Keep in mind that for every video I have done, there are 5.6 other songs that I've never gotten around to doing a visual accompaniment. The videos were entirely secondary; I really don't like music videos as done in an MTV style. I wasn't too hot on them in the beginning, although when it was new there were some amusing stories told. As the music has become more pop and rap, the videos have become more ego-centric. If I don't care about the artist, I am certainly not going to care about their video.
The various companies that I worked for, including my one-man video firm, tried our hardest not to be involved in music video creation. First, the artist were always starting out, had no money, and wanted a 'favor' that they would repay later. That meant you weren't going to get paid and if they became famous (fat chance), they'd use a bigger production company in a bigger town. It was a lose/lose proposition.
I only did perhaps three in twenty years, the last two as a favor when I was working in state government. Those were so unlike the 'meat & potato' product that I was churning out; it was a challenge to adopt a radically different style. When I found myself, around 2012, drifting into producing them, usually for some reason in the coldest months of the year when you are house bound, there was only one goal; don't make these look like anyone else's material. In that, I think that I was successful, for better or worse.
When I was finished recording sixty songs in less than five months in 2014, I forced myself to take a year off. Despite that, I wrote two songs in airports going to and from vacation late that year but resisted recording them until the next new project. There was also the matter of my electronic drums; the kick pedal was in pieces and either replacing or fixing - and I tried both multiple times - failed. I let it slide, since I wanted a year off, and used the time to create and organize my music videos and start a massive inventory of all my digital data.
That inventory spiraled out of control, continuing into early 2017. encompassing eventually transferring over 5 terabytes of data, sorting it the entire time. I admit it; I was a digital hoarder. Growing up in a time when getting any good information was a challenge, I grabbed everything I could, not bothering to sort of even review much of it. The redundant material alone was staggering, not to mention the junk. Everything was moved, everything was looked at, and it was either thrown away or stored in an intelligent manner. This was overdue by perhaps a decade.
The good news was finding a great deal of recording sessions that I had previously thought lost. It would be possible to go back and remix, maybe even fix, without having drums. By 2016, I was getting itchy to do something with my music. The 'Big Addendum' project was conceived. Over 90 song folders, full of all the raw layers, were opened. Every one was an attempt at a remix or improvement. A few new outtakes/drum loops/discarded experiments were discovered.
The end result of the 'Big Addendum' was a seismic shift in my recorded output. There were five new albums, I discarded every album done before 2010 except one (which only had five of the original 33 songs left on it in the original mix), created two newly sequenced albums of songs that I did not remix for one reason or another, reduce almost all my albums to a consistent 11 songs (except some outtakes albums with really short pieces), and created two new outtakes albums. This musical part of the inventory alone was over six months of work.
The remixing was tricky; I have recorded on at least four software platforms that I no longer have. Syncing up multiple layers wasn't always possible. Honestly, some songs couldn't be done, some songs couldn't be improved. Everything was sorted and labeled, everything was opened, and a few things that were completely forgotten were found.
In the end, it wasn't a major new recording process, just a remixing and review of my earliest material, before I really had a process in place. There was a lot of bad stuff, but there were a few drum loops that I rescued and found new uses for. The following video, 'Funky India', has a drum loops from a song long since discarded. It's new, it's short, and it's fun.
I had fooled with Indian music tones and textures before, usually applying them in unexpected places on a cover song. 'Funky India' has the electric sitar to the forefront, even though the drumming is more electronica than Bollywood. The color palate of the video is over-saturated, like an Indian video, and more to my tastes than the muted monochrome used so much in Western film and video this millennium. The entire product swirls around in a pleasing way, making a statement without being specific.
The 'Big Addendum' allowed me to revisit the most experimental music that I had ever tried. The following, 'Laser Guided Democracy', is about as far out as I have ever reached. It was a guitar experiment, obviously influenced by Robert Fripp's Frippertronics. Done around 2007, I couldn't begin to reproduce the effects today. It sat unused for almost a decade until I could figure out how to add something as simple as a bass line that would act as an anchor.
