Category: Music

0 Seems So Sad to Say

March 8, 2017
by Crommunist
· Media · Music · Originals

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A disturbing number of love songs follow this basic theme: “You make me feel like shit and you betray my trust, but I love you so I’m going to put up with it”. To me, that sounds like the unhealthiest possible way to be in love with someone. Love, to me, is a mutual and constructive thing, where two (or more) people are committed to making each other’s lives better. Sure, people make mistakes and sometimes it is necessary to forgive them, but at some point you have to really ask whether the person who’s cheating on you for their fourth or fifth time actually loves you. And you have to start asking some questions about yourself as well, I’d say.

So I put a twist on this “you betray me but I love you” trope and added to it, turning it into “you betray me, and I love you, but I’m still leaving”. Because it’s possible to love someone enough to know that they’re no good for you, and the best thing you can do is get your distance. And that’s what this song is about.

0 I Kissed a Girl (Katy Perry cover)

July 17, 2016
by Crommunist
· Media · Music · music videos

One of my favourite things to do with pop songs is to change them in such a way as to give the listener a fresh perspective on something they’ve heard a hundred times before. The original “I Kissed a Girl” is an insipid pop song about making out with a girl at a bar as a fun experiment. I don’t have anything particularly negative to say about the song, but I don’t exactly have too many positive things to say about it either. But if you take away the saccharine nature of the original, what you get is a song about indulging in something that’s perhaps a bit risque.

So I tried to capture some of the sultriness implicit in the song’s nature, to put a new spin on it:

It didn’t start intentionally, but by the time this song was performance ready I was trying to channel as much Prince as I could wrap my unworthy fingers around. That man knew how to infuse sex into rock music with a funk twist, which was precisely the combination of sounds I was trying to work in there.

I’m trying to get a bit more ambitious with the sounds and themes I’m working into my covers and originals. One of the pitfalls I fell into a lot with my early looping covers is the ‘dead air’ problem, where you’re spending a lot of time layering things while the audience waits for you to move the song forward. The challenge I’m setting for myself now is to structure my arrangements in such a way as to avoid spending too much time without giving the audience something new and interesting to pay attention to. I’m particularly happy with the way this one worked out, and will undoubtedly try to write more like it.

0 Love at First Touch

July 17, 2016
by Crommunist
· Media · Music · Originals

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I’ve never really been a believer in “love at first sight”, The concept never made sense to me: if love is about a shared connection between people, how could just looking at someone make you fall in love with them? I can understand being instantaneously attracted to someone, but we already have a word for that: lust. Or maybe even infatuation. But love? That seems to cheapen the concept to me.

I was in love with someone who was very tactile: she loved to be touched. Cuddled, hugged, massaged, whatever – as long as I was touching her, she was happy. I’m not a particularly affectionate guy by nature; it’s just not something that comes to me instinctually. This was, of course, a source of frequent conflict for the two of us. When I get upset, I need to be left alone until I calm down; when she got upset she wanted to be physically comforted. Treating each other according to what we’d want was a problem – I felt smothered, and she felt abandoned. It was a tricky situation to figure out.

Once I got more accustomed to it, I gained a deeper appreciation for how much physical touch can express. It can be supportive, it can be sexual, it can be playful – it can be almost anything. I learned to appreciate it when it was present, and even miss it when it was absent. After a while, I became almost as touchy-feely and gross as a normal, healthy person.

So I tried to put some of those thoughts and experiences into this song: … Continue Reading

0 The Way We Spend Our Nights

December 13, 2015
by Crommunist
· Media · Music · Originals

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I recently became single. How/why it happened isn’t a particularly interesting story, but suffice it to say that as breakups go, it was very civilized. And so now I’m single again, and trying to figure out what that means for a 31 year-old guy with essentially no free time and no particular interest in rushing into another relationship.

Unlike the last time I was single, however, Tinder is now a thing. For those of you who somehow don’t know, Tinder is an app for your phone where you upload a few photos and a short profile, and other users either swipe right if they think they’d like to meet you, or left if they don’t. If two people swipe right on each other, it’s a “match”, and they can message each other to arrange a date. It’s basically online dating in the Candy Crush era: superficial, simple, addictive, but ultimately mostly just a distraction.

I wrote a song about Tinder, and online dating in general. Very little of it is based on personal experience (I’m an OKCupid man myself), although it’s not exactly fiction – maybe think of it as “inspired by a true story”. Not my story, but certainly the story of hundreds if not thousands of people who signed up for a good time and ended up getting way more than they bargained for.

0 Pumped Up Kicks (Foster the People cover)

September 8, 2015
by Crommunist
· Covers · Media · Music · music videos

One thing that I like about covers is that you can take a song that people know, and do something very different with it. You can re-make the song to reveal a new emotional palette, allowing the listener to simultaneously experience something familiar and something novel. This tune, originally by Foster the People, is a perfect illustration:

The song is about violence in youth culture, and has a very upbeat and “pop” feel. Such a juxtaposition is actually quite interesting – it was the same thing that made the movie Natural Born Killers so affecting. Sadly, there appears to be a real tendency for people to skip over the lyrical content in favour of the fun nature of the song, resulting in people bopping along merrily while singing the words “all the other kids with the pumped up kicks better run, outrun my gun” – not exactly a happy sentiment.

