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Posts Tagged ‘GarageBand’

Salon de la Guerre’s New Alt-Rock Album

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Aren’t you lucky, you darlings! Salon de la Guerre’s 35th album is here, and it’s a lot of fun!

The album is called Citizen Wet Smack and it features some hard-rocking tunes such as “Scooter Impossible,” “Fred Jr.,” and “Once Evil, Now Retired.” The songs cover familiar Salon de la Guerre ground, with vignettes of characters you might find in short fiction: small-time criminals, white collar scammers, spoiled rich kids and unethical philosophers.

As of this week, the album is available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Pandora, YouTube and Bandcamp, among other streaming services. You can also use my stuff to make TikTok videos, if you’re so inclined. (My old song “Funny Drunk” is evidently popular for that sort of thing.)

About the title: “Wet smack” is an old-timey phrase for “wet blanket” or misfit. I use it a lot in my novels when I can.

The instrumentation on the new album is weird (Salon de la Guerre fans should expect no less by now). I include a lot of original Fender strat guitar performances alongside prefab guitar sounds generated on my iPhone GarageBand. I confess, this app has a hard rock guitar timbre that I quite like, and which I can manipulate in Logic Pro X. I understand that some purists probably shudder at that thought. But as I’ve said before, I’m not a musical purist about anything. I don’t care where songs come from as long as I’ve got an instrument or machine that gives me easy access to my own melodic ideas. Sometimes for this reason I get some snickers about my production quality from friends and critics. On the bright side, I’ve squeezed out a few hundred songs by doing things my way (I’ve got three more albums dropping soon, and my total song count is now just under 500 titles).

I noticed after I submitted my music to a paid review site a few months ago that a good reviewer can spot my influences pretty easily. The critic who wrote about my last album, Even Toy Dogs Get the Blues, thought he could hear some Peter Gabriel in my voice. I accept that view, though I don’t mind stating my influences outright, especially for my latest work. It’s pretty much all Sonic Youth, Joy Division and the Pixies. So there you go!

I’m also responsible for the cover art this time around, since my preferred collaborator has been busy. The plaster bust photos were purchased from a photo wire and taken by someone named Parsadanov.

I will likely do this kind of album again in the future, but the three albums I’ve got coming up are all very different: one’s folk, one’s electronic, one’s classical.

But for now, please enjoy a sample of the new album below, and buy it if you’d like!

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That’s Right! I’m Releasing Another G** D*** Rock Album!

Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged , , , , , , , on July 26, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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:

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