Don't Give (That Girl A Gun)

Cambridge, MA
22 February 2008

State Fruit (Featuring Mike Hopkinson)

On July 4th, 2005 I decided to skip the parades and festivities. I had just bought a lot of recording equipment and my friend Mike Hopkinson proposed that we play music that day. He'd been playing drums for a little less than a year I think, but he was so natural.

We composed this song in a few hours and recorded it immediately to hard drive. I used my friend's Paul Reed Smith guitar on this song, played through a Fender Princeton amp. This was my first experience using a Sennheiser cabinet mic (which I still use to this day), so I achieved a real "studio-esque" guitar track. I played electric guitar with Mike on drums live onto the recording; we had no isolation of instruments in his basement, save for the fact that my amp was turned, facing opposite to his drums on the other side of the basement. I went in later that afternoon to overdub the bass guitar and acoustic guitar parts.

At the time I was listening to a lot of the Gamehendge songs by Phish, and you can definitely tell by listening to the minor sevenths and muted strumming pattern in each part of this song. I truly feel like the only thing this song lacks is a light sax (or other horn) melody. Still, I present the recording to you now in its preserved form, as it was recorded on Independence Day.

On Meditation

I remember a couple years ago, I told Rachel that if she meditated correctly her head would hurt. That's because when you meditate correctly, your brain tries to exit your head. It wasn't totally false, it's just one way to meditate.

When I first bought my synthesizer and started composing a lot, I began to do what I now call synth meditation. I would create a sound patch, improvise for a few minutes, and compose a short melody. Then, I'd take this melody and play it over and over again, every now and then deviating from it. Sometimes, I'd have the synth plugged into my hard drive, and I'd record these meditations-compositions-improvisations. The first of these synth meditations comprised my first electronic full-length album, recorded in 2005.

Recently I found an old journal which described my discovery of a new type of meditation. I'll paraphrase the entry:

Today I discovered a new meditation. I took my new Brad Mehldau Trio CD to the cedar bench, and stretched out on my back. Listening to the record, I took a short nap. It was December, and when I woke up, a thin layer of snow had collected over my face and body. When I opened my eyes, I stared straight up at the tree that hangs over the cedar bench. Without moving my body or my eyes, I focused closely on the tree branches, then at the glowing moon behind it. I became completely in control of what I saw - I could at will remove the tree from my view, and just look at the moon. I did this repeatedly, removing then replacing the tree back into my view. And it was meditation.