The video is as creepy as the music. By the time that I uncovered the crazed guitar track, with all the strange stereo effects already in place, it was long forgotten. This was the type of thing unearthed by the 'Big Addendum'; not really front line, but so cutting edge that it is hard to believe that I actually did it. Yet I do remember spending some time and recording a few examples, and I did use one of those other guitar tracks, not nearly as weird as this one, called 'Hell's Bells' on the 'Zaftig' album back in 2012.
Keep in mind that all the material reworked and tweaked during the 'Big Addendum' was done previously to my self-discovered progressive tendencies. The following example is a reworking of a discarded song that was retreaded in a completely different manner. The original version had some serious deficiencies; badly recorded acoustic guitar, timing issues, and more. I replaced the guitar and bass, leaving a very strange drum track and keyboard pad. I switched the name around to 'Sunday Summer'.
This time around, the bass gets to play a more supporting role in articulating the melody, the guitar mostly sticking to chords until the chorus. The video, some old car informercial from the 1960s, is deconstructed, a perfect accompaniment to the spacey vibe of the music. it's still not a great song, too slow and a little unfocused, but it is better than the original from 2007. With visuals, it even reaches the enjoyable stage.
Perhaps the best thing about the 'Big Addendum' was that it closed the book on my first decade of recording. There were at least 40 retreads between 2012 and 2014, and the 'Big Addendum' itself was a deconstruction of my earliest material. The next year I was able to record 45 songs and not glance over my shoulder once. Curiously, while there was a return to a blues album for the first time in four years, I consciously avoided doing a progressive sequence.
I wanted to try new things while going back to the blues; after all, besides progressive rock, blues rock would be my most common genre. However, since most of those songs are cover versions, I rarely do videos. One album that I sequenced were love songs of a sort. The title song, 'Weird in Me', became a prog anthem by accident. It started out as a very intimate song, but the arrangement grew into something epic.
The video had a difficult trick to pull off; how to follow along an autobiographical song without showing images of myself? Fortunately there were some great gifs that I found on-line that graphically showed what I was trying to say. Manipulated together, the video becomes a satisfying accompaniment to a very revealing song, one that I dedicated to my wife for putting up with me for so many years. It is as psychedelic as anything that I have ever done, yet it seems curiously specific to the song. Wonder how that happened?
There were a bunch of lyrics written for this project. One of the more interesting ones were for a noir piece called 'Dropped a Dime', shown below. It is a piano piece, the guitar adding jazz touches. The actual song itself is a ballad, but somewhere between rock and something else. It is that quality that makes it progressive.
Another excellent video, this time using many period film clips to put the viewer in the right era. I love having at least two things moving in opposite directions on the screen, forcing your eyes to see in layers. The song itself was all about the bad side of love, so the images had a certain grimness. It was an interesting experiment, and it might lead to some other things in the future.
I also revisited some ideas, trying to improve them. One was the Floydian float discussed previously. This time the song was designed to be part of the 'Saragossa' album, a vaguely Caribbean/nautical theme. For once, while on vacation, I actually shot footage specifically to use in this video.
The idea was to do a piece with echo bouncing from speaker to speaker, in time to the beat of the song. It's trickier to do than you would think. I was able to build on the melody, adding layers of feedback guitar as the song worked towards a climax. There was also a defined intro/outro, making this a very complete work.
'Kraken Attack' was pure aggression, a lick that I had been tinkering with for years. This time, a complete arrangement was built around it, complete with a very different middle section and some very tasty chord progressions. This one is meant to be loud, hard and mean, and it fits the bill. At over nine minutes in length, it was the epic piece on an epic album, 'Saragossa'.
The video was a combination of old black & white footage of daredevils doing bad things and some crazed graphics. The whole thing is supposed to be a little frightening, as all good heavy metal should be. Prog metal is a genre that I only have some knowledge of; it came into its own during the 1990s, and I was interested in other types of music by then. But I wanted something huge to fill the album and to counter all the other good vibes on that album, and this fit the bill.
There are many other examples of progressive rock from this period, but those are the only ones to get music videos so far. I hope that this four part series shows just how ingrained the notion of progressive is in my music. It seems inescapable when I start creating; there has to be a blending or clash of styles, some expectation being challenged, some mashup being attempted. That is the joy in making music. I hope you enjoyed it too.
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