http://tlnt.at/twuaXT
www.talenthouse.com

I am not a professional by any means but I just HAD to do something… they gave out all 9 tracks in WAV format to “Don’t Stop Me Now” for entrants to work with… so I turned the song into a duet and added some harmonies. ^_^

Might be nuts! …but most of y’all know that about me anyway.

If you could vote, or leave me a nice supportive comment out there, it would mean a lot to me! Also share on your Facebook pages and Twitters & so on, if you would!!

The grand prize winner gets an expenses-paid 2-day TRIP TO LONDON to the Queen studio!!…. and $1000…. and ProTools recording software plus mucho other goodies…. it was free to enter, Voting for “People’s Choice” prize opens tomorrow thru Dec 21… and I do NOT expect to win a thing but it sure was fun just to have this opportunity to sing with my FAVORITE artist & band!!!

All street-legal too!!
Amazing!
THANK YOU… if you go out there and vote… please please please!!!
Linda

she’s so lucky

by Linda Adams

she’s so lucky

he don’t bring home no liquor

won’t ever bring in no drunkenness

or bring home

no wild women with big

hair

no fights

no meanness no insults

no dead animals dragged in

by the antlers

no greasy motorcycle parts

strung out

all over the bedroom

she’s so lucky

this time

she don’t know why

she’s uneasy

Published in Buffalo Bones, Volume VI #1, Fall 1999, pg. 36

Linda wants to interview me?  Well, I’m not one to question the motivations of people who are smarter and more experienced than I am.  Perhaps I do have something to contribute—though I’m really not sure what.  I am not famous, though I’d like to be.  I’m nothing particularly special on the guitar—and I can’t sing at all.  I write stuff.  (I got that tag line from a newspaper reporter who “covered” a performance of mine he wasn’t at.  He said I introduced myself as “I’m Joe—I write stuff.”  I hadn’t—but I thought it was a great line, and I’ve used it ever since.)  I have spent the past 30 years or so trying to become a better writer.  I’m still working at it.

I wanted to wait to finish this until after Deathgrass’ performance at the Rocktoberfest.  (Yes, the “Rocktoberfest” is held in September.  It’s an outdoor concert.  On the Oregon Coast, one doesn’t go outside in October without lots of raingear.)  It being a ROCKtoberfest, we concentrated on “rockier” numbers (we are versatile), while still playing exclusively originals; fans came despite a relatively early gig time and rotten weather, and people (including the sound guys) told us we sounded good.  We managed to play what people wanted to hear (even though I prepare setlists in advance and we don’t deviate from them).  And we got paid.  Are we doing something right?  Maybe.

I can and will gloss over history real fast.  We are all products of our past, and we can’t do anything about it except learn from it.  I learned to play guitar to impress a girlfriend, wrote my first decent song years later (I figured if my baby sister’s boyfriend could do it, I could, too), and in the late 1970s was one of two songwriters for a regionally famous bluegrass band, the Dodson Drifters, that no one remembers any more.  20+ years after the band broke up, I joined the online writers’ group Just Plain Folks, because there were no other writers where I lived.  There are now.  I like to think some of them started because of me (“If that guy can do it…”).

Linda wanted me to talk about Deathgrass, and I wanted to talk about the inspirational aspects of roadkill.  The two are marginally related.

Deathgrass is the band—The Local Band, I remind people—formed in 2009.  The other four musicians (drums, bass, lead guitar and blues harp) are really good, and we’re playing mostly my stuff.  “Deathgrass” was somebody’s attempt to describe the music, and the name stuck.  I’ve been called The Guy Who Writes The Dead Animal Songs; only about half my songs actually have dead animals in them, but those seem to be the ones people remember.  (There is an old proverb that says everybody has to be famous for something.  I guess this is my “something.”)  We have an album out, Dead Things in the Shower (the title cut was co-written with fellow JPFer Bobbie Gallup), and it is getting radio airplay.

