Good Times

song 3 of Lou’s January ’23 song-a-week challenge (1/23/23)

   The iPhone entered my life in 2012 and proved to be the best way yet to document music ideas. It fucking changed my life (I go on about it on the RAW impressions ‘gratisode’). Together with Photobooth on my MacBook, I was able to make videos of riffs so I didn’t have to do what I used to do: try to figure out where I had put my fingers listening to an audio recording. Over the years puzzling out riffs that I wanted to make into songs meant that I rarely figured out what I had really done. As a result, I’d miss out on the overtones and string muting moves that gave the original demos character. As of 1995, I began streamlining the way I wrote. I wasn’t happy about it but it seemed like the only way. Specifically, I started writing more on 6-string guitar with standard tuning so it was easier to teach the band, and easier to remember. I lost important parts of what made my music interesting to me: the 4-string guitar and the raw origins of the songs.

   When I began collecting ideas with my phone and computer in 2012 things started to change. Soon I had dozens of riff videos from hotel rooms (the pic above is an excerpt), backstages, and home. With these new devices, I was reconnecting with my past. 11 years later and I’m getting closer to what I wanted to do from the beginning: make songs that sound like a transmission from a parallel universe.

Good Times, the original mix, appears on RAW impressions mini-music-monday 8.