Matt Marque

Oh My Darling

I wrote this song when I was 20 or 21.  The actual title, if memory serves, was ‘Flip and Fuck,’ and was a reference to a friend’s oversized (and eminently collapsable) red chair that doubled as a bed.

I’m not sure when I started referring to it as Oh My Darling, but it was probably not long after seeing the words Flip and Fuck in print.

It was originally the B-side to the Disconap 7” which is still, astonishingly, for sale.

Oh My Darling by mattmarque

I can has studio.

I’m the proud co-owner of new studio space.  For the past few years I’ve been recording at home, but, after realizing that my aesthetic was calling for less car horns and shrieking pedestrians, I decided to get a Real Place to work on music without interruption.  

As it just so happens, a friend of mine was looking to share her space, and so here I am.  Right now I’m busy futzing with monitors, trying to remember how I had everything routed and savoring the quiet.

I’ll put some pictures up soon.  I’ve been taking lots of random shots of the city, and it’ll be nice to put my camera to more worthwhile endeavors.

12 fun facts about Nothing Personal.

1. If you listen closely to the lyrics in Blowback, you’ll realize that (surprise) they don’t make any sense. They’re the original placeholder sounds I used while adding all the backing tracks so we would know where we were in terms of the overall mix. I did at one point have actual lyrics written out, but they didn’t…sing right, and when we compared them to the original placeholder track, they didn’t have the plaintive, emotional quality that I was looking for. So we scrapped them and kept the original placeholder ones.
   
   
2. The cutoff happens in By The Way (and other songs) because I never bothered to write actual endings for most of them. (Got lazy). I think there may be one or two songs on there that have an actual outro, most of them are just faded down, or have individual parts selectively faded. Same thing with bridges (i.e. you won’t find any).
3. A lot of the arrhythmic pauses you hear in my singing are due to not actually knowing how to sing. Or at least not having any conception of support. Hence the weird breath pauses and sibilance. I didn’t start lessons until a month or so after the record was finished.
   
   
4. Possibly While High was orginally supposed to be a big Bach ripoff, complete with strings, brass and light percussion. But as we were sitting around listening to it one day and trying to decide on a rhythm part, Matt “$” Schneider started playing the countryish figure you hear over it, just messing around, and I thought “there.” So we made him play it again and in one take we had it.
   
   
5. I wrote 90% of the lyrics and vocal melodies in a three day bender after waking up in my sleep and deciding that everything I had written thus far sucked. I do that quite a bit. I’m a terrible rewriter.
   
   
6. I demoed most of it on a 4-track and, for the final pass, an early version of Vegas. The beats were made in Fruityloops (I use Reason and a bunch of others now), and I would sing over the two-channel recordings until I found a melody I liked. Most of it I wrote with a little Radio Shack tape recorder next to me on the couch.
   
   
7. The beat in ‘Closer’ is just a canned beat I took from Fruityloops and modified with some slight reverb.
   
   
8. During recording, it was pretty standard: everything live and mic’d—guitars, drums and piano/Rhodes. No MIDI at all except for the beats, and even those were bounced to audio and then just looped. (All of this was in Pro-Tools by the way).
   
   
9. As for gear, I used a pretty modest setup (i.e. no pedals, just a few guitars). Other people brought way more toys than me, but the studio had a pretty nice selection of instruments I was able to dick around with, including a piano that was actually in tune. I used some no-name amp for my electric parts, but I have never liked how I sound when I play electric guitar so we mostly just stuck with my trusty Taylor and this ancient classical that I write everything on. They also had an amazing-sounding Wurlitzer, and it wasn’t long before I was banned from suggesting we put it into every song.
   
   
10. We used only a couple of mics, one for the vocals and two condensers for the guitars. The drums took the longest to record simply because there were more mics involved. All in all, it was a pretty standard session, recording-wise. Editing was another story. Most of the effects you hear are generated in Pro-Tools. I hate recording with effects since you’re stuck with them. Plus digital effects are easier to work with I think. You have more control over things.
    
    
11. We mixed and edited on a Pro-Tools rig. I had just recently gotten used to the idea of doing things in digital, and I didn’t know if I could handle tape-based again. (We ran the mics through a 2” tape reel with no EQ though before plugging straight into the board). Pros: easy to edit. Cons: easy to edit, to the point where it can quickly turn into an endless cycle of nudging things around and spending valuable time messing with minor effect changes.
    
    
12. Here’s the original demo of Close As I Can:

Unable by mattmarque

Steal this business model.

