Category Archives: Self-Retrospect

The Self-Retrospect posts are the ones where, instead of talking about how other artists’ songs or albums impacted upon my life, I egoistically attempt to elevate the stature of my own music by discussing it in a similar fashion. (Notice the use of the phrase “other artists” in that sentence.)

In this seventh edition, focusing on the corresponding seventh track on the Projects compilation, things get a little bit quiet…

On 21 March 2003, I recorded a mostly improvised piece called ‘Soothing Effect’. The title was intended to be somewhat ironic, as a listen to the track will demonstrate:

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[download 'Soothing Effect' mp3]

I was going to say “a quick listen”, but at just under eight minutes in length – the longest track I’ve ever put out – it’s anything but quick. Like ‘Apple Tree’, this used  a Sonic Youth-style tuning (GGBBDD in this case). Unlike ‘Apple Tree’, however, this one also stuck firmly with the Sonic Youth aesthetic, i.e. it’s fairly fucking noisy.

This was pretty much the culmination of my SY emulation attempts. There wasn’t really a way I could have pushed it further on that front. (Which is not to say that their influence on me dissipated, by any means – just that when it did show up, it was less overt.) As if to commemorate this, the next song I did  - the following weekend – was possibly the quietist, most subtle track I’d ever done.

Of course, this new track was mostly an attempt to emulate another band, Beat Happening. I’d come to know Beat Happening through two books: Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and Everett True’s Live Through This. After being intrigued by both books’ accounts of the band and their lo-fi, low-tech, DIY approach to songwriting, recording and performing, I went and downloaded some of their songs (via Audiogalaxy – without a doubt the greatest P2P file-sharing system of its time!), like ‘Our Secret’ and ‘Hot Chocolate Boy’.

And ‘Indian Summer’, of course.

It’s essentially impossible to mention Beat Happening without mentioning ‘Indian Summer’. Whether or not it’s their best song is debatable, but it’s certainly their most enduring. And I can’t deny the influence it had on that song I went on to write, called ‘Snug’.

For the bulk of its less-than-bulky two minutes and thirteen seconds, the instrumentation consisted of just one clean electric guitar and an unintrusive bass. Atop this, I recorded some detached, unenthusiastic vocals, singing lyrics which were probably a little too twee for comfort. I made a deliberate point of avoiding any rhymes.

All of which makes it sound a bit lame. And perhaps the bulk of the song is a bit lame. But its saving grace – perhaps even a coup de grâce (?) – is the instrumental bridge. For about 18 seconds (from 1:17 to 1:35-ish), four or five extra guitars come in, each playing delicate little lead lines, combining to create this warm, lush blanket of sound. (This might have been where the title of the song came from. I really can’t remember, so let’s say it was.)

This part, along with the extra guitars’ little encore at the end, managed to lift the humdrum majority of the song and take the whole thing to a higher level.

Well, that’s what I thought, anyway. Have a listen for yourself, see if you agree:

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[download 'Snug' mp3]

That instrumental break had a couple of different parents of its own. As I said, Sonic Youth’s influence didn’t go away – and my love of the more mellow, intricate guitar work on the (underrated!) A Thousand Leaves album, such as on ‘Hoarfrost’, showed here.  I’m not sure if my timeline’s in check, but this could also have been about the time I was deep into the Velvet Underground’s self-titled third album and ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ in particular – another spark.

But the key inspiration for that part was actually from quite a different breed of song. The intention was that there would be two cycles of verse, pre-chorus and chorus with just the single guitar and bass – centre-panned, so the stereo image was as “narrow” as it could be. And then, in one moment, all these additional guitars would come in, placed “around” the original instruments, with two of the guitars panned to the extremes – hard left and hard right. Directly contrasted with the preceding narrowness, this makes the bridge part sound big, wide, …expansive.

It’s not a particularly original or inventive trick. I’m sure it has been done a zillion times by a zillion different acts. But the single instance of this that stuck in my head – and which is still one of my favourite moments in any song – is in the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Stand Inside Your Love’. The song’s verse keeps the guitars near enough to the centre. There is an increase in intensity in the pre-chorus (“But for the last time…”), but things remain relatively narrow. Until it kicks into the chorus, with Billy singing the word “dreamed” and those hard left and right guitars crash in …voom!

Mine didn’t go voom, but I think I got the effect I was aiming for.

