Homegrown Radio with Earl Butter: 6/4/10

Happy Friday all! Here we are with the very first edition of Homegrown Radio. We’re all pretty jazzed about this new ongoing series, & we hope you’ll enjoy it too!

In case you missed our teaser post about the series, Homegrown Radio will appear each Friday morning with a home recorded song from one of our musician friends. These days home recording can be sophisticated or basic or lots of things in between, & we’re up for pretty much anything just as long as it wasn’t recorded in a professional studio setting. One musician will be featured each month, & this month we’re very fortunate to have Earl Butter as our inaugural Homegrown Radio music-maker.

If you lived in the Bay Area in the 1990s, there’s a good chance you’ve heard, or at least heard of, the Buckets. There were a lot of talented bands in San Francisco & environs at that time, but none could rock the house any better than the Buckets, with frontman Earl Butter. Earl wrote the songs & sang them & also held forth on his Telecaster. If you’re into cowpunk, alt-country, Americana or just plain good music, you really ought to consider the fact that you could own one or more Buckets’ cds. Two recent releases, Sod & Silo are available on CDBaby, while their self-titled debut album is still available on Amazon at bargain prices. I’d give all three very high recommendations.

After a recent stint with Joel Murach & the Low Rollers, Earl Butter is doing some home recording; very much in the miniature vein, but short or long, Earl's tunes are always catchy. In fact, this month, we’ll get a “two-fer" of Earl Butter's music each Friday because the songs are short—double your pleasure, double your fun.

Earl tells me he’s “creating up a storm,” & goes on to tell us about today’s two songs:

These were all recorded on my macbook, in garageband, either with an sm57 or the pinmike. Pork Sandwich was the first one I recorded. These songs are all unwritten. They are songs I found myself spontaneously singing either to myself or my cat, usually right as I got up and was getting ready for my day. Pork Sandwich is probably a little earlier than that. I remember, I had written it in my head, and taught Dani Leone to help me sing it so I wouldn't forget it. When I went to record it, I couldn't figure out the chords, and had Joel Murach come over to help me. That one has a mike to it. Although it is the first night I used garageband. I did the verses just a few minutes before, but the words were still sort of coming to me as we recorded it.

My Happiness is the most recently recorded, but it has an earlier demo done on the same night as Pork Sandwich. That one's biggest idea is that I wanted to hear the percussion from Magic Bus, but couldn't find any claves. Once I got them, I found they are hard to play. I used the claves, and an egg shaker. But put them through a bunch of garageband effects for fun, and I think it is funner because of them. I bought the stylophone recently when I couldn't afford the keyboards I really wanted. I said, I'm buying something! $19.99 or something. It's a fun little retro-synth.

Enjoy the tunes!

My Happiness



Pork Sandwich