It's been a typically bipolar weekend of band practices here at Dief HQ. Let's start at the start, shall we?
Much anticipation was building for the Friday night and Saturday night scheduled practices this week due to the wealth of new material we've been throwing around in various incarnations lately. First off, the band has been whipping into shape a couple of promising new ones in practice for a few weeks now: the previously mentioned Shari-penned original "Good Songs Bad Songs" and a cover of probably the most Canadian song ever (it's about curling, for christ's sake! curling!) the Weakerthans' "Tournament of Hearts". Add to that the two new demos that I, the Prime Minister of Rock, John Diefenbaker, recently finished up (and posted for all the Diefenfans to sneak a preview of, scroll down if you missed it) that were set to debut in the full-band setting, and it was almost too much excitement for the city limits of Baltimore to contain. After some less than stellar run-throughs of the Weakerthans tune in previous practices (almost entirely the fault of the guitarist... goddamned B flat!) Friday's practice started with a "f@#%-we-should-have-been-running-tape-on-that" inducing performance of it. The guitar player finally knows how to play all the chords, the key was changed so the melody is within the singer's range (remember, kids, it shouldn't hurt to sing) and, pow, out of the park. The problems started when we tried to go into "Good Songs Bad Songs" immediately thereafter.
Let's chop it up: Shari wrote the original draft of the song, based on a chord progression I'd given her. Post-that, I had added a bridge part that I thought really made the song much more dynamic, and suggested that the song's structure should be verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-chorus (the original song was just verse-chorus-verse-chorus-?). Shari wrote some additional lyrics to fill in the extra choruses at the end, but I thought they could use some punching up, so I sat down with the song late last week and significantly revamped it, mostly from the middle of the second verse on, though I did change some parts in the verse that Shari had as spoken that I thought would work better with a melody behind them. Blah blah blah, right? What it boils down to is that when we first attempted to do "my" version of the song, it didn't go well. So I'll spare you the gory details and just say that band practice was cut short, with me left quite crestfallen that we hadn't gotten to my two new compositions.
Saturday night's band practice, in true Diefenbaker bipolar fashion, was a complete redemption of the rickness on display at Friday's get-together. We steered completely clear of "Tournament" and "Good Songs", instead ripping straight into the new stuff. I think "Mine" was first up. I could be mistaken, but it scarcely matters, as we ran through both new songs countless times, going back and forth between 'em for over an hour. Both "Mine" and "World Winds Down" sound ten billion times better with Shari singing them instead of me ('natch), but what was really fun was that, as we got through the first few run-throughs, Shari was jumping up and down during the intros to the songs. Overt enthusiasm for the material? Now THIS is the band I signed up for! The only snags were Shari's synth part for "World" (she'd come up with it when I introduced the song in band practices before recording the demo and it's actually quite good) that didn't seem to arpeggio correctly (I don't know if "arpeggio" can be used as a verb, but I just did, so deal with it), and Shari repeatedly forgetting the melodies to the bridges of both songs (which I began to refer to as the Jeff Bridges in between-song conversation... hilarious!!!).
So, in closing, everybody have fun tonight, but by no means do I encourage you to Wang Chung tonight, go out right now and buy Ted Leo and The Pharmacists' new record The Brutalist Bricks, don't buy Butch Walker's new record I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart, and keep on rocking in the free world.
Kisses,
J.D.