Having the use of mixing technique as the key element of a song means you have slight problem when it comes to performing it live. Without the big multiple intertwined guitars bit, the song is reduced to its insipid core – and I don’t really think it’s strong enough as such.

Also, particularly when I first started playing gigs, I’ve always found it a lot more difficult to play quiet stuff in front of people. It’s so much easier to be loud and abrasive.  When I did my first “David Ding” show (accompanied by my friend Peter on drums), ‘Snug’ was actually on the setlist. However, when it came time to play it, I chickened out and decided to go straight into ‘Flare’ instead.

The only public airing ‘Snug’ ever got was not very public at all. It was at a little show I put on with and for some friends …in my living room. In that quite intimate setting, it was still a bit limp. Since then, it has remained outside of the live repertoire. And until I’m in a position to get five other guitarists to join me on stage, I have a feeling it’s going to stay out there.

I’m not sure if that counts as me letting the song down, or it me. Either way, there’s a letdown in there somewhere. Oh well.

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Episode six of the stubbornly self-centred Self-Retrospect series, in which I go on and on about old songs of mine, as if they are of great importance. In this installment: mysterious metaphors, twisted tunings and bouncing basslines.

Arriving at the tail end of that pre-Leaving Cert burst of activity I wrote about last time, ‘Apple Tree’ remains quite a proud achievement for me. I think it came together really well. Musically, that is. Lyrically…

Yes, I have mixed feelings about the lyrics. I don’t think any major new ground was broken. The overall thrust of it was, once again, pining after someone. I suppose a slight innovation was its focus on what might happen if I actually acted upon my desire – questioning whether it would actually work out, rather than assuming the fairy tale ending. The whole thing was then filtered through this quite ridiculous, deliberately vague metaphor. What does “eating your celery” specifically mean? Who knows? I often hear/read writers being coy and saying they like to leave things open to interpretation/up to the audience’s imagination. I reckon a reasonable percentage of such utterances are in cases where they have no idea themselves.

I did like how the words sounded though. Each line had the exact same phrasing and rhyme, which gave it a kind of playful, nursery rhyme kind of quality. Anyway, I’ll move on…

Writing about ‘Breaking’, I mentioned that my interest in Sonic Youth would have a massive influence on my approach to guitar tunings. This is true. Between 2001 and 2006 about two-thirds of all the songs/pieces I recorded had non-standard tunings. (Although, interestingly, of the 10 songs on the pseudo-best-of Projects, two-thirds are in standard tuning. Selection is about 50/50.) Some of these tunings were usual, common variations, or not far off. Some were lifted directly from SY’s playbook. Others were my own invention:

As far as I know (and as far as Google tells me), I may be the first and only person to have utilized this GGEECC tuning. Clearly SY-inspired – with the paired strings and all (the pairs are tuned in unison, i.e. same note, same octave. Warning: tuning a guitar like this can really really confuse sound guys during soundchecks in live venues. One kept telling me to turn off the chorus effect I had on.) – it was also a bizarre open C, with the root notes actually the highest in pitch. This tuning initially arose when I wrote a song called ‘Undermind’ – a fractured, noisy number which used lots of harmonics.

(Actually, the original recording of ‘Undermind’ hasn’t been available online for years. I suppose now’s as good a time as any to unearth it:

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[download 'Undermind' mp3])

So, the idea with ‘Apple Tree’ was to take this same tuning and repurpose it in a much more traditional, poppy and much less noisy context. That was the intention. I’m not sure how traditional the result was. The song was in 6/8 timing – not ubiquitous, but not too uncommon. The intro and verses were just four chords – fairly straightforward, though the chords themselves were a bit weird. After the first sung verse, there was a short break. Then two more verses, followed by the break again, which became a breakdown/noisy outro – y’know, traditional…

What I liked about this, though, was how the second guitar part came into play. If you look at that Sonic Youth tuning list again, you’ll notice how – although they tended to match up on the early albums – Thurston and Lee would differ in their guitar tunings (e.g. on ‘Schizophrenia’, Thurston’s guitar is tuned to F#F#GGAA and Lee’s DDDDAA). ‘Apple Tree’ was not the first song I’d used two different tunings on, but it was the first where I tuned one guitar to specifically complement what the other was playing. I broke down the individual notes that were played in those four chords on the first guitar and then came up with a tuning that enabled me to play similar note combinations in a different manner (without having to make insane shapes with my hand). The result was this:

So, I had two guitars - panned hard left (GGCF#AC) and right (GGEECC) in the stereo mix - playing odd sounding chords in an odd sounding combination. And it worked!

