Hella Gems is a music weblog wherein each contributor posts new original music on a daily rotating schedule. There are twelve contributors, which means that if you are one of them, you get to write, record, and publish a song every twelve days. Now, I’ve been writing songs for six years or so, and in that time I’ve come up with, oh, ten or twelve that I think are good. And, y’ know, I’m happy about those. But at the rate that they’ve been going, a Hella Gems contributor would have written 180 songs. How dare I call myself a songwriter in the face of such prolificacy? These people put me to shame. Yesterday morning, though, I was given the opportunity to redeem myself: our good friend E. Robert Frank called up Alex and me and asked if we wanted to help him record an as-yet-unwritten song which was due on Hella Gems that night. “It’s sort of like Shoebox Full of Tapes,” Rob said, “except we update it more often.” Oh, snap!

I said we’d be happy to help, on the condition that if we liked what we came up with, I could also post it here on SFoT, and Rob readily agreed. (Of course, I was bluffing. I would be elated to rock out with Rob at any time without precondition.) So, around 7 p.m. last night, he showed up with a car full of instruments, and we brought them on in, set up, and futzed around for quite a while. To give you an idea of what a class act we were at that point in the evening, our idea of a “good” keyboard part was one that could be played with the backs of one’s fists while simultaneously flipping the bird at one’s bandmates and (notional) audience. Keepin’ it classy, us. Eventually, and without having actually recorded anything, we decided to go get Chinese food. At a restaurant a mile and a half away. On foot. This was all very enjoyable, of course, but by the time we got home again at 10 p.m., we had still made exactly no progress on our song, which had to be done by midnight Pacific time, which was now five hours away.

But then Alex picked up Rob’s acoustic guitar and started alternately playing E minor and D chords while Rob and I noodled on the drums and keyboard. And then I discovered that the pitch bend on Rob’s keyboard made a sound like a high-tech outer-space pedal steel, and somehow, from there, the whole thing began to come together. I spent about twenty minutes in the corner with a notebook (this is 180 degrees to how I usually operate when I write lyrics, and I don’t love what I was able to come up with in twenty minutes, but it had to be good enough, so here it is), and we played and played and sang and sang and mixed and mixed and with an hour to go before the deadline, we had finished the whole thing. Rob has already written about the process at length over on the Hella Gems blog, so I refer you to his post for most of the details.

I know I’ve missed a few months of updates this fall, and I’ll probably be calling an official hiatus pretty soon here, now that I’m in school and have less time to devote to things that are not directly related to getting my Ph.D. But I wanted to leave SFoT with something I was proud of, and here it is. If you’ve been listening to SFoT in 2008, thank you!

It’s our nine-month anniversary, by the way. Yay!

Embarrassingly, it took a lot longer for me to realize that the first song on Reconstruction Site is a sonnet than it took for me to write one.

Another day’s insistent rays incite
my grudging eyes to open, blurring red
dawn-glow with blood. I stumble from the bed;
I squint; I groan; I try to stand upright.
What drug, what magic spell makes sun less bright?
This water glass will have to do, instead.
One sip, and stars explode inside my head.
I blink; I stall; I drink it all in spite.
But when I’m done and set it down at last,
I see that it was magic all along:
a thousand rainbows dance across the wall.
The morning sun, refracting through the glass!
Both optimists and pessimists are wrong.
The glass, all empty, turns out to be full.

We kind of sucked.

But it’s okay! Because a month ago, I asked you a question: “Should I post an embarrassing video of my band on YouTube?” And you, dear reader, answered with a resounding “hell yes”. So here we are. And here we were:

And there you go. And because this is kind of a cop-out and not a real Shoebox Full of Tapes update, to tide you over until next time here’s another video in which I play music. Sort of.

Except when I don’t. For example, I had forgotten that my band had played this in college, and it was just now that I managed to find this recording from 2004. Man, y’ know — I think we really weren’t too bad! I like this better than the 2006 version, in fact. That’s Tanny Phillips playing the guitar and JP Ramos playing drums, of course.

Now, the really important question: while I was digging through this old stuff, I also found an embarrassing video! of us playing this song at a Gardner Lounge show in 2004. In said video, I twitch around spastically and compress the pitch range of the song to two notes, “low” and “high”. So, my question for you is: do I put it on YouTube for all the world to see? Acceptable responses are “yes” and “hell yes”.

