Hello friends, John Diefenbaker here.
Just thought I'd drop you a blog about my favorite band, and I'm sure yours as well: Diefenbaker. Since we last spoke the Dief has been focusing on one particular area of being a semi-functioning music-generating machine: not being a lazy machine. The question came up at a band practice a while ago - "Is Diefenbaker lazy?". We had been focusing on nailing down our strongest three original songs, at the time "Maybe Michelle", "Interstate 80", and "Differential Speeds", just playing them over and over again, every band practice, even in the same Diefenbaker Precise Order every time. Well after a while it no longer felt like we were doing the same three songs over and over again to get them down as much as it felt like we were doing them out of habit. Sure, we would occasionally diverge into a cover or two, or one of the other two originals we'd rehersed but not focused on ("Deafening" and "It's Not So Easy For Everyone"), especially on a weekend band practice when we tend to go longer, but we were frankly starving for new material.
I believe a new era in the development of the band started when I finally got around to demoing and, subsequently, including in band practices, "World Winds Down" and "Mine" (as was chronicled earlier in this very weblog). Shari's unheretofore-demoed "Good Songs Bad Songs" came in around the same time, so suddenly we had a total of six songs available on the setlist. The Weakerthans' "Tournament of Hearts" fell oddly seemlessly into the setlist shortly thereafter (oddly because previous covers had been tried and didn't really stick), with the also-not-yet-demoed original "Posing for Pictures" hot on it's heels.
I've got another new one in the pipeline, tentatively titled "Anymore", and Shari's got another new one on the way as well that she gave me the chord progressions for at last band practice. I just finished up the last little lyrical bits for "Posing for Pictures" right before I sat down to write this, so the full, shiny, finished version will be premiering tonight at practice, and Shari said she's got some of the melody worked out for her new song as well, so I'm hoping to hear that tonight.
In other Dief news, we've been tentatively looking for a rhythm section. No luck yet, but I think we're, as a band, confident enough in our material now that we'd like to hear it with actual drums behind it instead of a crap keyboard or drum machine. A bass guitar would also be nice to back up the guitar parts. I was running through our current strongest song, "Posing for Pictures", today and was thinking how ass-kicking it would sound with a full band behind it. I think we're no longer coming up with stuff that's good compared to what we've done before. I think we're now coming up with stuff that's just fucking good.
J.D.
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