It did need something to anchor it though. This is where the bass came in. And it’s really the bass part that I’m most proud of. I know I had already been able to move on from basic root-note stuff, with the improvised part in ‘Never Knew…’ and the funky line in ‘Tiburón’, but this took it to a new level. It had an overall structure: progressing from sustained underpinning notes in the first verse, through beat-keeping ones in the break, into a carefully constructed ”proper” bass part for the second and third verses. I even tabbed the whole thing out:

In the end, it all gets noisy. Both guitars and the bass get distorted. The right guitar gets a wah pedal and the left one a chorus pedal with all the parameters set to the maximum. And then the clean guitars come in for a little reprise. The end.

Why not have a listen to the whole lot yourself:

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[download 'Apple Tree' mp3]

I can’t remember if I was doing it consciously at the time, but in retrospect, it seems that I was ripping off/paying tribute to/being inspired by the R.E.M. track ‘New Test Leper’: the 6/8 timing and the bassline, anyway. I loved playing that particular Mike Mills bass part, so it’s not at all inconceivable. I definitely put enough of my own spin on it though, surely…(?)

I have only ever played ‘Apple Tree’ live once. The practicalities of the guitar tuning are to blame for that. At that particular gig I brought a separate guitar to play it on – otherwise retuning would be a nightmare. Ger Lynch backed me up on drums and it actually sounded quite good. Except the vocals. My vocals were crap. The best part, though, was how we segued it into that original GGEECC song, ‘Undermind’. I’ll embed the video of that segue and ‘Undermind’ below (video of all of ‘Apple Tree’ still exists somewhere …I’m just not sure where). Before that, here’s the audio of the ‘Apple Tree’ performance. (To get the full, continuous song-transition experience, download Selection and listen to it on a gapless player!)

‘Apple Tree (live)’:

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‘Undermind (live)’ (w/ ‘Apple Tree’ outro):

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The fifth installment of the Self-Retrospect series, in which older, (hopefully) wiser me casts an eye back on some of younger, more naïve me’s more memorable musical moments. In this episode, I remember that time I decided to write a country song. Kind of.

In the year 2002, I wrote and recorded about 80 different pieces of music. About three-quarters of these were written and recorded prior to Wednesday, 5 June. That was the day the Leaving Certificate (the final exams Irish secondary school students sit) began. The lead-up to those exams remains my most prodigious period of musical output.

Granted, not a huge amount of time or effort went into the majority of that output. In most cases, I’d stumble across some sound or some sliver of a musical part – and within a few hours I’d arranged it into something and recorded it. A lot of the resulting pieces weren’t overly listenable. But some were okay. Even some of my best things came about in this quick, haphazard fashion. And still do: when it comes to making music I, as a general rule, like to get things done and dusted as quickly as possible.

Relative to that usual method of operation, making ‘Hate the Paint’ (completed in mid-March) was probably one of the most calculated and deliberate things I’ve done. It was most certainly not something I “stumbled” upon. I purposely set out to write and record a certain song.  And, although it took me several weeks, I just about managed it.

That’s not to say there was zero spontaneity behind it. Indeed, its main inspiration derived from my friend Dave leaving his (newly purchased) acoustic guitar in my house. I did not own an acoustic of my own at the time, so I resolved to make the most of my temporary custody of it.

It’s funny how, in the liner notes for Projects, I very pompously declared that “making good music is— 0% spending lots of money on fancy gear”. I mean, I still think this is true – i.e., you don’t need any specific kinds (or classes) of equipment to be able to make good music. But with that little bit of pretension, I was in some ways neglecting how different pieces of musical equipment - particularly unfamiliar ones – can inspire different things. You certainly don’t need a €50,000 grand piano to write a song. But sat in front of a €50,000 grand piano, a songwriter is bound to come up with a different song than he would if left alone with a €10 ukulele (…and, of course it’s important to remember, vice versa).

My point is that without Dave having left that acoustic guitar behind, it is stupendously unlikely that ‘Hate the Paint’ would ever have come about. Although I didn’t buy that guitar… so perhaps my pompous point is still valid.

In any case, I had access to an acoustic guitar and I was going to write a proper acoustic song. With strumming. And, I decided, singing. Yes, up to that point, almost all of my vocals were delivered in that dry, almost-talking, melody-free monotone (you know, that one I continue to use all the time…). I was determined to do some “proper” singing.

