Husband and WIFE

I've made a move and asked Lisa to officially incorporate herself into my live act. It was basically bound to happen, anyway. She's very talented, and will be even MORE so when we get those fangers worked up so they can play bar chords!

Some new lyrics

The song is called Pavane, and the music has been simmering since I went to the Aspen Music Festival in 2008. I've had a few of the lines kicking around in my head, but yesterday and today I was able to weld them together in vaguely bitter song.

I came down with a smile fixed onto my face
We held hands stepping slow in uncertain space
Do you see friends' faces twist in the night?
But what did you expect? I will hold you tight.
Better instincts got us in the way
This pavane will take us to the day.

Show you scars. Show you're underneath unreachable stars.
Demonstrate to them all who you really are.
I can catch their ears and sing the prettiest songs
Once or twice round the room won't take so long.
Hide me in my bottle for a while,
I can peek my head out when they smile.

These broken hearts can still laugh into the face of regret
Stealing all of the sings that we didn't get
We come down with fashion fixed to our eyes
Till the senses give out and we get wise
Afterward I don't know who it's for
No one ever held open the door.

And day is done.

Lisa and I first danced together in our music history class - and the pavane was a perfect match for our shared temperament.

Days of Flowers

Starting a rerecord of Palm Sunday today - all kinds of percussion and ornery off-beat emphasis. I am no drummer, though, and I want to get this mutha good and tight. Probably will end up following Oh Architect on next release, so the bar will be set high. So I run over and over and over and over... whacking on this Indian drum Lisa got me, and burping a stainless steel water jug. It's still not good enough after about 4 hours of all that. Glad to be recording though.

It's always my nature to skip the difficult "effort" stuff and dream ahead of myself. I can see the front cover of the album, I can almost even see the track titles of my next album. I tried to go the backwards way and come up with a title first today - "The Midnight Special". I know it's already taken, but I thought it would be a good place to start and diverge. I met it with hearty unsuccess, but I'll try again and again. Plans!

Palm Sunday goes like this:

The days of flowers have taught me how
To count it all for nothing till the sun rains through the clouds
The bread of life and cup reply
And fill my heart and mind with every reason telling why.

The days of flowers have taught me how
To count it all for nothing till the sun rains through the clouds
The bread of life and cup are now
What's flowing through the sap and dew drops all around

The town is glowing green
What a winter it has been
The kids are on the rooftops with their stereo machines
Yeah we all hit the streets
Skin blazing in the heat
I know each mossy crack in sidewalks underneath my feet

I check the time, I find your name
I'll call you up on Thursday, glad to see you again.
I'll call you up on Thursday, glad to see you again.

I Must Have Been Blind

Tim Buckley is a hero of mine. Here's a very dark video of a song of his.

#554; The Fiction Generator.

#554; The Fiction Generator.

Country Roads

Brown MacDonald was a physician and lived to be 93 years old. He always said he was "Brown in the Winter and Browner in the Summer," cracking a war smile that I never saw disappear from his face. The man sat next to me in our church choir for the last few months of his life, and I came to know this eternal optimist only slightly. I am playing today at his funeral - John Denver's Take Me Home Country Roads - which is quite a lovely song. I'll probably cry or something.

Piece by Piece

Hey! The site's really come together! Every section is basically functional, and the individual album pop-ups have been revamped. Now I have to tweak and make sure everything will "degrade gracefully" or whatever. Shucks!

Figured out a lovely way to play My Shepherd on solo guitar. It's a cinch on electric, and it's super classy. If only I had a nylon string guitar… it would sound lovely, as would So Long As I'll Live.

Mysterious Content Vanishing Act

I've finished some work on the Talk and decided to follow the same template for both the Live info page and Hear, which will be some hybrid monster of discography and audio - perhaps even some video. It's all ugly as sin right now. Why did I pick green? - eh, I zuppoze it lookz nize.

