ROOOOOAAAAAARRRRR!!!!

I just want to take a moment to thank everyone who came down to TRx on Sunday afternoon to support Something Lovelies and our surprise guests Sonic Mustard and double thanks to all of those who through some money down to support Childhood Cancer Sucks, an organization that has been founded to fund research that is focused on finding a cure for Childhood Cancer.  I know when I looked down I saw multiple tens and twenties in there, so that was great!  F U Cancer, Thank you Nich, for having us down to your awesome shop in DTR because it was a great time.

The morning before the show I didn't feel nervous at all, which was kind of weird for me.  But then half way through the day I started to feel like everything was going to go wrong and like everything was going wrong already.  For example, running through my head was the thought that maybe I wasn't good enough at guitar to pull off some of the simple songs we were going to play;  Why did I have to get this cold and why wasn't it gone yet;  I don't even think anybody's going to be in to it while we're playing...on and on and on.   Thank god for Zach who gave me some sound advice, namely to can the frustration and throw it out the window.  It worked.  Even though I didn't pull off some of the guitar, even though my voice was a little bit off from the cold, and even though we had only played these songs together a handful of times, we had fun.  And so did everyone else.  Fun.  Isn't that what it is all about.

I leave you with the sound advice of a six year old girl on how to become a great musician.  "All you have to do is have fun, and it will sound better."  Rock on Millie.

when all others have long since signed off

in the next room there lies a woman of unprecedented charms and here i am letting my blessed dexterity waste away the new fashioned way at this plastic tray that is only warm from my touch and not from it's own heart and hearth within the way that she is.  and as i puff and puff with no one to pass to i feel content and yet somehow aversely inflamed with the thought that i could ever be comfortable with who i am now when i know inside that there is so much work left to do before the Sistine chapel of my corpus humanus is completed.

And that's what's been on my mind lately.

it's not that i assume you were wondering but that i might as well just say it because who cares if i do any more than if i don't is a valid question.  i've been sitting on ideas my whole life and i just want to see if they're worth anything to anyone cause most of them don't fit me anymore.  it's like giving away old clothes to goodwill so that someone else can find a use for them. or maybe it's more like putting up the stepping stones that i've used to get to where i am now on craigslist in the free section so that i don't have to carry them with me anymore.

And that's pretty much the reason i write.

m and i drove down to PDx today, her in her black geo metro and me in the white ford econoline 19' bus trailing behind.  for the first fifty miles i was feeling a little tense about the way he (and by he I mean the good ship USS Sir Moby Broke-Dick) steers, but once i got used to it (and may i mention that the drivers in tacoma and lakewood didn't help me out one bit) i relaxed some and enjoyed the smoothness of the road as it pulled the fish-eyed earth away only to reveal more earth, which i might add doesn't in fact come to an end but instead eerily continues to be in front of us come hell or high water as stories from the past have revealed.

And that is a digression from my day.  It was a good day.  I got a t shirt and she got some books.   Unfortunately we weren't around long enough to see some family that I am long overdue in seeing.

I hope this finds you well,

M. Chase

news flash

recording music is a science.  as long as you are willing to learn, you can figure it out.  at least i hope that is true or i'm totally screwed in the end.  but for now, i'd like to re-present to you, my second mix of "hot potatoe" as it stands today, and most likely this will be the mix i use for the "all get out (demo version)" cd that I am just one song from finishing.  In the end, I'm going to have six songs on it.  they will be (not necessarily in this order though) 1) grey matters 2) the stranger 3) comfortable skin 4) hot potatoe 5) what do you know 6) hey, man.

i've always really liked the way that hey, man turned out so mad props to kristie fike the baddest assed lady engineer i know.

anywho, here's the song.  i've got to get started on the aforementioned comfortable skin.  is it taboo to use the syllable "fore" so close to "skin?"  Or am I still thinking about that lady killer Jonah Falcon?

Damn you John Stewart!

the heat will get to you
but don't let it fall
when she waits at home for you
and she is hot for you to call

the least you could do is call

she goes out of her way
to make you happy,  yet
you find it inside of yourself to complain
and the one sure thing is that

you're gonna do your thing
so are you happy yet?

the heat just got to you
and you let her down
then you had to yell at her
cause she turned your excuse around

and you just let her walk right out the door
so what the hell are you standing
around here for?

***Update:::  I, Rather Quite, your diligent man-servant of the latest and greatest news about yours truly would like to announce that in a fortunate turn of events, I was done with work at 1:15pm today and then after finishing my mix of "hot potatoe" I got a call from South Seattle Community College to let me know that class had been cancelled for tonight.  So now here I am with the amazing opportunity to lay down some tracks for the final song on the demo.

now wa'im saaaynnng'!  shout out's to j-roc and the trailer park.  i wish i could watch trailer park boys seasons one and two for the first time all over again.  and if i could say anything to bubbles it would be, when i die, do you think they would let me be reincarnated as you?  i'd really like that.  

the haps

It's been a week and a half since my last post.  I've thought of apologizing for that, but the point of that is moot.  I'm all about apologizing when I've done something wrong, but in this case I haven't blogged because I've been right.  Starting this project is exactly what I've needed to get things on the right track creatively.  Let me once again go over the progress that I've made since my first post.  So far, I've finished recording two songs, two video performances, and booked two live performances.

