New, Quick Work

I used to write songs quickly, then make quick and dirty recordings of them, then stick them up on my old blog with a little write up and just go with it. I guess the reason I stopped doing that was because I quit recording stuff quickly, then I quit writing quickly, then I sort of quit writing.

Last night I once again wrote and recorded a quick song, so I'm posting it. When I say quick, I mean less than an hour from concept to uploaded. I was playing around responding to a great flash story about breaking up with the comma -- a story with no commas in it at all. So I wrote a brief narrative about a blues song with no "C"s in it -- neither the letter nor the note. Once I'd gone to the trouble of writing the ultra simple lyric (which really doesn't have any "C"s), I decided to go ahead and put some music with it. I cheated on the key though: it's in G, which does, in fact, contain plenty of "C"s.

Well, without further fluff, here's "Break of Day":

[Break Of Day]

Live at the Attic

Back in April, Shelle, Matt and I had the pleasure of performing at Eddie's Attic in Decatur in support of the Atlanta chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. I've used this space in the past to write about this cause and how important it is, and we were pleased to participate again this year.

As an added bonus this year, AFSP and the folks at the Attic teamed up to record the event, and the masters were passed along to me for editing. The bad news is, I've been really busy with all sorts of things, and I've only edited about half the performances. But the good news is, we were the first act and I started at the beginning. So our songs were among the first ones I finished. So while I work on the rest of the shows, I'm posting a link here to download the MP3 of our performance of "She Walked Away" from Eddie's Attic last month.

Enjoy!

Download She Walked Away

Promotion

I suck at promoting my own music. Always have. In fact, sometimes I think I have a self-sabotage thing going on.

Way back in college, me and some friends had a band called "Fits of Rage." We did not suck. In fact, given the mid-eighties college scene, we were pretty good. And with a little ambition, we might have done a thing or two. We kicked around and shared stages with kids who went on to play in very successful bands. And our drummer, Rob, was always sitting in with the best musicians and toured with some top acts after the F.O.R days. There were always some small-time industry people around, and folks would approach us after shows to talk about recording and that sort of thing. But we never even made a demo. We didn't return phone calls; we didn't re-print t-shirts when ours sold out; eventually, we petered out and went our separate ways.

In the mid-nineties, my folky acoustic group made a lo-fi recording in my apartment and got it on the air at the local college station. We gigged regularly in Athens and Atlanta, and we even got some decent press. The Atlanta Journal did a feature on open mike shows one night when we happened to play. The writer raved that we "gripped the audience with [our] tight . . . set"; while an Athens paper did an interview feature on the band, complete with photo layout and song (mis-)quotes. We drew crowds at the likes of Decatur's Eddie's Attic and Atlanta's Red Light Cafe, and people we didn't know knew who we were. So how did we capitalize on this momentum? We stopped playing in Athens altogether, cut back on the number of dates we played generally, and changed our name. How's that for guerilla marketing!?

So it should come as no surprise that in the age of the Interwebs, I have MyBook, SpaceFace, LiveBlogz, Twiggles, and all the rest, but I don't use these technologies for anything like a coordinated "promotional strategy." I have, however, started using a single tool to coordinate mailing list, press kit stuff, music downloads, and those sorts of things. It's called Reverb Nation, and it integrates with this page, with Facebook, and other services. I've had the account for some time, but they've been improving the service over the last year, and I've come to believe that the convenience of the thing outweighs my instinct to try to make everything "do it yourself" (an instinct that results in half-completed and abandoned projects).

So drop by the "Patrick and Shelle Bryant" profile on Reverb Nation and check out the downloads and the "be a fan" widget and whatever else is there. I'll be glad you did!

Nothing to Report

It's been over two months since my last post, and I don't think anything of musical note has happened since then. Oh, my mom gave us a Yamaha keyboard for Christmas. That's been fun. And I've touched base with our producer about getting the CD wrapped up. I have some great musicians lined up to play, but I still don't have drummer. The real challenge is the budget: we don't have one.

While I'm ruminating about nothing in particular, I'll brag about my kids. Their school had its annual "Peace Celebration" this weekend. Each class prepares and sings a song about peace in honor of MLK. Because it's Montessori, my boys (11 and 7) are in the same class. They sang "Dona Nobis Pacem," first in unison, then in a round. It was good. But the really amazing thing was, My 11-year-old son directed the class rather than the teacher. She had assigned him, along with a younger student, to learn the piece, teach it to the class, and conduct all the rehearsals. So when it came time for the performance she asked him to direct that as well. Needless to say, we were rather proud. And his little brother did a great job of singing too!

In the course of this rambling, I've thought of some actual things I want to write about. Which was sort of the point. So here's hoping I'll get off my duff and get back to being a music blogger this year!

-pb

Schola Cantorum

I don't think I've written here about choral singing and how much I love it, how much a part of my life it's been since I was a child. I always sang in church choirs as a child and youth, and I sang in the touring and chapel choirs in college. We (Shelle and I) even sang briefly with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus under Robert Shaw, way back before we were married. Since then, we've sung with the occasional community group, but mostly with church choir.

