Salon de la Guerre fans take heart. After taking a year off from music, I’ll be returning to the streaming services in a couple of weeks with a new album called Even Toy Dogs Get the Blues.
I largely stopped writing music in 2022 because I’d been neglecting my fiction; also, I suffered musical equipment failure and, most important, nobody is knocking down my door for new material. But after completing the first draft of a new novel around March (a sequel to my book Zip Monkey) I opened up my iPhone’s GarageBand app to make sure the virtual piano keyboard was working properly (after I dropped the phone). Pretty soon, I was accidentally writing new music. Yes, it’s that simple.
I’m tempted to use horrific cliches like “back to basics” with this album. Since upgrading my technology two years ago, I hadn’t made a rock album on GarageBand for a long while. In 2021, I fell in love with my new Logic Pro software and started writing songs in musical notation for the first time. I got five new albums out of that program and then belatedly discovered that it also did wonders in brightening my guitar sound.
And yet …
It’s just too damn fun to sit around the house with my phone making up melodies on cool prefab instruments. I can do it at the gym too. Or on a train. Or in a boat with a goat. And there are advantages to going the lo-fi route: I keep the songs from getting too filigreed and overproduced and strangling the life out of them. If there’s a guiding philosophy behind Salon de la Guerre, it’s that music can come from anywhere. Sometimes I like playing it on a guitar, and sometimes I just like tapping it out video-game style on my app.
I did throw in a new wrinkle, by using jazzier piano chords this time around to go with the loud guitars. It was not my plan, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the music came out kind of Steely Dan-ish in places. (Steely Danish?)
I’ll also humble brag a bit that this album probably demonstrates my strongest singing ever. I’m a writer by trade, not a vocalist, but I’ve had to learn to interpret my own material because I don’t have the time or money to start a band and hire singers. Over the years, I’ve become less self-conscious about my singing voice. It has a quality and I feel better about it every time I ship out new work.
The new album is a mix of the fun, sad, weird, ominous, propulsive, perverse and literate. In other words, quintessential Salon de la Guerre.
I’ll be releasing it in the next week or so, but until then, here’s a teaser–a jokey take on pickup lines:
Beauty is Imperfection 