly alive and just a little sniffly, since the previous 36 hours or so consisted mostly of me canceling appointments and otherwise lying as still as possible with either NPR or some BBC mystery (who am I kidding? Poirot, always Poirot) droning softly in the background.

A two-song day, the eternal game of catch-up. A transitional day as well - I worked on "Funhouse", the title track of the Pink album that will forever bring back memories of this time of my life. Song choices have been haphazard and based on what I have on hand or almost-know. Some choices, like the Funhouse phase, have been therapeutic. So that's all cool, and now I'm starting a phase I will refer to as the uber-standard phase, in which I'm going to try to plan ahead (ha!) and learn songs that are so well-known that it's kind of ridiculous that I don't know them inside and out. There are a lot of these songs. People wonder what rock I've been living under when I say I don't know them.

My uber-standard of the day was "Can't Help Falling in Love". It's based on an 18th century French love song by Jean Paul Egide Martini, called "Plaisir d'Amour". George Weiss, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore wrote the English lyrics (like "My Way", they had nothing to do with the French lyric. We like stealing French things and making them Amerrrrrrrican). This version was made famous by Elvis in 1961. Then everybody and their grandmother covered it. The version I knew of first was UB40's version. UB40 will always remind me of visiting my sister at her college apartment in Tucson. Red, Red Wiiiiiiiine...

I will have to try for musical analysis and geekery another night, because my valiant immune system is telling me I should go to bed now, lest I have a relapse of the pestilence.

Fever

How fitting that I chose to learn 'Fever" on a day when I actually have a fever. Ok, so it's from the 1950s, so kinda bends my timeframe, but it's an uber-standard. I'm glad I chose this song for today, because it's easy, and because everyone does it, and there are a jillion different ways to do it. My friend Alysha Umphress (currently in Broadway's American Idiot) does her rendition of "Fever" with Ray Fellman at the piano - lyric & arrangement-wise, it's like the Peggy Lee version. The video's from a couple years ago, but I got to hear them do an impromptu performance of it a few nights ago. I could listen to Alysha sing all day, and ditto for Ray's playing.

Ok, people, I'm going back to sleep! I have two shows tomorrow, so I need to get rid of this bug. Maybe I should bend my timeframe rule again and memorize "I'm Young and Healthy"??

I Will Survive

Where does the time go!?!? Monday night, again? The end of March, already?

I know where the time has gone: into my apartment, into all the furniture and little things I've found and purchased and brought home or had delivered and blah blah blah blah blah... The time that hasn't gone into my apartment is firmly lodged in my sinuses. At least, there's something in there. I look forward to the simple pleasure of breathing through my nose again.

Now that we've determined where the time is, where am I tonight?

Home. Almost out of the woods, apartment-setup-wise, thank goodness. Feeling a little lost/stuck: grad school makes its bi-weekly trek across my mind and as I watch it cross, I wonder, should I be giving you more thought? In contrast, feeling content to be alone this rainy Monday night, puttering around, practicing, plowing through paperwork. Having guilt-free dominion over my time is a perk of being single.

Also, I am behind. Not on anything that matters to anyone else, like rent or credit card payments, just on everything I want to get done for myself. Like this project. Now that my mind has space in it for something other than furniture-shopping and just getting through the day, it's hitting home that this project is going to take a lot more time and effort than I've been putting into it in order to get out of it what I want. The self-discovery is great and all, but I do want to improve my chops and my ear, build my repertoire, and write about a process and an experience that other people might find interesting.

After the above, you will not be surprised to learn that I am working on two songs today. Saturday was eaten up by laundry and two trips to Ikea (small car + tall shelves), and Sunday was devoured by work all day and a sinus infection, or whatever this is. My first song is "I Will Survive". It was made famous by Gloria Gaynor, but I first encountered the version by Cake when I was in high school. I loved it, of course, because it had the F-word in it. Gloria Gaynor apparently dislikes that version for the same reason. Anyway, I chose it because it is super-easy to memorize. It basically goes around the circle of 5ths every eight measures ad nauseum, so I printed out the lyrics and played it in a few different keys. My next song is "Glitter in the Air" - the Pink song that turned me on to the Funhouse album after a friend sent me a link to the youtube video of Pink's Grammy performance.