Ever since picking up a copy of The Baffler in High School, I’ve taken a keen interest in the record industry. The actual mechanics of it I mean. How records are made, how they’re marketed, etc. I’m certainly not the first to make the observation that the music industry doesn’t so much resemble a mature, vibrant enterprise as an incomprehensible foreign soap opera, what with its bizarre plot twists and recurring scandals.

And I admit I’ve kind of enjoyed seeing it slowly cannibalize itself. But these days, watching the music industry flail around like a drunk is getting old. Depressing even. I can only snicker so many times at RIAA website defacements before I start feeling sorry for them. They just can’t help themselves. Like other vastly more knowledgeable people than I have pointed out, the industry is changing and it seems like the last to realize it is the industry itself.

Which is a shame, because it sure is an exciting time. You don’t have to do things the Old Way anymore. Bands have figured out how to make it outside of the system. Every week new distribution models are popping up. Vinyl is back from the dead (again).

And so in this spirit of willful abandon, I’m giving away my latest record for free. There’s absolutely no strings, no coupon codes to enter or signup forms to leave a fake email address on. Just click the link and woop, there it is. The entirety of Nothing Personal.

If you want, you can download each track separately, or you can also click the link at the bottom and download it as one big compressed file. (Careful, it’s about 75 megs). I’ve encoded it with LAME at 256K variable bit rate, which is about as high a quality as you can get with MP3. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. If you want to put it up on Bittorrent or Limewire or The Pirate Bay or whatever the kids use these days, you have my personal word that I think that’s awesome.

If you want to seed it to Usenet, or burn CDs of it only to throw them into the lake during the climax of a Wiccan ceremony as you pray to the four elves of the Magic Forest, be my guest. Because really, I want you to hear it. It does me no good to keep it locked up inside CDs that you’ll never hear.

Plus, let’s be honest: I’m small potatoes. In a given month, the amount of records I sell absolutely pales in comparison to bands like Radiohead or even, probably, Milli Vanilli. So even if I set up some sort of pay-to-download system, the amount of money I’d make from it is not worth the hassle of making you jump through hoops to get it.

I don’t consider this a bad thing. I never really expected to make money making records anyway. For one thing, it’s an astoundingly expensive pursuit. Just to record Nothing Personal alone cost me $5,000. I had some help from the label of course, but I also contributed my own money because it was important to me to be able to make a record in a fancypants studio, with nice gear and with wonderful, patient people.

The other reason why I’m doing it this way is because, well, I think it may actually be a good business move. If my calculations are correct, the more people who hear your music = the more people who might one day potentially want to pay for it = the very slim but intriguing chance that you may one day be able to make a living at it. Radiohead gave away In Rainbows for free and they still sold a metric fuckton of actual records when it went on sale “officially.” (It helped of course that the packaging wasamazing).

Speaking of, you can always buy the actual Nothing Personal CD, too. I personally like to own a hard copy of whatever I have on my computer, but your mileage may vary. I toyed with the idea of including a donation link via Paypal, but really, I don’t want your money. Just your ears. Just for a little while.

I swear I’m never writing another record review again.

Bobby Conn: King For A Day /  Trans Am: Sex Change (Thrill Jockey)

Over the course of a decade, Bobby Conn has managed to carve out a curious niche in the already-crowded panoply of Chicago’s music scene.  Once known primarily for his frenzied live shows (seminars really) and style-a-minute recordings, he has naturally resisted easy categorization due in no small part to the sheer grasp and reach of his various personas. 

And yet for all of his incarnations—Bobby Conn as low-rent Bacchus, Bobby Conn as mesmeric performer, the Bobby Conn that emerges on his sixth solo outing King for A Day may be his most convincing yet. Like all Bobby Conn records, King for A Day benefits as much from ambition as it does anything else, and the lineup reflects this. 

Working with romantic partner and musical accomplice Monica BouBou, Conn also enlists the help of erstwhile colleagues The Glass Gypsies and newcomers The Detholz!  Even John McEntire weighs in at one point to lend his hand at synthesizer.   The results are equal parts Hollywood polemic, tawdry ballad and cheap thrill.  Make no mistake—there are no glassy introspections here.  No meditative brushstrokes.  This is Bobby Conn at his kinky best.  

He knows it, too.  When he sings “My teeth are so white/They burn your eyes/So close your eyes/And let me simplify your life” (in “Anybody”), there’s no mistaking the smirk in his voice.  And when he sings “Here I am, if you want it/There’s no reason to wait/I’m so easy to talk to/Give me love…” (in “Twenty-one”), you get the sense that he’s not so much sympathizing with the protagonist as making fun of her.

