Jacob Corvidae

Photo by Patzi Temples, from zerne.wordpress.com

This one is a bit more straightforward than some of the others, especially in how it relates to the love side of this theme. It also touches more directly on my fascination with conflict as a means to transformation.

Musically, this song actually has a couple of melodic lines, one of which bears some mention. The second one is an ephemeral sound -  and next to the blunt piano, it comes off as almost background atmospherics. It’s further obscured by the fact that it is itself made up of two simultaneous set of notes making up one overall sound. But in the end that it gets a moment by itself, and for me that’s the melody that creeps back up in my mind hours later.

The details:
Download the whole album to date over in the noisetrade area to the right, or just download the latest track from soundcloud here: http://soundcloud.com/jacobcorvidae/love-and-the-duelist

Next track in 2 weeks.

Please pass this on to your friends, family and enemies….

Lyrics are in the comments.

Jacob
[If I was as badass as Amanda Palmer my initials would be JFC, but I'm not, so if I ever wrote JFC then my middle initial could only mean "fuzzy" or "furry" or something...]

The legendary Peggy Oki

This track tends to get 2 reactions so far: people tend to really like or they say “huh…”  And for that reason alone, I’m rather fond of it. The lyrics are all the names of skateboarding moves, intentionally arranged to make an abstract poem. But it’s not purely abstract. Even in these sparse, seeming nonsequitors a narrative emerges. This is a song about the tensions between grace and grit. I’d love to hear what you think.

You can now download this single track: http://soundcloud.com/jacobcorvidae/love-and-the-skateboarder

And of course, you can stream or download the whole album to the right (through Noisetrade).

Lyrics are in the comments.

4 down, 5 to go.

See you in 2 weeks.

Adam Kinney - photo by Hannah Reel

Well, so much for the regular schedule…. All was fine, but then I up and went to India (!) for almost a month… and upon returning was swamped with my own life, and then a variety of (I’ll spare you the boring details) simple tech issues which weren’t so much to overcome, but kept the album release on the backburner for a while.

My apologies for the gap. We should be back on a regular schedule now. New track every 2 weeks or so, but I’m not certain it’ll be clockwork….

Thanks for your patience! I hope you enjoy the new track…

Here we are with the third track to be released: Love and the Anarchist. While not thoroughly fast and folky, it’s certainly faster and folkier than our previous tracks — and yes “faster and folkier” won out in the voting. “Unusual” was not far behind, so I’ll probably release that next. Apparently, most of y’all could care less about “pretty”.

But even with the “faster and folkier” label applied, this isn’t exactly a folk song. Many of you know my acoustic work more and while this is as close as it gets on this album, it’s still not exactly an appalachian mountain song, Tom Lehrer tribute, nor Iron & Wine-like. That’ll all have to wait for other venues…

This is the only song that’s more than 10 months old in this collection. I actually wrote this years ago, then lost most of the lyrics. But the structure, the sound and the feeling behind it stuck with me.

As with most of these songs, this steps into a particular character and mindframe and speaks out to the world from there. If not for the bridge, this song might not fit into the theme of this collection — but between the bridge and the way that the rest of the song speaks to the Occupy movement without explicitly being about it, it was a natural to include on the album. In fact, given the tension, lyrically and musically, between the bridge and the rest of the song, I’d say it was a precursor to some of the core tensions at the heart of this entire album.

I had a friend ask me where I found the time to make this album, given my other personal, professional, activist and artistic endeavors. She said “I hardly manage to have time to clean my room, much less record music.” So I’d like to offer this official disclaimer:

NO rooms were cleaned in the making of this album. Any resemblance to real or superficial cleanliness of rooms is merely a by-product of procrastination techniques.

Here’s the next track: Love and the Actuary!

A special shout-out to the tremendous trombonist Cecil Scheib (of New York’s Hungry March Band and Cobra Gold) who’s great work fills this song out. Also thanks to Joel Howrani Heeres for the loan of his stand-up bass.

Response to the first track was great! Thanks, everyone for all the good words and feedback. I hope this next one also works for you.

Tell me what you want to hear next! — see the survey below.

Also, here’s another photo from the photo shoot done for the album. Again, a big thank you for photography to Spilt Sugar Photography. And as per her request: photographs by Spilt Sugar, photo editing and manipulation by yours truly.

Again, you can listen and download to your right. And you can always head over this way to get more info on the album, Love and the Occupation.

Thanks so much for listening, and please feel free to direct others to this site.

Next track in 2 weeks!
(now answer the question below)

Here’s the first track! (Well, the first track to be released, not the first track on the album.) It’s free, so please take it and share it.

This track may not be your cup of tea, as they say, but please come back and try some more as they come out. The sounds and moods are quite varied on the album, and you might hate this but love another.

And yes, more will be coming. The plan is to release another song for free approximately every 2 weeks until the album as a whole is released in the late winter or early spring. You should see the track available on the right-hand side of the page, just click on the album cover.

And here’s the basics about the album, Love and the Occupation.

Next track in 2 weeks!