The music came first though. A capo was placed on the first fret of that guitar (that may have been an arbitrary decision) and I strummed the hell out of it. I recorded a second track of the same, so that the two could be panned left and right, making use of that stereo thing I’d finally started to set as my default (before it had been rolled out only for gimmicky use). A third, “lead” guitar track was put in the centre. The result was a lot more “country” than I’d imagined I could ever get. But there was no stopping me now…

With the music in place, lyrics had to be written. Again, I was determined to write “proper” lyrics – ones that were suitable for the “proper” singing I was going to do. This took a while. With a lot of discarding and rewriting along the way.

Eventually, I got there. I have not idea where the “paint” thing came from, but once it was there, it stuck. As for what the song as a whole is actually about, well… Almost all of the songs I wrote around this time (and many of those I wrote since) fell into one of two categories: songs moaning about girls and songs moaning about myself. ‘Hate the Paint’ is not about a girl.

With lyrics written, all I had to do was record the vocals. Usually, this would be a case of trying two or three takes and then choosing the least crap one. But, again, this song was going to have “proper” vocals. It was also going to have harmonizing vocals. And it was going to need separate takes for the verses and choruses because those parts overlapped.

In the finished song there are, I believe, five tracks of vocals (although mostly you only hear two at any time – a high and a low). But, in total, I recorded more than 80 different takes. I became obsessed with getting it just the way I wanted. At some point, though, I decided it was done. And it sounded like this:

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[download 'Hate the Paint' mp3]

I’d like to think my vocal abilities have improved since then, but for 18-year-old me, that wasn’t too bad. It certainly displayed a bit more range than I had up to that point. Perhaps it didn’t have as much emotional resonance (for me) as previous ones like ‘Tiburón’ or ‘Breaking’,  but the overall quality of the song was a peak too.

I performed it live for the first time at the Village in December 2005. Mr Ger Lynch accompanied me for the show. He played drums for most of the set, before joining me on guitar for the last two songs – with ‘Hate the Paint’ being the closer. The original plan was for us to both play guitar on both, but after the penultimate one, my guitar started acting up, so I decided to abandon it: Ger would play the guitar and I would focus intently on the vocals. Without having the quick strumming to worry about, I could put all my energy into singing the song. After all, this was a song that required proper focus and energy, in order for it to be sung “properly”.

I think it was my extra focus and energy that was my downfall. The added power I put behind the vocals somehow resulted in me going extra high – I think it was a whole octave higher than the high part on the recording. And this was too high. I sounded absolutely terrible and undid – in my mind – any good I’d built up through the set.

But, funnily enough, the feedback wasn’t that bad, actually. Perhaps people thought that was how I’d meant it to sound? Or perhaps people had started to get drunk at this stage.

Either way, I learned from this and scaled back the energy levels for subsequent performances, of which there have not been many. It made the way to Japan, but it didn’t last long. I haven’t played it at a show since a December 2007 gig in Nagasaki. I don’t think this has anything to do with me growing out of the song, or getting sick of it or anything. I’m still quite fond of the song. Instead, I think it might have something to do with what happened a couple of months later.

In February 2008, I recorded an entirely acoustic album, on which I made a fair few attempts at “proper” singing. I’ll probably get round to waffling about that effort in a future entry, but I think it’s fair to say that ‘Hate the Paint’ was an early hint at what lay in store. It’s possibly a shame that it then got usurped in the live repertoire by its descendants, who’ve filled up my usual acoustic jangle quotient. Perhaps, though, like ‘Flare’, it’s due a resurrection…

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The fourth installment of Self-Retrospect, an ongoing series looking back at my past musical efforts and their respective evolutions – and pompously going on and on about them.

‘Shark’ was the name I gave to a little piece I lay down on the morning of Sunday, 16 December, 2001. It was a surfy-sounding instrumental, based around a bass line I had come up with the previous day:

The bass part was directly inspired by a groovy, bluesy track Chris, Bebhinn and I had done. However, while that one had a bit of an upbeat bounce to it, this was in a minor key and had a somewhat darker, moodier feel. Over this bass I recorded an improvised guitar part. This was based on a minor blues scale I’d learned – the same scale I’d get further milage out of later on a song called ‘Yours Truly’, which ended up becoming part of the Das Glitch (band I was in in university) repertoire. A live rendition of that can be found here.

