A miscellany like Grandma’s attic in Taunton, MA or Mission Street's Thrift Town in San Francisco or a Council, ID yard sale in cloudy mid April or a celestial roadmap no one folded—you take your pick.
Showing posts with label Homegrown Radio-Earl Butter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Homegrown Radio-Earl Butter. Show all posts
June is drawing toward its end, & that means this will be the last Homegrown Radio segment featuring Earl Butter—thanks so much, Earl, for the fine material & thanks for all the support, dear readers; & a big thanks to the Bay Area folks who made last week’s Homegrown Radio segment one of the most popular posts here in some time; & thanks to Ray & Scotty who helped facilitate that!
Even tho our time with Earl Butter is drawing to a close, don’t be too sad—next month you’ll get to enjoy Homegrown Radio with Sister Exister, who readers also know as poet L.E. Leone!
So let’s see what Earl has to say about today’s songs:
Step Aerobics is the song that started this whole thing. I was working with this guy Sonny Smith and we were cleaning out some the gutters on this pretty high house. There was a big ladder. Sonny writes songs. A lot of songs, all the time, it's songs with this guy. Songs and his obsession with Paul Simon. So I thought maybe I'd write him one and came up with Step Aerobics for him. A gift! An Earl Butter song! A gem! He didn't seem very impressed and never did anything with it. Never even, really, accepted it as a gift. So, I figured, wow, finally I've written a song again after all these years. And such a great one. Perhaps the greatest song ever written! I should at least record it. I think this one has brushes on a cardboard box and me and the mac and the pinmike.
After I recorded it and heard the greatness, I was able to keep going. The rest is history, or something a lot like it.
Timecrimes? Well, I was watching a movie called Timecrimes and I noticed I kept singing this song, over and over to myself and cracking up, so I paused the movie and went over to the macbook and recorded it. It is all a capella. It is, simply, the greatest song ever written (unless Step Aerobics is). Although, like Van Gogh, it will probably not be properly recognized until after my death.
Time for some more Homegrown Radio with Earl Butter—so let’s get right to it & see what Earl has to say about this week’s songs!
It is weird to think that I was singing the underwear song to my cat, but I was. I think the logic to it is airtight. It makes more sense than any song I've ever written. It's recorded throught the pinmike, very quickly before I ran off to work one morning. It made me realize the beautiful beautifullness of my voice, and how great it would be if there were more of me. I am super proud of that song. Even with all the motorcycles going by my window.
I threw Meadows in there, too. It is also the greatest song ever written and was the soundtrack to that little movie I made. Feel free to show that, too.
& we are showing Earl’s movie, complete with the greatest song ever written as a soundtrack. Enjoy!
Friday is upon us, which means it’s time for another edition of Homegrown Radio—this month featuring Earl Butter! Let’s not shilly shally; here’s what Earl has to say about today’s two songs:
Library Lady and Eve, I believe are actually the same song, but written one step down from each other keywise. Eve, I think is the odd man out of this batch, in that I believe it is from a lyric idea I had laying around for awhile, and then one day picked up the guitar and decided I was going to "put it down" before I lost the little scrap of paper it was written on. It also keys in on my wonderful voice and the magic that I can do with it by stretching out a note and wiggling it around. It really is a great gift and I really am wonderful.
Library Lady really IS unwritten and spontaneous, and really was sung to (kind of at) my cat. I get very anxious before every class I teach, and well, this day I remembered that we were having a guest come in and boom, as I am Earl Butter, I made it into art. It really is just a chorus, or an intro or something. But notice how wonderful the harmony is. Wow. Way to go Earl Butter!
Both of these have added verses and stuff to them, and will someday be recorded in full. But I think they stand alone the way they are and the way they began, as beautiful spontaneous and incredible and amazing little bursts of songcraftingism.
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.