Again with the Mountain Goats covers! I didn’t even know about “Twin Human Highway Flares” until I saw the band play it at a show in Chicago in 2005, two days before I moved. If you listen to the recording of that show and you get to this song and you notice sort of a heavy subsonic thump at about fifteen seconds in, well, that would be my jaw hitting the floor. Or possibly yours.

I think that that probably would’ve happened, hearing this song that night, even if I hadn’t lived the first 22 years of my life in eastern Iowa, even if I didn’t know those particular stretches of road and river cold, even if I didn’t know exactly what that sunset looks like. It sure didn’t hurt, though. Here are the lyrics. It’s on this album, which you should own, but really, you might try listening to that live version first.

Also, tonight’s Shoebox Full of Tapes is in honor of my sister, who turns 26 next weekend. She came to that show with me and (in between being chatted up by the sound guy) helped me scrape up the bits of my brain and get me home at the end of the night. She’s done this a few times, in fact. I love you madly, Maya.

What happens when I’m listening to Atmosphere and Aesop Rock at the same time as I’m reading my own proto-song journal scrawl from 2005? Lyrics like this. I’m super-excited to have finally finished this thing I started nearly three years ago, especially since it’s now been nearly two and a half years since I really did leave Chicago.

The advertisement I mention in the song was real, by the way. (And so was my reaction.) The actual copy was “hundred thousandollaraire”, but that shit just doesn’t scan.

I just left work now, and it’s well past dark out,
but I won’t make it home
until I get what I came for: a record or eight more
to drive away the cold,
and a few hours later, my new fix paid for,
I’ll have to figure out
which way the lake is again, so I can make the last train,
and if by now we haven’t changed,
I must have it down in my freezing bones:
I’m leaving Chicago soon.
I can’t explain, but I know
I’ve got to make some changes in the kinds of places
I pass through every day,
and if I had some spray paint, I could start by changing
what the ads on this platform say.
“I’m a hundred-thousandaire” finds a hundred thousand stares
each night as we’re all detraining.
“Why am I paying commissions like a multimillionaire?”
Why don’t I erase the last five words and write “complaining”?
Down in my freezing bones,
I’m leaving Chicago soon.
I can’t explain, but I know
we tread these streets on unsteady feet,
carrying purses and bags,
and all of us in makeup applied so well,
we almost can’t tell we’re so sad.
From door to door and store to store,
we make the requisite rounds
so we can give each other presents that we know we won’t like,
and I guess I should’ve known
we were always trying to pull each other down
in my freezing bones.
I’m leaving Chicago soon.
I can’t explain, but I know.

You must do the things you think you cannot do.Eleanor Roosevelt

There’s no way that this song could be played on anything but a guitar, so I borrowed one from my wonderful housemate and did this in one ridiculous take after looking up how to play three guitar chords. Also, the Internet at my house just died, and so I am posting this from a damp park bench in front of the neighbors’ place while stealing their wifi. Does it get any more punk rock than that? I ask you!

Alex, this is for you. It’s one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite albums, and I hope you love it as much as I do!

As your New Year’s present from Atlanta, we bring the pop-punk.

• Alex J. Rudnick: drums, backup vocals, waffles
• E. Robert Frank: bass guitar, recording, mixing, mastering, coffee
• Yuna Wu: Casio VL-Tone mastery

And the original. Happy 2008!

This is a new version of the original. I tried to tighten it up, tweaked some of the chords (thirds on the bottom! CRAZY), and even tried to incorporate Eric’s good suggestion. I started recording at 11:45 p.m. tonight, after going running with Alex and having dinner with Paul and making cookies and power-cycling the Firepod and panicking about how I couldn’t get sound to come out of it and panicking about how I was getting bad sounds to come out of it and it’s now 11:59 p.m. and I have not failed to bring you Shoebox Full of Tapes for the month of November. I haven’t really checked to see if this came out sounding okay after being filtered through a lot of technology I don’t understand, and this may be the least professional I’ve ever sounded in a SFoT update, but that’s okay because it doesn’t matter. Here, I made this. Here, it’s yours.