I could mention to you the fact that I've accomplished very little from one point of view and very much from another.  Compare the fact that I've only really finished two songs to what that actually entails.  Taking a closer look at the process reveals this to be no small feat.  I've written and arranged two separate works as a composer, then I have become both studio musician and sound engineer as I work my way through the performance and recording of the separate drum tracks, bass lines, acoustic guitar and electric guitar parts, lead and backup vocals, and then taken those performances and mixed them into cohesive representations of something that like a crazy person I have heard inside of my skull.  If I were to dive into the question of "where did all of these imaginings of songs comes from, and what does their origin imply?" we could be here all day.  Honestly though, that is just another digression.

As far as the recorded material itself, you can hear it on my blog (you're on it), my Facebook Fan Page, The ROCKiT Space Website, occasionally on The Westside Will Radio Show, Myspace and Myspace.  but I think the most amazing thing is the places in this physical world that this music has already gone and the happenings that are going on around it.  At the aforementioned ROCKiT Space, I've performed a few times at the weekly open mic there.  I've also gone to Shadowland Bar and Grill open mic, and now today I played my first formally booked performance at Alleycat Acres on Beacon Hill.

Before I go any further, let me talk about that for a minute.  It all started with this communications class that led me to create a blog in which I could write about music that led me to connect with a few classmates, one of which is running an urban farm that is just a stones throw from the arts space that I volunteer and open mic at.  Friday night last week, I was reading through the replies to my posts for assignments in class and one of the replies was from Sean and in it he asked if I would play some acoustic music for their Sunday workday lunch break.  I started off the morning with some coffee, a simple breakfast, and some vocal recording.  After throwing an outfit together, I bounced off to Beacon Hill in my little blue Metro, unloaded my guitar and walked up to the sunny crest that the Alley Cats were turning from a vacant lot into a full on production-focused urban farm.  The Alley Cats is the group of volunteers that have been meeting with Sean for about a month and who are now working on orienting the farm for maximum productivity.

As I entered the space, I was greeted by said Sean who was being interviewed by a reporter from the Seattle Times about this project that he started.  After we talked for a moment, I walked through the crowd of workers that were busy relocating the large pile of composted soil in the front of the yard to the uniformly oriented rows that had been dug out perpendicular to the street stretching across the 42' of depth that the lot contained.  It wasn't until a was a few feet from the shed at the back of the lot that I could see just how far the hill dropped off behind it as its weeds and tangled trees tumbled down to Lake Washington below, surrounded by land and with the silvery towers of Bellevue looming over its banks.  After taking in the vistas, I walked back over to the table next to which I had stashed my guitar where the crowd was gathering to eat their lunches.  While tuning up, I had some good conversation with a couple of the volunteers about where the project came from and where they want to go with it.  I also was offered did happily accept a very tasty vegan brownie.  And while each of the people I talked to seemed to have their own individual reasons for being there, the unified purpose seemed to be what was in the forefront of their thinking, that being the food that they were going to get to take part in creating.

Standing next to the large compost pile in a little patch of sun, I played some new and some very old tunes of mine, along with a nice cover of a cover song.  And though the crowd was talking and not all gathering around googly-eyed worshiping me for my gift of music, I could tell that they really appreciated me being there so that they could turn off the radio and hear something organic while they fed their growling tummies and cooled their perspiring brows.  Before I left I was able to work out some ideas about getting kids from ROCKiT Space and their families involved in an agricultural class of some sort.  Of course it's all ideas right now, and I won't have much hand in that, I feel lucky to be in a position where I can connect two different organizations that are doing what they can to make positive change in the same neighborhood in their own ways.

In other news, my next booked performance will be played with another musician and old friend at Tyrannosaurus Records in DTR on Sunday March 21st at 4pm.  There is no cover charge, but there will be a tip jar and a Childhood Cancer Sucks donation jar up on the counter during the show.  That reminds me, I've got to call Nich (the proprietor of  TRx) and let him know those demos and flyers I promised are going to be a couple days late.

And just so you know, I was going to post a song on here today, but after going back and listening to it, I really want to flesh it out a little more.  After this song, I have one left to record before I make the official booking demo that I will use throughout the summer to try and gain exposure here in the northwest and beyond.  Don't get me wrong, I'm going to continue to record music and document the progress of that here, but I will also be talking about where the music takes me and what I get wrapped up in as a result of it.

I hope that you will find these ventures to be entertaining at worst and informative at best!

Cheers,

M. Chase

New keyboard!!!

Yay!!  No more copy and paste every time i want to use the letter "a".  no more avoiding words that have a "q" or a "z" in them and i can use as many exclamation points as i want!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Aren't you excited.

Later y'all,

M. Chase

jalapeeee-no

...and i have to say it's been a good week.  Oh excuse me, hello.  Have you two met?'