I still have to work on that, so I will sign off after I paste in some earlier observations about tonight's practice session. Oh, I have headphones now! I can practice at night and actually hear myself!

Observations as I practice tonight:
I have so much to do - another song to learn, laundry and books to put away, papers to file, emails to send, more things to practice and read and study and take care of than are realistically going to get done tonight - that I can feel myself rushing as I play. Duh, no wonder I have a tendency to rush or lose the groove - it's a habit.

This reminds me of someone I've been accompanying lately. He's a singer who's not so good at, um, ...pitch. He's very sweet and has a charming stage presence, but he has a problem singing on pitch. Which is kind of non-negotiable. I realized after a couple times working with him that his pitch problem is just habit. He can match pitch easily when I make him slow down and listen to himself. He needs some help with vocal technique, but mostly he just gets distracted and sings off key, and it's a habit.

So it is with my playing. I'm in the habit of constantly thinking of the next ten things I need to do, or remembering the thing that didn't go quite as I had hoped, or having both sides of a difficult conversation that may never need to happen - all while I'm negotiating something as complicated as playing the piano. A few years ago, I noticed that I always seemed to play better when I was feeling a little under the weather - not totally knocked out, but just a little sniffly or achy. And I've noticed recently, as parts of my life have been in boxes and/or shambles around me, that when I have to work, it's a huge effort only accomplished by completely shutting off everything but what I'm doing at exactly that second - but I've been working well when I have to. I believe this is called "compartmentalizing" and "being in the moment". Now I just have to learn to do this when my life is going smoothly.

Popular, ...or, Naptime

I cannot get anything to make sense right now. Earlier, I was writing an intended post about time management, and cleverly linking it to yesterday's song, "Popular" from the musical Wicked (balancing work, rest, social life, needing to network, being *popular* - free association works for me). As it turns out, I have a lot of thoughts about time management ...and no time to put them in coherent order. Ha. I have so many things to say on the subject that I don't know where to start!

My to-do list is much the same way - it is so long, with so many tasks vying for top priority, that I don't know where to begin. Actually, that's a lie. I know exactly where to begin. Sleep. Practicing would be counter-productive at the moment, because I play with bad technique when I'm this tired, and lord knows I don't need to cement any more bad technique in my body. I could do little mindless tasks around the house, but... since I have the option, I'm going to take a nap.

By the way, I wrote all this by hand on the train, so there is a small victory in here for time management.

My schedule is so wacked-out, and is wildly different from week to week. My average bedtime lately has been 3 a.m., which is extra fun on Sunday mornings when I need to leave by 8 for my church gig. My body is happiest when I go to bed around 12 or 1, and get up around 7 or 8, and it's wondering why we aren't in California right now, since that's where my circadian rhythms seem to be. Sorry, body, let me remind you, we are a musician.

Last night, I got home after 3 from a gig. Today I had to be somewhere at 11, which was nice because it wasn't too early, but I had to get up before too much of the day burned away. Days when I don't have any scheduled appointments, but a ton of work to do (learn music for gigs, freelance on-my-own-schedule projects) are the worst, because I am invariably exhausted and have no attention span. I made myself the promise this year that I'd take a full day off at least once every two weeks - that is, no paid work, and, if I can help it, no business meetings or work-related practice. But there's so much overflow from Work and Life that maybe once every two months I have a Planned Day Off was actually feels like a day off. Hence the inability to concentrate on Swamped-But-Set-Your-Own-Schedule days. So I get less done, so I have more overflow into the next supposed light/free day. Vicious cycle.

Then there's the fact that transitioning into a new home and neighborhood and relationship status all have a way of eating up a lot of time and energy that might otherwise be free. Right now I have the sense that I am swimming as hard as I can, and getting nowhere.

