FAWM : davidtaro (@davidtaro)

@paulharrison 2w

Thanks so much for your kind comments on "Looking For a Place. I'll remember "shatteringly beautiful lyrics" for a while....maybe put it on a note card for when I need a boost. And yes, Tomas did a fabulous job creating the music and delivering a simple, engaging version. I'm glad you liked it and and am glad the song connects across the ocean. Thanks again!

@nancycunning 2w

Hey, David - Thanks for listening to Like I Loved You Then. The anecdotes are a mix of things my kids did (like eating cheerios off the floor) and things my I did to my parents (destroying cars). I remember how much I loved your Little Bird song about those tender parenting feelings, so I'm especially happy this one landed for you. I've been promising myself a binge of your stuff, and I'm back from traveling, so hoping tomorrow is the day.

@greengrassgirl 4w

Oh, David! Thank you so much for your generous comments on Because It Ends! I think you probably understand how scary it is to post your first vocal, etc. and it is so rewarding to get good feedback from you. Thank you! I had tons of help from my collab partner, Dominick. So patient and encouraging and a veritable magician with arranging and production. I needed all that help! And his gorgeous backing track was wonderful to sing to! So thanks for listening and giving us a thumbs up!

@brisk 5w

Thanks for that. I'm always a bit wary about taking potshots at such uncontraversial targets. It doesn't really seem earned. Especially as - in my neck of the woods anyway - that ground seems to have been largely ceded. At least in public.
It's a fake-alele - specifically the LABS fingered mandolin. If I had a uke I think I would have tried to perform it for reals, as this song seems to lend itself to that kind of sad trombone kind of presentation. I'm not sure what I'm doing in the bass on the chorus either, it gets a bit annoying not understanding any music theory whatsoever. I just don't know where to begin.

@brisk 5w

Ha yes, the autotune for some reason seemed important; maybe, as I was saying to @richaaaay , I kept it because I love the verses on SFA's "Justaposed With U". From a problem solving POV, I thought it did a good job of giving the verse a different "voice", and in a song about a group of different characters it seemed to make sense. It may well not. (The reason it was there in the first place was that I was trying to find the best melody by manipulating my thumbnail sketch recording, and I kind of liked it.)

Not sure what this one is about really.

Mrs Brisk's parents used to have a little mural set into the ground in the garden that said "BE DON'T SEEM TO BE" and I've been pondering what that might have meant for a couple of decades. Anyway, this song is probably about following someone blindly, and trying to change yourself to please them... and then having the realisation that you were probably following them because you were drawn to parts of them that weren't really "them" either - they were putting that confidence or whatever on. Maybe? I've certainly always thought that one of the coolest bits about the books was that the emerald city wasn't really emerald at all - everyone just had to wear green glasses before they went in. I guess they ditched that in the film for various reasons, but I wish they had kept it.

And that is the end of my TED talk.

[edit: glad you liked the title. I had the title before I had the lyrics, or the idea for the lyrics as happens 95% of the time. I thought it was a good verbal/cultural hook, but one that worked best out of context. I'm not sure what kind of a song I would have written if I had done it "straight" - errrmm if you know what I mean]

@billwhite51 5w

Hi David, If you are up for a collab, I have a lyric about a sailor on shoreleave who is having a lonely, dull night. In the morning, he returna to the ship, where fellow sailors are hugging and kissing their girlfriends and saying goodbyes before shoving off to their probable demise. the guy wihses he had somebody to say goodbye to, and the last line of the song is the title, "I just want to kiss a girl," if that sounds like something you would like to put music to and sing, send an email to BWhi51@yahoo,com and Ill send you the lyric.

@brisk 5w

I can't overemphasise to you what a formative influence "Without A Sound" was on me. For me it is one of the premier alt rock-ish records of the 90s... and the irony is that it is almost universally agreed to be one of Dinosaur Jr's worst, or that's what seemed to be the consensus the last time I checked. It was the first I'd heard by them, so I didn't really have any idea of what they were meant to sound like. None of their other records lived up to it. But anyway, there's some great lead guitar on that, including at least one song where there's just two solos happening at the same time. Unless I'm misremembering? Thanks for the very nice comments by the way.

@brisk 6w

Yes, you are right of course - why would oddbod have even the vaguest idea what I was talking about? In my defence I'm still only making babysteps in understanding this whole "theory of mind" thing, so if everybody, everywhere can bear with me a few more decades while I get that sorted out, I would appreciate it greatly. (and @oddbod , here's https://soundcloud.com/david_taro/cannibals-dont-think-twice - there's nothing worse than blowing your own trumpet, but at least this is a shared trumpet - and the chief triumph is the words wot @davidtaro wrote, so I'm giving myself a free pass.)