It’s not all about the lyrics though, and it wouldn’t be a Bobby Conn record if it didn’t contain some unexpected musical delights—the distended, snaking string figures that emerge in “A Glimpse of Paradise,” the prowling and muscular guitar that lines the basin of the instrumental “Sinking Ship.”  Even ostensible pop songs can’t escape Bobby Conn’s peculiar, weird imprint—the muted horns and tricky time signatures of “Twenty-one”transform what could be a disaffected take on disco-era schmaltz into something more telling.  And in the opening song “Vanitas,” tense, mostly acoustic churning gives way to sudden, all-out hair-metal assault.

At times, the record’s sheer density and stylistic promiscuity threatens to overwhelm, and there are moments when the record seems to overtake itself.  But Conn knows his stuff, and is nothing if not dedicated to his craft.  The end result is a sprawling, monstrously-complicated record that sheds previous incarnations as deftly as it thoroughly inhabits them.  And like all Bobby Conn records, it just may be his best yet.

Like their longtime labelmate, Thrill Jockey’s Trans Am seems to invite comparisons to just about everything, a tendency not at all surprising given the band’s penchant for borrowing liberally from both well-worn prog-rock tropes and early monochromatic electronic music.  Yet despite these wholesale appropriations, or perhaps because of them, Trans Am has always enjoyed an uncanny ability to re-invent itself, and their latest record, Sex Change, is no exception.

Mixed and recorded in a little under three weeks, without benefit of their normal gear and often employing an adapted version of Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies,” Sex Change finds the band gamely continuing along the promising arc hinted at in 2004’s Liberation.  More of a tactical than a strategic shift, the record doesn’t veer very far from the sleek, rhythm-heavy and programmatic template established in earlier releases.  

But there are some new elements this time around.  In “North East Rising Sun,” the inclusion of honest-to-goodness vocals, unadorned or otherwise obfuscated by vocoder, is a nice touch.  So too is the shy, guitar-driven lift of “4,738 Regrets.”  They’re not seismic shifts by any stretch, but there’s enough of these moments to suggest that they may be on to something.

Trans Am’s ability to mimic has survived intact as well.  Tracks like “Exit Management Solution,” with its squelchy bass line and top-heavy synths, could easily pass for vintage hollAnd, and the guitar wash of closer “Triangular Pyramid” gives a polite nod of the head in Built To Spill’s direction. 

Still, perhaps due to the harried recording schedule, the record is a little thin in places.  Tracks like “Climbing Up the Ladder “ don’t seem to offer much beyond a phoned-in, perfunctory take on ‘80’s era funk.  And “Obscene Strategies” lifts a bit too heavily from War’s Low Rider, even down to the sunglass-shaded vocals and insistent cowbell.

It’s at these moments that you realize that listening to a Trans Am record can be a self-conscious experience.  You wonder constantly: am I getting the joke?   Yet despite these minor distractions, the record serves as a welcome return to form.  It may not be the most complete or consistent record they’ve made over their long career, but, judging from where they seem to be heading, they shouldn’t be long in getting there.

Elliott Smith (1969 - 2003)

N.B.  I started writing this before I realized I hate writing about musicians even more than I hate writing about hating to write about musicians. 

Elliott Smith (1969 - 2003) 

To the millions of Americans watching at home during the 1997 Academy Awards, Elliott Smith must have seemed a strange sight. This was the year of the juggernaut, of Titanic and Celine Dion. The question that night was not if Titanic would win, but by how big a margin.

So it is perhaps understandable then if no one paid much attention to the unknown songwriter from Portland who appeared suddenly, incongruous and shy, in an ill-fitting white suit with a guitar tucked close against his chest. 

It was, even by his standards, a muted performance. He played as if unsure of himself, his eyes never once leaving the middle distance between his guitar and the floor. At one point his hands seemed to slip on a chord. It was over quickly. 

His career had started, as these things so often do, on a whim. A friend had lent him a four-track and, upon hearing the results, encouraged him to shop the record around. It was quickly picked up by a small imprint, Cavity Search Records, and in July of that year it was released under the name Roman Candle. A smattering of live appearances followed, including a brief tour with Mary Lou Lord, and by the end of the year people were beginning to pay attention. The buzz had started. It was 1994. 

Roman Candle was a curious record, as notable for its arresting musicianship as it was for its lack of polish. By turns dense and spare, deliberate and decaying, it retained a hushed, reverent quality throughout. It was, above all, a quiet record. His voice, while expressive, rarely broke above a whisper. It was the kind of voice where you could tell that the singer had his eyes closed the entire time. 