Oh well, being "productive" doesn't seem to be the point right now. Transitions like those mentioned above, lifestyle changes, career goals shifting slightly. There will be time later for running around like a crazy person, crossing things off the list. Right now seems to be the time to figure out what the hell I want on the list in the first place.

Now, about that nap.

Sober

It is with a touch of irony that I blog about the Pink song "Sober", which I still have to work on (keyboard, volume just high enough to hear over the noise of putting the keys down, because I still need to get decent headphones), at 1:30 in the morning after two beers and several sips of a friend's mojito at a bar in my new neighborhood. Refined sugar doesn't count if it's from a friend's drink, right?

Here's what I get out of this song: Sometimes there comes a point when we get tired enough of our addictions that it's worth the trouble to stop.

So. Sugar. Lent. Just a practice run. My addictions are all completely legal (such a goody-goody), which makes them that much harder to manage. Twelve more days until Easter and cake and cookies - twelve endless, interminable days.

Really? That's less than two weeks. The entire season of Lent is only six and a half weeks long, and I have not made it without cheating and messing up. And I'm just giving up refined sugar - it's not like I'm on a juice fast, or a fast of any kind.

Take a moment out of myself to observe. I learn how addicted I am by how skilled I am at advanced rationalization. I learn how to start over when I mess up, instead of saying "Screw it, I messed up, I'm a failure, let's throw in the towel." I learn that this too shall pass (seriously - six and a half weeks). I learn that I have options; honey is not refined sugar. I learn how much space sugar - freaking SUGAR - takes up in my life.

A few days ago, I asked, Who am I alone? Who am I without the boxes of my relationships with others, with myself, with various substances and entities (the internet, my other completely legal addiction)? Not that it really matters, since I will never be without relationships - but it might be good to spend a little time considering the question.

Tonight, I am a girl who stays up until 2 a.m. to write and to learn a song, because it was important to do that, and because earlier it was important to hang out in my new neighborhood with a friend who will let me steal sips of his mojito.

Playing the Ink

Here we are again, the wee hours - just so much to do in a day's work. Yesterday, I learned "So What" from Pink's Funhouse album, with the intention of going straight through and learning all the songs on it, or at least all the singles. "So What" - easy to learn and to play, especially since I've been mainlining that album for the past week or so. I can't help but think my neighbors might have gotten sick of hearing me play the repetitive little melody of the intro and verse. Na-na-na naa na-naa naa...

Contrast that with today's epic Jason Robert Brown song, "King of the World" from Songs for a New World. I needed to work on it a little bit anyway for a gig this week, and I decided that I might as well make it the song of the day, and savor the fun of Funhouse a little longer.

Memorizing-the-Form-wise, "King" is easy (intro, verse-prechorus-chorus, verse-prechorus-chorus, bridgity-bridge-bridge, chorus, tag), with the exception of the bridge ... I call it a bridgity-bridge-bridge because it's ...well, long and drawn-out as only Jason Robert Brown can draw something out. It is - if you choose to analyze the song as I did - twenty-eight bars long. The right hand of the piano part is a repeated 5-note pattern that's really simple conceptually and really irritating kinesthetically. Then there's a funkdafied, syncopated buildup into the final chorus which is completely balls-to-the-wall ridiculous.

This is the kind of stuff I live to play.

A note on modern musical theater composers and sight-reading/faking: Jason Robert Brown's music tends to be very idiomatic of some existing pop style. This isn't to say he doesn't have his own compositional voice, but, in an emergency, you can usually tell at a glance, ok, this is more or less a rock/blues/funk whatever tune with a not-unheard-of chord progression, and you just hang on and count like the dickens. With Guettel or LaChiusa or Lippa, it may look like something familiar at an instant's glance, but you soon realize the harmonic or rhythmic language is not quite...normal. More rooted in classical music, so perhaps there's more scope for variation in the musical language than there is in a composition rooted in music of the plebs? A guess at most. But that's been my experience when put in a position to sight-read any of these composers' work.