The Schola Cantorum of the medieval church was the trained cathedral choir, a group of choral scholars. Now it's a (frankly pretentious) name often used for a professional or semi-professional choir at a liturgical church. Our church is not a cathedral. We're a small in-town Episcopal church with a 40-50 voice choir that divides among two services. Sometimes I'm the only bass singer at the early service. But our choir is quite good, regardless of which service you attend and how many singers show up. A few weeks ago, our newly-formed evensong choir -- our "Schola Cantorum" -- met to record some songs we had learned over the course of just three rehearsals, including the recording session itself. The evensong choir is a smaller version of the main choir, and though we're the ones singing on this recording, we're certainly no better than the larger choir. But I wanted to post a sample of what a 20 voice volunteer choir can sound like on a spur-of-the-moment recording. Perhaps this will illustrate why choral singing is so important to me.

Click to download/stream This Shining Night

Pushing

I'm a bit overwhelmed this week. We have a show Friday night (that's tomorrow), and since we don't play more than once a month or so, we really need to prepare. This show involves additional musicians who will play sets before we go on, and whom I've asked to join us for a couple of songs and then all join in for a show closer, so that means even more planning and more rehearsal than usual.

None of this would be such a big deal: I've got the set list mapped out and have run through everything, and Shelle and I will do another quick run-through tonight while our oldest son is at his ballet class. This will probably be a typical family rehearsal, standing in the kitchen with supper on the stove and our little girl sitting on the counter while we do our best to muddle quickly through the set list by skipping intros and instrumentals. It'll be enough. The big complicating factor this week has been my own bone-headed over-commitment in the interest of pushing myself to do something new.

I am not a classical guitarist. Not by a long shot. But it's something I'd like to learn and something I've dabbled with. So when I was asked some time back to play a guitar part as accompaniment on a Walter Pelz piece for the choir Shelle and I sing with, I said "sure." I didn't realize it would fall the Sunday after this Friday night concert, and of course I waited until this week to start learning the music.

Learning a classical piece -- even a relatively easy one -- is for me a very painful process of working through the notes and fingerings one measure at a time. That's because I don't really read music for guitar: I have to think too much about where a particular note falls on the fingerboard. Imagine trying to play piano if you only knew where to find the E and A below middle C and a D, G, B, and E above it. You could find the other notes on the keyboard, it'd take you some time to read through anything. That's approximately where I started this week trying to read the piece I need to play Sunday. We rehearsed with the full choir and flute last night, and it wasn't a total disaster. I've got it down well enough to chug along alright, and the second time through I had almost mastered my nerves enough to stop randomly plucking the wrong strings. But it's been a lot of work during a week when I haven't had a lot of extra time.

So it's been a long week already, trying to squeeze these painstaking rehearsals in when I could while keeping up with a crazy work schedule and the usual stops on the kid shuttle and so forth. In the end, though, I have to admit it's kinda cool. I'm enjoying the challenge of doing something that just a week ago felt like it was beyond my reach. So I guess I'll keep pushing for a few more days, then take a little break. Then I'm going to start working through the Berklee Method for Guitar that my friend loaned me. And maybe one of these days I'll take some lessons.

Can't Always Get What You Want

When I was a kid, I saw a Paul Simon concert on TV where he ended by saying, "Have a sweet and peaceful evening, everyone!" He was so sincere that you could almost ignore the cavorting unicorns and rainbows that seemed to radiate through the sentiment. Sometimes, when I read back through the kind of write-ups I often do after shows, I think about that sign-off. I'm always on about how magical and perfect everything was.

Well it ain't all sweet and peaceful. My last show -- two weeks ago now -- was the sort I'd just as soon put behind me. Luckily, the folks who came out were very forgiving -- they even tipped well! But I didn't give 'em much to work with. I was late getting started because I had little league baseball practice first, and I was pretty tired for the same reason. But that's not really a good excuse. I owe it to folks to be energetic and prepared when they take the time to come hear me play. Certainly, it was not an unmitigated disaster, but my energy really dragged and I had a couple of rather big, obvious gaffes. At one point, I felt suddenly led to play Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty," but I let my mind wander until I could hardly remember the lyrics or the chords. Another time I played a very soulful version of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2U," only to get my fingers on the wrong string on the very last chord, ending in horrible, glaring dissonance. Everyone just laughed at that, 'cause what else could you do? I also talked too much, including telling an actual joke that bombed.

Even a lousy show has highlights though. I played "Fake Plastic Trees" for the first time in about two years, and it felt great. Oddly enough, barely anyone in the audience knew the song. I had to explain that it was a Radiohead song. I also played a mini-set of lullabies, because when I should have been preparing for the gig the night before I had been instead trying to put my 3-year-old to sleep. And there was a little girl at the show who was really sleepy, and who lay down on a bench while her mom rubbed her back. That went over pretty well, even if it was a pretty big departure.

In the end, the feedback was positive, and that speaks well of a patient and generous audience. But I definitely learned my lesson about trying to wing it at the last minute! No more cruising in late and unprepared for me. From now on, I'm going back to preparing a set list and rehearsing!