Horizontal turning of the head.  Hmph.

  "Well allow me, [your name], this is Guy.  He's the lead singer of a band named The Bend and not having heard them live is why you still have trouble sleeping at night."

"Oh yeah, and you missed Gunn and the Damage Done earlier, too."

Sorry about that. It's just that you've caught me in the middle of what could be added to a literal hundred even if my first impulse is to tell you that there are a thousand things I'm doing right now.  I don't know how I even managed to squeeze in a birthday, but thanks to a couple of friends, we ended up going to Rock4Relief on Thursday night and it was amazing.  It's been a sinfully long time since my last live show (on or off stage) and it was stepping off the plane in the tropics after eighteen months of Antarctica.

There's been some conversation about my choice in album title.  It has caused me to do some deep thinking.  Though it hurts to say it, I think that though my message is clear and strong and positive in intent, it may be something that causes pain.  Whether or not intellectuals will wring me dry over "Arbeit Macht Frei" I really could care less.  But at the same time...I know that inside of every intellectual is a sensitive human being, and to that part of them I would yield.  So I may consider the advice.  I'm open to advice.

Add to that this weeks horoscope, courtesy of Rob Brezsny(chovich):
In the coming week, I predict that you will NOT experience disgusting fascinations, smiling-faced failures, sensationalized accounts of useless developments, or bizarre fantasies in the middle of the night.  You may, on the other hand, have encounters with uplifting disappointments, incendiary offers, mysterious declarations of interdependence, and uproars that provoke your awe and humility in healing ways.  In other words, Aquarius, it'll be an uncanny, perhaps controversial time for you-but always leading in the direction of greater freedom.


Pretty cool right?

I went to my first open mic night at RockIt space tonight and was really blown away by all that talent in the room.  There was this guy Kevin who was polished as a professional and it was only his second open mic night ever.  Then Jessi and Marti got up there and swayed us with there solid and beautiful harmonies.  In the midst of all that the dance instructor (from a class they have there just before they open up the stage to any and all who have an opinion) did a rap to some hand drumming.  Even I performed a couple of songs, and even though it was a little rough around the edges, it still felt natural.  It was my first live performance since May 20, 2009.  I was on the drums in with Zach on lead guitar, Walker on Bass, and Becky on rhythm guitar and lead vox in our band The Right Typewriters.  It was a great show that got a footnote in a review for her boyfriend's band who followed us with a killer show.  (Hurricane Lantern (s?) is the name of his band.)

For histories sake, the last show before that was April 15th, 2009 at The Comet with Zach on rhythm and vox, Tim on lead guitar, me on bass, and Matt as the skinner.  We were playing a Stooges vs. Misfits show and we were on the side of the Stooges.  We called ourselves Something Lovelies at the time.  I say that because our band names included Mr. Hand, Boot Blacks, and 1919.  We played Gimme Danger, I Wanna Be Your Dog, Seek and Destroy, and another one that escapes me.  That was a crazy high energy show, and we had fun.  Especially when the drummer who had let us use his hi hat decided that he had to go in the middle of our second song and ran on and quickly off stage to the befuddlement of Matt who suddenly realized that something was definitely missing.  I saw people in the crowd follow him out and I hope that they caught him.  But all I could do was laugh.  What the hell, right?

And before that I was playing a solo acoustic show a The Showbox Green Room on April 9th, 2009.  I guess I've tried on a lot of hats in the past but it's been a while since I've worn some of them.  When I walked into the door of the RockIt, I saw Jack sitting on the couch and a crowd of vibrant onlookers of all ages, some with juice and others with beer.  The smiles of a face recognizing a face that it has anticipated are shared and you feel like you're home.  And not just because this arts space was originally built as a residence, but more from the way that you can slip into the place where no one is standing and feel that they were saving that spot just for you.  From the beautiful accapella's of a Rastafarian healer to a lover singing of his lover and finally the raspy, end of the night attempts to roust the neighbors with a Beatles Sing Along, i felt like I was a part of something.  None of it was fake, either because i was part of something.  The closest thing I can equate it to is a youth group gathering without the religion.  And man it was fun, right?  If you weren't there, don't fret, there's a place for you to sit or stand next week, and every week following that from 7-10pm on Saturday Nights.



Did I mention that I've made a contact with an amazing person down in Renton recently?  There's a place you should look up called Tyrannosaurus Records. They've got a really cool thing going on down there, and they're not alone.  There's a great burgeoning community in what they lovingly refer to as DTR.  They have the more modern forms of media available (cd's) as well as the old Vinyl for those of you who are cursed with an audiophillic bone in your earlobes.  Live in-stores happen pretty often, and they have a recording studio on site.  I've never really had a great excuse to hang out in Renton, but with the discovery of this place I think that I need to reevaluate that as well.

Also, check out Shadowland Open Mic night in west seattle.  Tuesday nights.  That's it for now folks, but I'll get atcha soon.

Here's not looking at you,

M. Chase



PS~Cancer Sucks.  Remember that.