Deathgrass is an experiment of sorts.  We deliberately do not do covers.  Everything we play is either original (and that’s most of the stuff), traditional, or written by people as unknown as we are who’ve given permission.  We are perhaps proof you do not have to perform famous people’s material to make it in the music business.  We have fans (including teenaged fans—that still feels strange), and we keep getting more of them.  That doesn’t mean others should do the same thing; it just means you can.

Why roadkill?  One of the Writing Rules I absorbed over time says you either need to be saying something new, or saying something old in a new way.  I’ve gotten into the habit of looking at things a little sideways, and expressing human relationships in terms of roadkill is just part of that.  So I don’t have a boy-meets-girl song, for instance—instead, I have a boy-runs-over-animal-with-truck-and-thinks-about-meeting-girl song (“The Dead Porcupine Rag”).

Once people find out you’re a writer, they’re constantly feeding you ideas; these days, most of my song ideas come from other people.  I duly file them away, because I have noticed that over time, nearly all those ideas turn into songs.  (I will often ask, though, “Can I say this with dead animals?”  I have a reputation to protect, after all.)

I don’t have to say it with dead animals, of course—but I do have rules.  They’re just not the usual rules.  I am familiar with the Nashville Rules of Songwriting (and am also aware that a lot of good country-music writers ignored those rules, either inadvertently or deliberately).  I did once write a song that deliberately complied with all those rules, as I knew them; that was “Rotten Candy,” and it turned to be a surprisingly good song.  So while those Nashville Rules are (in my opinion) only suggestions, some of them are pretty good suggestions.

I try to keep a song between 3-1/2 and 5 minutes (both with and without a lead break, so I can perform it either solo or with a band, because I do both).  It must express a complete thought, with no loose ends: somebody hearing it needs to be able to say, “Well, I guess that’s all that needs to be said about that.”  Since I write country music, whatever we’re talking about has to be expressed in concrete imagery—real (or “real”) things happening to real (or “real”) people.  And it has to be different—either saying something new or saying something old in a new way.  (Which is where the dead animals come in.  If you re-tell the story of Romeo and Juliet with armadillos, for instance, you’re guaranteed to be saying something different.)

A lot of my stuff is humorous—not because I’m incapable of taking things seriously, but because I consider words weapons, and want to use them very carefully.  Over 35 or so years, I have written all of five serious songs, out of more than 80—and not all of those get played any more.  I figure I’m in this business to make money (well, maybe at some time in the future), and why would anyone want to pay me money to make them sad?  I’m much more likely to get paid for making people laugh.  I’m also a fan of Mary Poppins (“A spoonful of sugar…”): if people are laughing, they are less likely to notice that you’re also making them think.

I torpedo icons, because nothing should be unthinkingly sacred.  So we have “Born Again Barbie,” “Santa’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up,” “Can I Have Your Car When the Rapture Comes?” and some others.  I’ve “done” anorexia (“She Ain’t Starvin’ Herself”), bestiality (“Dirty Deeds We Done to Sheep”), cannibalism (When They Die, I Put Them in the Cookies”), and sensitive, sympathetic treatments of a stalker (“In the Shadows, I’ll Be Watching You”), a suicide (“Angel in Chains”), and a serial killer (“The Dead Sweethearts Polka”).

I don’t have to write serious stuff because other people do, and I can musicate it.  The music industry pundits say you’ve got to show you can work with others, so I do—I try to have as many co-writes in a given year as I do songs I’ve written and composed entirely by myself.  Most of those are “musications” (lyricist Beth Williams coined the term), where I’ve just set somebody’s lyrics to music.  That’s the “one-night stand” version of co-writing—it’s not a long-term or even necessarily close relationship, though it can become one.  Musications let me continue to feel productive during periods when I’m not popping songs out like Oriental babies.  I’ve had the good fortune to meet and work with a number of very talented lyricists, and I hope I’ve done them some good.

Some extraneous thoughts.  They’re not so much “advice” as simply things we or I have done that might be profitably imitatible.