Actually, I recorded one guitar part – and then decided to do another take. But, for some reason, I didn’t use headphones – or I had the headphones up stupidly loud – so the first take can still be heard underneath:

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[download 'Shark (Demo)' mp3]

So yeah, I called it ‘Shark’. Actually, I called in ‘Shark (demo)’, even though I didn’t – at the time – have any plans to do a “proper” version. I think I just used ‘(demo)’ because it was a very rough, loose recording – although, in retrospect, it’s not much rougher or looser than the “proper” stuff I was doing at that time. I don’t really know where ‘Shark’ came from. It might have been something to do with the aforementioned surfy sound. Or maybe the bass sounded like/represented a shark (?).

Either way, it was ‘Shark’. Then the song that it later spawned (recorded in March 2002) retained the name. But ‘Shark’ didn’t sound quite right, so I did what any pretentious teenager would do in the same situation: I translated it into a different language. Never too skilled in foreign tongues, I relied on an online dictionary to try out a couple of different ones. The Spanish just looked/sounded the coolest, so I went with that.

I probably could have come up with a more suitable title. I suppose ‘Shark’ could be linked – tenuously - to the words that I eventually wrote. A bit of a stretch. I’m not sure who the ‘shark’ would be – the narrator person or the person to whom it’s directed? Probably the latter. Though I suppose it could be either – it’s that kind of arty ambiguity everyone loves. (It is highly likely I went through this exact same thought process way back then…)

What’s the song about? Well, it’s fairly obvious, straightforward person-lusts-after-other-person stuff. I guess it was an important step for me to take at the time. There wasn’t any jokey self-deprecation nor vague metaphors or to hide behind. It was pretty raw. And when your audience consists of, well… your mates – people who actually know you – it’s sort of weird to be sharing those kinds of thoughts or feelings.

But the risk appeared to pay off. People liked the song. Or at least they told me they did. At first I thought their reaction was because of the bass part. I still felt this was the standout element in the song. But when I played it live – which usually didn’t involve a bassist – it also seemed to get quite a good response. Maybe I just fluked an actual decent song? Have a listen, tell me what you think:

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[download 'Tiburón' mp3]

It  evolved considerably live. Of my “old” stuff, it’s probably the song that has benefitted most from how my confidence in singing developed over the years. On the recorded version above, the words were just spoken, whereas with each live performance I’ve been able to sing it out more. Now, perhaps the original delivery was appropriate for the material (even if it might have come across a bit stalker-y) – but it feels better to put more into it. Maybe I feel it more; I’ve grown into it – it’s like the opposite of ‘Flare’.

Unfortunately I don’t have any recordings of the most recent performances of it. The best I can do is an acoustic version from April 2007. I ran through a whole bunch of songs on a quiet night at Crazy Horse in Nagasaki, in advance of a gig I was doing there a weekend or two after – to see what songs worked and what didn’t. I thought this one worked…

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[download 'Tiburón (Acoustic Live Rehearsal)' mp3]

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Welcome to episode three of Self-Retrospect – this blog’s most overtly narcissistic series, which recounts the stories behind some of my earlier forays into songwriting.

As we saw in their respective entries, the first two tracks on the Projects compilation [download here] were mostly significant for their lyrical content. Musically? Well, they each had their moments. Sonically? Not particularly interesting at all. Of course, at this stage, everything was being recorded through an old computer microphone made in the mid- to late-90s. I had just about figured out how multitrack recording worked. I was still, however, compressing the hell out of stuff when converting to MP3. This was mostly down to ignorance, but it was partly due to the severely limited space we had on our PC hard drive at the time. The latter also meant that very soon after I’d exported a mixdown of a song, I would have to delete the recorded tracks so that I’d have space to record new stuff. This would persist right up until I got my own computer when I was living in Japan in 2006. Which means that no multitracks of Projects-era songs have survived, unfortunately.

I did come around to not compressing the hell out of songs in the MP3 conversion process a lot sooner than that, but not before recording ‘Flare’ on 19 January, 2002. ‘Flare’ – track 3 on Projects - is a harsh and ugly song. Definitely the most overtly brutal thing I’d done up until that point – and possibly still one of the most severe I’ve ever done.  It almost physically hurts to listen to it. The quality of the final mixdown certainly didn’t tone things down. At a time when most MP3s had a bit rate of 128kbps, ‘Flare’ was 32kbps. Ouch.