Playing the Ink: this is jargon for playing exactly the notes written on the page, as opposed to "comping", or making up a groove based on the chord progression and style of music. Classical musicians who don't improvise only "play the ink". Then there are some fine players who wouldn't know one inkblot from another. My goal is to be able to do both: play the ink and comp well in a lot of styles of music. Five years ago I was an ink-only musician. I'd say I'm making progress.

The reason I bring this up right now is that, for many of the songs I work on, I just type up the lyrics and maybe the chord progression, giving myself no ink to play. I'm a very visual learner (weird for a musician, right? AND I'm a morning person, believe it or not). Learning from the sheet music saves me a lot of time, but I actually get too caught up in the music I see rather than hear, and I'm trying to learn to get off the page as quickly as possible.

Now, for "King of the World", I'm learning the ink, and there's no way I'd be able to memorize each note in the time I was able to spend on it today. At least I know the form and the chord changes, and have listened to it a bunch of times. I'm pretty sure that, if Martians landed and demanded that I accompany the Head Martian on this song from memory or else they'd blow the planet to bits, I could at least get through it. Hopefully Martians aren't giant JRB geeks. In any case, I think I will go to bed now, which seems the only thing to do when my blog posts take a turn for the extraterrestrial.

Alone

I took myself off-grid yesterday and the first half of today - I needed to get some rest and have a moment away, even though I couldn't really get out of town. I even turned off my phone and my computer for almost 24 hours. Somehow the internet survived without my constant monitoring, and here I am, doing my best to build up my sleep debt again.

I'm on a little Heart kick right now. I have these grand plans of giving myself a curriculum of songs and artists to study, but right now part of the point seems to be just to learn whatever strikes my fancy on a given day. So - yesterday I worked on "These Dreams", and today I worked on "Alone".

Late-night music theory geekery: "Alone" sort of meanders key centers - that is, at different points in the song, different chords feel like "home", or a chord you could end on without pissing anyone off. It begins and ends pretty definitively in minor (B-flat minor for the recording, though I find the sheet music is most often in B minor), but takes a turn for the relative major (D-flat) on the pre-chorus, and the submediant (VI - or G-flat) on the chorus (yes, I just had to google "submediant" to make sure I wasn't making it up at 2:30 in the morning). One could probably argue that the chorus instead begins in E-flat minor (and one might be right, seeing as I haven't cracked open a theory book in years), but the last five bars definitely feel like they're in G-flat. And finally the song ends with a few bars of piano in B-flat minor, mirroring the intro. No repeat and fade, thank ye pop music gods.

I am a giant nerd.

Then there's "These Dreams", which just never feels like it settles into a key (it stays in the mist, ahem). The verse is pretty modal, meaning it does use the notes from a particular scale, but there isn't any one chord that says "yes, I am home! You can end here!" The chorus is sort of in the key of C. The melody definitely feels like it's in C, but there are no root position C chords, so it's still tantalizingly vague. Oh, also, the rhythm: lots of strong lyrics etc. on beat four of the measures in the chorus. This song "hides 1" about as well as an 80s power ballad can. More mist, I suppose.

Side notes as I transition to personal stuff: 1. I share a birthday with Ann Wilson of Heart. Yay! and 2. I would like to hear what would happen if Ann Wilson's voice and Freddie Mercury's voice could have a voice-baby. Which of course is impossible.

So. Alone. The past couple days of detox and self-exile have prompted the question, who am I alone? The old standard "You're Nobody Til Somebody Loves You" crossed my mind. This song is potentially depressing for those of us who are single, but thinking about it without the lacerating fear of growing old alone or choking on dinner and dying alone in my apartment (which almost happens to single women in Sex and the City AND 30 Rock, so it must be true)... who am I outside the context my relationships? Not just romantic relationships, relationships in general. We always put each other in boxes in relationships, and some boxes are comfortable enough to stay in for a lifetime, and others... well, we try to stay away from people who put us in uncomfortable boxes. But what about the boxes we design for ourselves?