MIA in Miami

On the Road Again and Again

In the middle of house painting hell, having to move every item in every room on the second floor. The wife and I keep the main floor spotless and modern, like Yoko Ono. Not a bit of mess or clutter; all that gets shoved in upstairs, where some places haven't been touched in over a decade. The dust alone causes a major health hazard and the irritation factor is through the roof.

Add a heat wave, with daily temperatures between 90 and 100 degrees, and it makes it hard to keep up with a blog. Add to the fact that my office has been discombobulated over the last week, methodically stripped of every single item, every knickknack moved elsewhere and packed away, and it has been frankly exhausting. With a new carpet for all the upstairs rooms looming in the near future, the entire contents of our living area seems to be going up or down a flight of stairs. We were so tired that we actually skipped a minor league baseball game on the Fourth, instead taking a well-deserved nap.

But I managed, over the last two days, to pump out a few new music videos. The first one is a great straight ahead rock song, written in 2014 but not recorded until 2017. I laid down sixty - that is six zero tracks - in 2014, and there came a point when it had to cease. Since I was going on vacation in September, that seemed to be a good end point. After that, I would only mix and fix the mass of material that had accumulated. So naturally while on vacation I wrote two new songs, both very good.

Determined to keep to the plan, I wrote down a first draft of the lyrics to 'MIA in Miami' and did a very quick acoustic demo of the music. Doing the same with the other piece, an instrumental that was also recorded in 2017, I didn't realize that a broken foot pedal on my bass drum would put me out of action for three years, at least as far as doing new material. The riff was constantly practiced and the words were polished quite a few times, and I had a very good idea of exactly what I wanted. It's a rocker in the key of 'A", very natural for the guitar, but not the best for my limited singing voice. This time I managed to yelp through the piece in fine form.

The video keeps moving forward, no message or continuation, but that's the way I often put these things together. There are parts of two movies stripped of all narrative meaning, all close up and on-camera talking removed, leaving only images that are in motion. There are some giant explosions borrowed from another film, put through a special effects blender to act as re-enforcement to the crash chords. You get a vague notion of cars flying through empty landscapes and not much more.

Straight rock has been very successful for me, at least in terms of YouTube analytics. Of all my videos, by far the most popular is another boogie track called 'Divine Kelly'. That one started out as a nursery rhyme that I couldn't get out of my head, so I turned it into a song, once again int he key of 'A". You can really hear me struggling to hit some of the notes, but I did get through it. It was recorded in 2013 for a blues album, which shows how loose my definition of that genre can be.

A year later, I threw together a video using whatever images I could scrape together. There are videos that you shoot the imagery, and there are those where you need to find the visual portions from where ever you can get them. Both are a different process, but pure editing depends on your talent to take footage and put it together into something effective, no matter how dire the original. In the business, we called this, 'Making chicken salad out of chicken shit'.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why 'Divine Kelly' is so popular; one quick glance will let you know just what it is selling. That was not my intention. In fact, I was subverting the intention, as I always do. It's my nature to give you what you want while making you not want what you are getting. But people wanted it any way. They are welcome to it.