@nadine 6w

Thanks for your comments, David - They're well appreciated!
The opening chords on "Carry Me Home" are all the bluesy weirdo stuff. I thought I could handle them the whole song, but the more instruments kicked in the more I had to substitute by triads.
So you ask me how I do the guitars? I imagine I'm a metalhead, and forget that I shred a nylon. That's all! The lower bassline has been played by Robert, the upper bassline is me rocking the lowest strings.

@paul_pedersen 6w

Thanks for listening to "Love Me Like I Love You". I appreciate your kind comments. I was in headphones working on it all day yesterday and I think my ears were fatigued by the time I decided that it was done. When I listen to it with fresh ears today, I agree that the drums are too heavy. I will either pull them back in the mix or get rid of them, as you suggest. Either way, there's no way to swap one mp3 for another in FAWM, so anyone who stops by will hear the version you experienced.

@crisp1 7w

Thanks for your very kind comments on I Miss You. I have to tell you in the spirit of full disclosure, that the lyric I sent to @sunnymae said, "You gave the impossible its deserved death" and she rightly suggested we change that to "a well-deserved death", which sounds much more poetic. Anyway, the music and vocals that Sonya came up with are so stunning, I'm still wiping tears from my face. Thanks again for giving it a listen, David.

@radiobenedetto 7w

Thanks for the comments on New Dark Age. "A switch with 7 slits" is a reference to an old school switch for spanking kids when they get out of line in a kind of old time religion "spare the rod ,spoil the child" kind of sense. Some hardcore would cut holes in the rod or "switch" to cut the wind resistance to make it move faster through the air. This would give it a whistling sound whenever you got a whoopin, hence "whistling Dixie" cause it's kind of southern discipline.

@musicsongwriter 7w

Hi, David, You are very welcome. LOL to storming. I only have 1 complete song, the rest is either instrumental or a lyric so I need at least 4 pieces of mine which might be count as 1 full song :) To be absolutely honest, I don't care for the numbers. My aim is to create something I'd be happy to listen to in years time and not say "Yak" lol. Your songs are always special. Thank you for your beautiful work and for your kind support.

@oswlek 7w

I know! Rich's electric sounds otherworldly! I did nothing to that, btw, aside from just passing it through the general plug-ins on the mastering bus. It was that breath taking the moment it was imported.

I'm thrilled you mentioned the acoustic. I stumbled on a simple workaround. In the past, I would record mic and DI at the same time and use the DI to get a little more brightness. When putting this together I tried a setting on Cubase's multiband compressor for acoustics. It was pretty lousy, thin, brittle, overly bright. But when I blended it with the original track it sounded heavenly!

@nadine 7w

Thanks for your comments!
I'm amazed how great certain sounds and pedals work with my guitar, but for some reason chorus and flanger are a mess. Maybe its also my way of playing?!
"Right side of the road" is a part of a morph challenge. Most of the lyrics came from my predecessors and I'm curious about the next version.
"Pay it forward" will get some vocals and a proper mix as soon as possible.
This year I'm not sure about the future of many songs. I created some for fun, and I still lack of self consciousness to release something with my vocal. It feels so... absolutely not me... you know?

@brisk 8w

Yes, FAWM 2023 is the FAWM of the shiny title for me - titles are easy. Hopefully any musical or lyrical shortcomings can be glossed over by title excellence... but that's enough of that. Thanks for listening to XYU I mean YRU - I started with just the drum part and went from there. I didn't feel like it was uploadable until I had the tag at the end of the chorus ("YRU... going away"), that was the last bit. And it didn't occur to me that it was in any way Paul Simon-y musically: I was thinking purely of Cecilia, but I admit there was no reason any reasonable human could know that.

@daveyboy103 8w

It's all about streamlined workflow for me, a lot of what I have learned over the years can be immediately applied and I know it works, at least in terms of production. I also do not shy away from using technology where it can improve on areas I am weaker on. In the end songwriting is about the the words and the melody, that has to be right , but the presentation also important, and in some ways is shiny window dressing.

I am an Olympic grade window dresser. :)

@billwhite51 9w

I will send you some lyrics suitable for whispered indie folk music. RE PINK FLOYD. their song, colonel clegg, featured a sax solo and they had no sax player in the band, so they asked the audience if there was a kazoo player in the crowd. i raised my hand and they threw me one, then motioned for me to come on stage. where i was quickly briefed on where i was to solo. i was pretty thrilled. only a bit disappointed that syd barrett was no longer in the band. because his were the songs i really loved.

@nadine 9w

Welcome back, David! I'm sorry to read about your voice but maybe it's interesting to hear you on less heavy music. You still got the rasp, don't you?

Re: Workload. Strictly speaking, it's a bad idea to join FAWM with two albums in the making, but I feel like it's even worse to miss out. So I wrote a list of minimal FAWM experiemces: some challenges I enjoyed, FAWM 2022 composition leftovers and 3 wildcards for collabs - and poof they're gone! Who knows what will really happen, but I don't hope for another album of full band collabs that I cannot maintain right now!

davidtaro

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