I have been looking at ways of expanding my own musical arsenal. With that in mind, I tried to do a few things with this song. First, I put down the pick and tried to use the guitar as a sound board rather than a strummed instrument – the delay effect really helped with that. Second, I used my voice in a new way, trying to build intensity with breathiness rather than volume. Finally, I split the viola solo into two parts, giving the song a lot of time to breathe.

I’m very happy with the result. I hope you are too!

2 Suspicious Woman

July 2, 2015
by Crommunist
· Media · Music · Originals

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The fundamental component of love is trust. That’s what I think, anyway. If you can’t rely on someone, if they can’t be held to their word, then what kind of love could be possible? Love requires us to be our most vulnerable selves, and that requires enough trust to know that the other person won’t exploit that vulnerability.

I wrote this song while I was in the midst of writing another song (that I ended up recording, hating, and burying). It had an old-style blues feel to it, and so I started with a blues-like line “Oh woman, why you do me like you do?” There are a lot of blues songs about infidelity, but most follow the “please forgive me for cheating” or “I know you’ve been cheating” script. I decided to do something a little different, and explore the idea of being a faithful partner who was nonetheless suspected of cheating. … Continue Reading

0 What is Love? – Haddaway Cover

April 28, 2015
by Crommunist
· Covers · Media · Music · music videos

I originally started playing a cover of the classic Night-At-The-Roxbury 90s dance anthem What Is Love? back in my acoustic days. It appealed to my sense of humour, especially since nobody really recognizes the song until the chorus kicks in. I pictured audiences exchanging puzzled looks for amused ones. However, the more I played the song, the more I realized that it’s only the campy electro-pop back beat that makes this song humorous. Underneath, it’s actually pretty soulful. So I stopped playing it.

Then, a couple of months ago, I thought of taking another look at it – to put a serious spin on the song to turn it from something funny into something beautiful. This was the result:

I think this is among my better covers. It’s definitely among my better recordings, as I slowly figure out how to make live recordings that are both watchable and listenable. Let me know what you think!

3 OneRepublic – Too Late to Apologize

February 5, 2015
by Crommunist
· Covers · Media · Music · music videos

When I was 15, my parents bought me a viola. I had been playing on a borrowed instrument before then (and violin before that), so this was a big deal for me. It wasn’t too many years after that that I began to study with a new teacher, who pushed my playing to a new level. He, and the conductor of my youth symphony, and pretty much anyone with ears told me many times that I had outgrown the instrument and needed something better. It was around that time that I made the decision not to pursue music professionally, and it didn’t seem worth the expense to shell out thousands of dollars for an instrument I would only play occasionally.

Fast forward to this past year, and I was once again confronted with the sonic limitations of my old viola when I entered the recording booth. The viola sounded muddy and strangled. It was a battle to coax a steady and pleasant tone out of the old fellow, and there was only so much that production trickery could fix. Ultimately, I needed a new instrument. I began salivating over a carbon fibre instrument made by a New England luthier team called Luis and Clark. Every time I went to Long & McQuade, I’d take a trip upstairs and ask them if I could play it.

Basically, I was Mike Myers in Wayne’s World:

Well I finally bit the bullet and bought the damn thing.

“Apologize” is one of the first tunes I worked into my solo set. It’s got a great hook, and perhaps best of all I can play a pretty decent-sounding version without even touching a guitar. You get to hear my viola as a bass, as a string quartet, and as a high floating descant – all at the same time. I don’t play it live much anymore since moving to the electric viola, but I still have a great affection for this song. Hope you enjoy the cover!

0 Frank Ocean – Thinkin’ Bout You

February 5, 2015
by Crommunist
· Covers · Media · Music · music videos

A few months ago, I started listening to streaming music using a service called “Songza”. It lets you listen to playlists curated by music afficionados, without having to do the hard work of seeking out new artists. I’m not what you would call a “fan” of R&B, but periodically I’d hear a song that would make me say “wow, that’s really great”. Almost without exception, when I’d check the artist of the song I was unexpectedly enjoying, it was Frank Ocean.

This is my take on one of my favourite songs of his:

0 Leaving Even Handed Odds

October 27, 2014
by Crommunist
· bmusic · Music

I moved to Vancouver almost exactly 5 years ago. Having been a musician for essentially my whole life, I wanted to jump into the music scene in my new home as quickly as I could. On something quite like a whim, I answered a Craigslist ad looking for “someone to harmonize with” and found Stuart Alves, a local musician who had been in the scene for a few years and was looking to change directions. Over the course of the next few months, Stuart and I developed a setlist and began playing at an open mic at a bar near his house – the King’s Head.

As we became regular attendees at the King’s Head open mic, we regularly ran into Paul and Darin – two friends from high school who enjoyed playing covers and originals together. Stuart and I were offered the opportunity to play a night at the Cottage Bistro, a restaurant whose owner Stuart had known for some time. Because we didn’t have enough material to cover the whole night, Stuart and I hit on the idea of offering to split the night with Paul and Darin. Eventually the idea of trying to put together a few songs as a four-piece came up.

And so it was that we found ourselves at Kitsilano Beach, guitars (and viola) in hand, kicking around some ideas. We enjoyed the process so much that, after the original show, we decided to stay together and form a band.

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