But if his voice searched, his guitar compelled. The unorthodox chord structures and inventive changes that would serve as a blueprint for later recordings were already on prominent, astonishing display. The intro to Condor Ave. alone was staggering. Combining multiple ideas into a single passage, it flicked effortlessly between wide, thrumming bass notes and graceful, stacking runs. It was surprisingly playful, and you got the sense that he was enjoying himself, and that he was listening to it as intently as we were. 

Other records soon followed, each more pronounced and orchestrated than the last. Where once a guitar was his sole accompaniment, he began to add other instruments. By the time of 2000’s Figure Eight, he was an artist in full bloom, experimenting with tape loops and exotic arrangements. He was also reportedly working on a soundtrack to the movie Thumbsucker, and had even recently claimed to have given up alcohol, red meat and the dizzying array of various prescription drugs which had for so long dominated his life.

From the outside, at least, it looked as if he was finally turning a corner. 

He didn’t make it of course. 

Looking back now, his suicide* on October 21, 2003 in Los Angeles doesn’t seem that surprising. From the very beginning, his lyrics reflected a troubled, turbulent life, one spent openly struggling with the by now familiar refrain of drugs, rehab and more drugs. Towards the end of 2001, for all of its initial promise, his career had effectively stalled, and a lack of official communication had spurred the inevitable onslaught of rumors. Depending on who you asked, he was either sober and living with a girlfriend in Portland, or near death and homeless in New York City.

This confusion also extended to his closest friends, many of whom in those last months knew him simply as the lost voice on the other end of the telephone. 

Those last two years were long ones. He became more and more distant and incoherent, and would speak cryptically of a white van which he claimed was following him. His appearance also suffered, and at one point he was thrown out of a friend’s show after being mistaken for a homeless man by a police officer. His own live shows were similarly disastrous. He would often have to stop himself in the middle of a song to ask the audience for help because he couldn’t remember the next verse. It was becoming increasingly obvious to any who cared to look that he was coming apart. 

Still, almost despite himself, he managed to hang on just long enough to leave behind a remarkably prolific musical legacy, considering. Over the course of a little under a decade, he gave us five records, a smattering of B-sides and the sketches of what would become his posthumously-released From A Basement On A Hill. 

Not enough of course, but it never is. And besides, Elliott Smith always seemed to say more with less anyway.

*It should be noted here that Elliott Smith’s death has not been officially ruled a suicide by the L.A. County Coroner’s office.

Sleep deprivation rears its pretty head.

This morning, as I was walking back from getting coffee, something caught my eye. I almost don’t want to say what it was because it’s one of those things that people will look at you funny if you bring it up, or worse, think you’re angling for some sort of Mr. Artist Guy-type consideration.  And it wasn’t anything special, really, just a puddle lying between the curb and the sidewalk on Ashland Ave.

What was unusual about it was that it was a color I’d never seen before. I literally walked around it twice trying to figure it out. Was it blue? Grey?

Complicating all this was the fact that it seemed to shift and change colors depending on my orientation to it. One second it was the color of the surrounding sidewalk, the next it was reflecting the dawn sky. It was crazy.

Someday, far in the future, someone will ask me what my favorite color is and I’ll respond “blue” because I always respond with “blue.” But then, a few weeks after that, I’ll be sitting around, spacing out, and I’ll think about my answer and I’ll wish I could change it to whatever the fuck I saw this morning.

It’ll be too late then, of course, and I’ll have forgotten all about this, but it’s nice to know that at one point I had a Real Answer and not just something to say for the sake of saying it.

I will write you a song. For money.

The Romans got a lot of things right. From erecting aquaducts and roads, to inadvertently starting major world religions to kicking the shit out of their neighbors, they were badasses.  I’ve been reading about them again and I came across something else I liked: the patronage system. 

How it works is: you have a patron and a client. The patron is usually a wealthy (or wealthier) person. The client is usually one of the great unwashed masses. The client, in exchange for money from the patron, performs services. These can range from attending a funeral and weeping on command, to starting rumors and riots that advantage the patron.  Somewhat like modern astro-turfing organizations. 

And for the most part, this arrangement works well. The patron gets the ability to summon instant crowds in order to heckle rival orators, and the client has enough money at the end of the day to pick up some bread on the way home from the Forum. Everyone’s a winner. 

This system was adapted in the Middle Ages to form the backbone of the Arts. The Three Ms, for example (Medicis, Mozart, Michaelangelo), were all clientes contracted at one point or another to do things like paint murals, compose symphonies or compose symphonies about murals. I’d even go so far as to guess (wildly, inaccurately) that 90% of the major museum pieces were borne of this arrangement. 

