A couple of new songs, a couple of covers, a couple of fake record sleeves!

Diefenbaker: A scrappy little outfit eternally struggling within it's own limited means, be they in songwriting ability, instrument-playing ability, technological savy, or simply musical taste in general. A combo, though, that, perhaps through sheer pig-headed naivete and contrarian determination, forges ahead through the endless snowy tundra of music making like a mountie, determined to bring in his fugitive prisoner and see her returned to the custody of the authorities even if he has to carry her hundreds of miles on his back after being trapped in a cave with her for days on end and falling in love with her. What? Oh, sorry, I got bored midway through that sentence and started thinking about a Due South episode. Anyway, in that spirit, I present to you some new demos. They're solo demos, so it's just me, Johnny D. Hopefully, we'll work up some full-band demos before too long, as, in my opinion, these two new songs are up there with the best stuff we've written so far. In typical Diefenbaker smoke-and-mirrors, intentionally confusing fashion, I've paired each new demo with a cover that I'd recorded a while ago but hadn't put up yet, and made fabulous fake record sleeves for each imaginary 12" single! Isn't that exciting!?


First up, new one "Mine" backed with a cover of Tegan and Sara's "The Cure"

Download links:
side A - Mine
side B - The Cure

The chord progression and melody for "Mine" has been sitting around forever. I believe I may have even uploaded the work tape recording I made of it with no lyrics here at some point but I'm too lazy to look. At one point Shari was going to try to write lyrics to this song but ended up not doing it. I had part of the lyrics to the first verse in my computer for a long time, but actually sat down over the long thanksgiving weekend in '09 and finished the song. Well, it wasn't entirely finished; for some reason that I don't recall, I lost interest with two lines in the last chorus left blank and finished it off a couple weeks ago. This was my attempt to write an "upbeat" (relatively) song, a "pop" song if you will, that people might actually "like" and "enjoy listening to". I think it's pretty good, it's just sad-sacky and "f$%&ing brooding" (as my brother would say) enough that I still like it. Simple drum part, lyrics mixed to the front (again, relatively for my taste), and there you have it. On the b-side is a cover I did a while back of "The Cure" by Tegan and Sara, from when my T+S obsession was at it's peak and I was considering forming a Tegan and Sara cover band (consisting only of myself, of course) called Black Mountie.


Second, new one "World Winds Down" backed with a cover of Tegan and Sara's "Monday Monday Monday"

Download links:
side A - World Winds Down
side B - Monday Monday Monday

This song's rough concept came after I had watched the excessively long NewOrder Story documentary DVD and was totally geeking out over New Order. Barney Sumner said something in the film with regard to how he writes lyrics, that he just writes stuff that sounds right, and it's sometimes years later that he realizes what the songs are about. Well my eyes grew as big as dinner plates in the soft glow of my monitor at that point, and I vowed to try that ASAP. So I was messing around with chords, trying to get something that sounded intersting using the capo, and trying to find a rhythm track on the ol' trusty Casio CTK-601 that would go with them, and this sort of fell together. The melody of the chorus is something I usually try not to do, which is just sing along blatantly with the guitar lick, and I wrote the lyrics for the chorus immediately after coming up with the guitar part. So, that in place I proceeded to write lyrics for the verses in a similar Sumner-esque way, just off the cuff, right in the computer. Well, it turns out there's a reason Bernard Sumner is is a wealthy rock star and I'm I turd that works in Pikesville. The original lyrics for the verses were pretty bad, and oddly angry and unbecoming, so I scrapped them, drew some narrative inspiration from a source that couldn't be further from NO's musical realm (which I shant reveal here), and I'm pleased with the finished song. Flip the imaginary record over and you have a cover of Tegan and Sara's "Monday Monday Monday", a highlight from their 2002 If It Was You album that I think I tackle admirably.

Cover art for both sleeves adapted from the painting The Angel in the House by Jon "Poopbear" Hoffman. Stop by his DeviantArt and tell him it's awesome, won't you?

Your friend,
Johnny Diefenbaker

Good Songs/Bad Songs

Hey Universe, Diefenbaker is working on a CRAPTON (sort of like Eric Clapton except it's a ton of crap, but that's also sort of like Eric Clapton. Perhaps they are the same thing.) of new material (also not that the new material is crap, just that there happens to be a lot of it) (I love parenthesis). For reals! As previously mentioned in my previous post, I've been working on writing a song. Usually Jeff does all the songwriting (and he'll be editing this one later), but I thought I'd write a song for a change, and honestly felt it to be rather challenging. I have quite a lot of four-line or less 'starter lyrics/hooks' saved in my phone, but I find actually fleshing it out and having the song make sense lyrically is actually quite difficult for me. So I wrote a song about that, of course.

Here's the lyrics thus far (there will doubtless be edits later):

The sun filtered through my dirty office window as I sat down carefully
My fingers slide along the black, nondescript keyboard
I’d much rather be at home, singing my heart out, fingers on the keys.
I open a new document, thinking about writing lyrics, writing songs.
My stacks of papers go on ignored, tasks forgotten.
I stare irritably at the blank screen, inspiration gone
I have so many good lines but no songs.