But yes, the harshness was already there. First thing was percussion. This was the first song I’d done that had any kind of live percussion. It actually formed the basis of the whole song – and I have my little sister to thank for it. Jennifer, aged 12 at the time, was attending a sort of speech and drama/performance class thing on Friday evenings. At one, the class did a drumming workshop, where they did this polyrhythmic exercise in which one half of the class did one thing (keeping the 8th beat? – my knowledge of drum terminology remains terrible) while the other half did this “bom–bom-bom–bom-bom” thing. The next day, she demonstrated, and I suggested recording it.

For the 8th beat part, I went with hitting saucepans (or saucepan lids?) with plastic chopsticks. This is the first thing you hear on the song. The sound is all treble and gets right in your ear. On the 6th and 8th beat, I hit a different lid and – on another track – hit two saucepan lids together like cymbals. For the “bom” bit, I wanted something deeper. I don’t know if there are multiple “bom” tracks, but the one I remember was Jennifer (or may be me) whacking an empty box of Celebrations, left over from Christmas.

I had come up with the repetitive, obnoxious, upstroke guitar riff a few days prior to this and hadn’t planned on doing much with it. But then I realized it totally fit the 8th beat section. Before I recorded that though, I got Jen to lay down a distorted bass part – just hit the open E string to the “bom–bom-bom–bom-bom” beat and let the last one ring out. She then doubled that with the same thing an octave above. After that, I recorded the guitar, ensuring that the tone knob was set as high as it went. And then the vocals.

I had already written the words. Most of my songs – at least most of them back then – came about this way. I would write loads of words/pseudo-poems in a notebook (usually at night; sometimes drunk). Then, separately, I would mess about on guitar or bass and sometimes come up with something decent-sounding. After that I’d find words from the notebook that fit the song.

It was very very easy to match these words to this music. There were about 12 lines on one page – all rather seething. I took just six of them and then used that old friend (well, a new-ish friend at the time) repetition to lock them to the brutal repeating groove. Rhythmically, they worked brilliantly together. And as for the sentiment of those words? Have a listen and tell me if it fits:

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[download 'Flare' mp3]

At the time, there was some speculation among one or two friends about who the target of the lyrics was. No one guessed correctly, though. This was probably because the subject of ‘Flare’ wasn’t really in my life in the time and – in actual fact – wasn’t really one particular person. It was more about feelings I had towards a group of people, although I might have had one of the group in my head when I was actually putting pen to paper.

For me, the “beauty” of this song was its distinct lack of beauty. It was a lot of fun to play live too. It was definitely the highlight of the first “david ding” gig I ever did (which didn’t happen until November 2004 – nearly three years after the song was first recorded). That show was at Eamonn Doran’s (sadly no more) in Dublin, where my good friend Mr Peter Stringer backed me on drums. I was considerably nervous during the set, but when ‘Flare’ came, halfway through, I was able to let go. We played it faster – actually, Peter started off playing it quite fast and then I told him to speed up even more. And instead of doing my monotone deadpan thing, I found it in myself to do a monotone shouty thing. Heck, I’ve got a recording of that very performance [taken from the Selection compilation - a more expansive/less picky compilation of 2001-2006 stuff - which you can download here]:

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[download  'Flare (live)' mp3]

I ended up playing it at most gigs after that – it was a handy sort of confidence-booster to have in my pocket, and/or something to confront an unfriendly/uninterested audience with. But around late 2007, I just stopped playing it.

I think, of all the songs on Projects, it’s the one I’ve probably “outgrown” the most. While it seems somewhat acceptable to hear an 18-year-old sing/say/shout things like “the flavour of your face is making me sick”, I don’t think someone in their mid-/late-twenties can pull it off quite as well. That’s not to say I wouldn’t still write harsh songs, or that I don’t enjoy performing them. But I’d like to think I – as a part of, you know, growing up – have become a little bit more sophisticated with the mean stuff. But maybe I’m just being pretentious there (as if I haven’t been for the duration of this post – ha!). Who knows, perhaps I’ll resurrect it.

Actually, in late 2008, I did come back to ‘Flare’ when I was figuring out how to use a piece of homebrew Nintendo DS software called bliptracker. I took six samples from the original MP3 and did this one-take live video with which I shall leave you. Tune in next time for Episode 4: David gets sexy.

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