Do benefit concerts for a local charity.  We “adopted” the local Food Pantry; we’ve done four concerts for them since mid-2009.  Our “Failed Economy Shows,” featuring upbeat, uptempo Depression songs, have attracted a lot of attention, and have also been an opportunity to showcase material written by people as unknown as we are.  Being affiliated with a Cause gets your performance a lot of free publicity, and ensures people connected to the Cause are going to talk about you—and when you put on a paid show, people (including media people) will remember and help you because “you’re the guys who…”

Avoid silence.  I refuse to allow an audience to be bored by silence, so I don’t allow any.  Everything’s scripted out in advance, including my Rap between songs, and we don’t need to say what song is next or what key it’s in because there’s a list (unobtrusive, of course) on stage and we’ve practiced everything in order, anyway.  A sideline benefit is we come across as uber-professional—and in music, as in politics, perception is reality: if you act like you know what you’re doing, people will think that you do.  (Yes, that should be part of that “advice” thing, too.)

“Professional” does not mean expensive.  Last two albums (actually, there are only two) were done in local commercial studios, with owner/engineers who were just starting out and interested in making a name for themselves.  Both had good ears (one was a music teacher), good sense of arrangements, played in bands themselves, and had decent equipment and knew how to use it.  From the band’s end, we recorded everything “Patsy Cline style,” live and in (mostly) one take; you can do this if the band is note-perfect—and all that takes is practice.  Recording, mixing and mastering of an entire album for under $500?  Sure.  Designing CD covers, labels and liner notes I can do myself—I used to be in the graphic-design business—so there’s no cost there.  The resources are available to compete on an even footing with the Big Boys; one just has to look for them.

The same applies to videos.  (“Video is the new audio,” Canadian DJ Len Amsterdam used to maintain, and I believe he was right.)  I am slowly but surely making videos of all my material—again, concentrating on getting professional quality for next to no money.  I watch a lot of music videos to get ideas, and have picked up tricks from a lot of videographers that I can imitate with equipment I’ve got on hand.  (Former graphic designer, remember.)

Push the envelope.  (If you don’t, you never find out how big the envelope is.)  Writing is writing, right?  So I’ve had a blog (“The Writer’s Blog”) for the past four years, do a weekly column for the newspaper (and occasional news articles), and have scripted a couple of plays—short ones, for a “troupe” of sock puppets (the last two of which plays included songs written by me).  In music specifically, I’ve deliberately tried to write in different genres (that was one of the items on the 2011 Worklist)—so I now have a medieval ballad, a couple of polkas, ragtime, a rap, and even a country death metal song.  For the abovementioned Rocktoberfest, we were able to play mostly rock ‘n’ roll songs, written mostly by me.

Success?  I have to paraphrase Bill Clinton:  “Define ‘success’.”  Fame and fortune haven’t happened, and may never, for all I know, or may be posthumous; I am happy simply to see measurable progress, even if I sometimes have to measure that progress in baby steps.

I have occasional “uppers” that help make it worthwhile.  I wrote a love song for my wife for her birthday, and she liked it.  (And it got performed by a band on her birthday this year, with her in the audience.)  Deathgrass was invited by my daughter and her husband to perform at their wedding.  (And we did mostly love songs, without any dead animals.  We really were able to do that.)  And a few years ago, when Santa came to town (always on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and always on a fire truck—small-town tradition, here), our Friday Night Group was asked to serenade Santa with Christmas carols (another tradition)—and somebody requested “I’m Giving Mom a Dead Dog for Christmas.”  And it turned out everybody in the crowd knew the words…

LINKS:

Most (not all) of my songs are archived on Soundclick:

http://www.soundclick.com/joewrabek

http://www.soundclick.com/wrabeksworksinprogress

http://www.soundclick.com/deathgrass

The blog is at http://nakedspacehamsters.blogspot.com.

The Deathgrass CD, Dead Things in the Shower, can be purchased online at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/deathgrass.

For the videos, go to http://www.youtube.com/roxhythe.  There’s a live clip of Deathgrass performing “Dead Things in the Shower” and “She Ain’t Starvin’ Herself,” and some music videos.  The two best are also the two most recent, of “50 Ways to Cure the Depression” and “Can I Have Your Car When the Rapture Comes?”