Stone Cold Jazz rehearsal went well, despite a missing Kenny Reed. Ben's tunes are heavily influenced by Indian classical music, and it's easy to get lost in the meters and phrases. But playing with him is getting me excited about writing more jazz, or anything for that matter.

New Look for SamAdamsMusic.net!

Check it out! I worked on the CSS for way too long, dusting away the cobwebs and putting off many things, staying up till 2 in the morning. For all that effort, it's fairly unimpressive, but I like the sleekness of it. I also made a half-hearted attempt to "degrade gracefully" with the page design - text-based browsers will have little problem reading it. Thanks to the folks at BrowserShots.org, who load the page and take a screen shot on oodles of different browsers and operating systems.

Now we'll see how I do with the rest of this site.

Stone Cold Jazz rehearses today - an unheard of event. Sax play Ben Crandall has some original material he wants to tighten up, and he's been pushing for a fixed list of rep that we can play real nice. We'd all like to make it up to Portland sometime. That's the big time, you see.

Behind My Front Door + analysis

Behind My Front Door by samadams

A lovely little pop ditty recorded for the wedding favor that Lisa and I gave out to visitors - it's too cute not to share. This probably won't make the album cut, and it would be impossible to reproduce this song in a solo live setting. Perhaps that's why I like it so much.

It all just tumbled out of me, and really the end product doesn't resemble a pop song that I would sit down and try to compose. The song has no chorus, and all three sections of the song (as I see it) are quite different, not to mention the abrupt character of the coda.

• The opening verses feature bouncy melodies over a repetitive harmony and a strong backbeat. Each verse ends with the familiar reference to the title, but to dissimilar music.
• The bridge presents a completely different rhythmic feel (a nod to bossa nova) as well as a much more sweeping and connected lyrical line, moving over an unstable but forward moving harmonic base.
• After the bridge, the first melodic gesture of the initial verses is repeated in a layered call and response between Lisa and I. The simple harmonic devices from the beginning make a return, but they are rhythmically set against the original back beat - which is still present in the ukulele and drums. The bass and piano seem to be in an oscillating 3/4 pedal point crisis, while the introduction of an amorphous background choir wander aimlessly around the D mixolydian pitch collection. An obvious V in the grand Schenkerian I-V-I bassbrechung (if you follow that smut). But when it resolves to G major, it feels unfinished and somehow implies further harmonic resolution. Is the song actually in C? I have no clue.
• The coda is frail and exposed, and in my opinion relegates all that has happened in the song up till now has been a dream. The chorus opens up the door and lets the air in.

The analysis gets a little carried away, especially since no one really asked for it. But things always get exciting when you realize what's going on in some contemporary "pop" music.

Palm Sunday (acoustic) by samadams

Palm Sunday (acoustic) by Sam Adams

SoundCloud.com is a website I've recently discovered that packs a lot of punch in terms of how music can be circulated on the web. It looks sexy, and it gives users a some great feedback opportunity.

Here is a demo version of a song I hope to include on my album in progress, working title The Desperate Mystic. It was originally conceived as a birthday gift for my mom's 57th birthday, and it conveys a fairly uncharacteristic bright-eyed demeanor. We'll see if we can darken the tone in the final version. Hoo hoo hoo.

New Address, New Name, New Game?

In attempts to get more Web 2.0ish, I'm setting my mental gears in motion toward streamline and perfecting my online musical presence. This includes the following:

• A simpler and less cumbersome website design for samadamsmusic.net.


• More frequent and relevant blog posting.


• Integrating all the pieces of this web-puzzle together nearly seamlessly.


• Getting home in time for dinner.

I'd also like to make a buck, but we'll see what we can do about that, won't we?

Jewel Cave by samadams

Jewel Cave  by  samadams

Haha and Marriage and Website

First, the haha.


Next, I'm getting married in August.

Thridly, my website is undergoing a redesigning and you should check it out.