Then it hit me: All good songs have already been written.
All good songs have already been written
All good songs have already been written
There are millions of them out there, millions of bands, all of them amazing.
Who could possible care, who in the world would listen?
Hasn’t it already been said before?

I slump regretfully in my seat, my inspiration completely dashed
How can I compete with such genius? I'm neither talented nor clever
I write about music I love, honest music with no reservations
and music that I can’t stand, horrible overly produced bits of autotuned garbage
I can't listen to it any more, it's really dreadful
I want the singer to just tell me what is on their mind
tell me what they are really thinking

as I realize: A lot of bad songs have already been written.
A lot of bad songs have already been written
A lot of bad songs have already been written
Like Journey! Or Genesis! Phil Collins' entire solo career!
All these insincere bands writing terrible songs who went to school to be musicians
Perhaps there's some hope for my song after all

My heart races as I start to type
The words don't come too easily
But still I figure that I'd like to try
Because!

I realize: A lot of bad songs have already been written.
A lot of bad songs have already been written
A lot of bad songs have already been written
Like Eddie Murphy's "Party All The Time!" or anything currently on Top 40 Radio!
All these insincere bands writing terrible songs who went to school to be musicians

I do realize: A lot of bad songs have already been written.
A lot of bad songs have already been written
A lot of bad songs have already been written
There's too many bad songs to ever possibly mention!
All these insincere bands writing terrible songs who went to school to be musicians
Perhaps there's some hope for my song after all

There's quite a bit of Shari-weird and less Jeff-angst for a change which is nice. I'm feeling pretty accomplished. Most of the time I can't even finish sentences. (Me: "So I was thinking of going to the ...." Jeff: "Noun?" Me: "I've forgotten what I was saying.")

My Scorecard

Hey there! Diefenbaker is currently working on a song about my personal musical tastes, and while I've always had this scorecard in my head, I thought I would share it with you all. This is in no way completely exhaustive; I have a lot more musical bias than this list of criteria even begins to suggest. It's pretty accurate though.

And there are some charted results! Again, not horribly exhaustive, but still an example.

I EXPECT MORE RESULTS.

xoxo

Shari

Jilted John!

First off: DOWNLOAD THE SONG HERE

It's my (solo) cover of Jilted John's "Jilted John". I'd been wanting to cover it forever. At first, Jeff was supposed to be part of this, but he only knew it from my playing of it excessively during Betsyoke Night* and didn't know it that well. So I decided to do the album version (which was mostly keyboard) as opposed to the single version (which was produced by Martin Hannett, guitars, really echoy drums, the whole nine yards). I'm such a music nerd.

So I did all the parts myself. Well, except the drums, which are pretty obviously a drum machine preset (our drum machine is an Alesis SR-16 named Cookie Vecchio). I chose the drum sound because it sounded like the Casio SK1 I killed accidentally by plugging in the wrong power chord (I will never forget the smell).

Wow, that was a tangent! Anyway, uh, as may be made pretty obvious by the above recording, I love keybords but I'm not very good at them. I am pretty much capable of playing one note at a time within a single octave. As such, I ended up recording the keyboards on two seperate parts (bass and treble). The chords were done with SYNTHESIZER WIZARDRY. And it took me a bajillion takes to do without messing up majorly!

The vocals were very fun to do though! One take, because I'm punk rock and whatnot.

Hope you enjoy it!

xoxo
Shari

*Betsyoke Night: fabled series of nights when we lived in a terrible apartment on 36th Street that was mouldy, crumbly, leaky and full of bugs. Our landlady was named Betsy and she sucked and never fixed anything. So we had nights where we played music rather loudly and de-vocaled the music using a program on our computer and sang along.

'Cuz it's not the speed that kills...

"Hey, look! No, stupid, over there!"
"What the [expletive deleted]? It's a new full-band demo from Diefenbaker!"
"Well don't that beat all. I thought they broke up after trying to record a Wham cover..."

GRAB THE FULL-BAND DEMO OF "DIFFERENTIAL SPEEDS" HERE! BETTER THAN THE "RAW TAKE" VERSION, BETTER THAN THE "I'M BUSY" VERSION!

Believe me, I'm as surprized by it as you are.

So, yesterday, a day that just so happened to be Jesus of Nasareth's 2010th (or is that 2009th?) birthday, band Diefenbaker struggled their struggling asses into the Official Diefenbaker Practice Space (see pictures a couple posts back) at about 10pm EST or so for band practice. Since we'd had extra time off work for the holiday it was a record-breaking third night in a row for band practice. Your friend John Diefenbaker was assuming this was going to be a short one, what with the recent frequency of practice and the residual effects of Christmas dinner and all. Wednesday night we'd just run through some of the old Dief standards, with Paul Gross' "Ride Forever", from the Due South soundtrack, thrown in at the end by my request (we hadn't really touched it since we recorded the legendary demo of it on Halloween... scroll down if you missed that one), and Thursday's installment was completely focused on working out synth parts and a general direction for "Differential Speeds", the obvious next candidate to be demoed. So coming into Friday's practice, Shari had a fairly complete keyboard part for the song, so we ran through it a time or two.