And so, in that proud tradition, and in the spirit of trying things which I have no business trying, I’m offering to write you a song. For money. 

Ever wanted an inexpensive theme song lovingly crafted to nowhere near your exact specifications? 

Ever been sitting around the house going “Man, I should totally, like, pay someone to write something for me!” 

Ever had the urge to hand over your original song to a total stranger and have them take it apart and rebuild it from scratch? 

Well, here’s your chance!  For the low, low introductory price of I’m Not Sure Yet, I’ll make a song for you. A real song, too. Not just 5 minutes of feedback or heavily-delayed loops of dialogue from Everybody Loves Raymond. We’re talking verses, choruses, maybe even a bridge if I can ever figure out how to write one.  Guidelines: 

• You can suggest styles or elements you’d like and I’ll do my level best to accomodate. I can’t guarantee I’ll get it right, but I will certainly try. You’re my patron after all.   
• Structure is up to you. Want one long verse followed by two small choruses? Done. Want a song comprised of nothing but bridges?* Done. (*Trust me, you don’t want this).   
• Estimated turnaround time, after factoring in indecision, speculation and rampant perfectionism, is about two weeks. Give or take.   
• Each song will come in its own hastily-constructed case and come complete with a brief bio, personal thankyou note and perhaps some random crap that I find in my desk drawer while I’m looking for stamps.
• Anonymous commissions are fine, welcome even.   
• Though I will negotiate fairly and work hard to fashion something you’ll like, I retain veto power. I don’t want to hand you something craptacular, and you don’t want that either. So if it isn’t going well, or I’m stuck, I may request some additional time.   
• I’m actually not kidding.

Sounds good? No? What do you have to lose except, possibly, the ability to make your rent payment?  If you are interested, shoot me an email. We’ll talk. Frivolous or serious inquiries only please.

A Very Minor And Inconsequential Defense Of 4-Tracks, Which, Though In Decline, Are Still Awesome.

A friend of mine recently asked me about 4-tracks, and I wrote her a response. Not a very good one I guess, but it got me thinking– I’ve long since retired the ol’ trusty Tascam Portastudio, but I still harbor a certain, perhaps sentimental fondness for them, and some of my happiest memories date from the time I lived by myself on Southport and, armed with nothing but a 4-track and the prospect of a day empty of phone calls, obligations and errands, I proceeded to waste many a fine morning messing around with it. So, anyway, here’s the original list I sent her, along with some new additions:

• The limitation of 4-tracks keeps you, for lack of a better word, honest. You don’t have 8, 16 or 24 tracks to play with, so you have to make the individual parts stronger. It helps eliminate the chaff. And you can always add more stuff once you get into a proper recording studio—it’s almost impossible not to.

• 4-tracks usually come with a built-in mixer and mic-preamp, which can improve the audio quality. Something can also be said for the sound profile of analog tape as opposed to digital hard disk-based recording, which, without the aid of some fancy outboard gear, sounds like crap. (Computers require a semi-retarded amount of gain to sound nice).

• Computer sequencers tend to get you watching the screen more than listening to the sound. There’s also a tendency to think more structured, to make the little colored blocks of sound line up perfectly. This isn’t always a good thing. I find myself doing this sometimes, and when that happens I have to force myself to get up and go stand in a different room of the apartment so I can actually listen.

• 4-tracks are portable, durable and can be used on tour. They also don’t require a whole lot to get up and running–just a mic and a wall outlet. I’ve owned several over the years, and I’m pretty sure that if I were to subject my laptop to the litany of drops, coffee spills and cigarette burns that I’ve put my 4-tracks though, I’d be unable to turn the thing on, much less make music with it.

• They make great notepads. And their simple, unobtrusive nature makes them ideal for those times you wake up in the middle of the night with a melody and/or cold sweat.

• Computers, due to their multi-functionality, can be distracting. Email, web surfing, googling the names of your friends, etc. All these things can sap the time you have available. 4-tracks gently require you to focus on the task at hand. 

• The 4-track “sound.” Examples abound, but I’ve always been partial to Winning Losers: A Collection of Home Recordings and Elliot Smith’s first couple of records. Maybe it’s the tape hiss, but I like to think there’s something raw and undiluted that comes through in those recordings that wouldn’t sound the same if they were instead pristine, lavish studio affairs.
  
  DISCLAIMER: All opinions expressed herein are probably incorrect. And I should also probably admit that I don’t actually use a 4-track anymore.