Suddenly, in a rarely heretofore seen display of self-motivation and decision-making ability, Shari said, "Okay, want to record a demo of that?" In reality, I wanted to do nothing less, but I reasoned, "Well, my part's relatively easy, I can still be downstairs blankly staring at the television within twenty minutes, why the hell not?"

So the Monstrosity was hauled in on the flatbed truck required to carry it, cords were unplugged from things and plugged into other things, etc etc who cares, and there you have it. I was downstairs watching Rick Springfield videos before I knew it after nailing my guitar part in a take so overflowing with the combustive power of rock n' roll that the pick I was using couldn't stand the fury and broke up like an airliner over the Atlantic, parts of it never to be found again. True story.

The weird part was was that while I was downstairs watching Heart videos with Eddie Argos (the cat, keep up with her at @kittyargos on twitter), Shari didn't reemerge until (she says, I wasn't keeping track) four hours later. Apparently she didn't like the synth part we'd been practicing, so eventually just threw it out and came up with an entirely new bass part. I think it sounds pretty good, but I did like the key part, and it begs the obvious question: If we're going to be doing bass parts on the keyboard, why not do them on the bass guitar that's propped up in the corner that never gets used? But I shall leave that for smarter men than I to ponder.

Tonight I shall leave you with the lyrics to "Differential Speeds", which I probably should have been providing for these songs all along, as the mixes aren't neccessarily the clearest, but I just thought of it for this song. Download, listen, and read along...

Differential Speeds (lyrics by Borneman, music by Borneman/Fedak)
With open arteries, all the blood flows out
If you're not careful
But you could pull a gun, blow my heart right out
And I'd still love you
But do ya get really, the magnitude of me?
Are you in or are other plans gonna come up?
And are we a "we" or are we traveling different speeds?
I just can't bring myself to ask
'Cause it's not the speed that kills
It's the differences in speed that kill, so ya wonder why
I don't like the way you say things sometimes?
It's 'cause it's not the speed that kills
Over highways my plane floats down
Out of the cloudbank
Familiar concourse, familiar flat
Unfortunately
'Cause where I've just been is the place I'd rather be
Morning light shining through your blinds making lines
I think you feel the same, but this is all insane
Feels like we're going so fast...
But it's not the speed that kills
It's the differences in speed that kill, so ya wonder why
I don't like the way you say things sometimes?
It's 'cause it's not the speed that kills
Do you care at all? 'Cause you're not there at all
Though you call all the time, somehow that's worse than not at all
When we're face to face, I swear your face betrays
Something that makes me fear for my life
Goodbye
Landing gear deploys, I feel it come down
Impact the tarmac
An image in my mind, for just a flash
A brick wall on the runway
You know I love you?
You know that, don't you?

Oh, PS: This, as well as the other full-band demos, are available on our myspace music player, available by clicking on the award-winning graphic you see at the upper right of this very page.

Kisses, J.D.

New Diefengoodness!

First off, I'd like to sincerely apologize for the sound quality of these two:

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD: Differential Speeds (raw recording) 12.19.09
(Jeff never gets my jokes)

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD: Deafening (raw recording) 12.19.09

They were recorded with a handheld cassette recorder, so the quality is dicey at best.  It should also be noted that they were recorded during the BLIZZARD OF '09. I tried to fix it in SoundForge, but now they just sound echoey. While they aren't really official 'demos' (I am working on the keyboard parts), we wanted to give you an update on what's doin' with Diefenbaker! Other than watching a lot of Due South. We could honestly be watching more Due South. Watched "Hawk and a Handsaw" last night and it has seriously been about, oh, 20 hours and I'm still laughing about the "Why am I always the fulcrum?" bit. It got stuck in my head and it won't leave me alone.

Anyway, onto the music. Jeff writes the lyrics so I have no idea what the actual meaning of 'Differential Speeds' is, so I'll let him cover that particular lyric later.  He did, however, let me into some of the mystery of the lyrics of 'Deafening'.  As much as I'd like to save it for our VH1's BEHIND THE MUSIC, it's actually really simple.  For example, the first line is "Hey, post-punk" - I have this habit, whenever dinner's done (because I am horribly domestic - although I'm terrible at cleaning) I knock on his office door - usually he's listening to music, so I make up a funny name to call him. In example, if he were listening to the The Replacements, I would say, "Hey, Paul Vest-erburg, dinner's ready." Or if he was listening to grunge, I'd say "Hey, Seattle." There have been funnier examples but I can't remember them at the moment. The chorus line "The silence on the radio is deafening" comes from a message board  after the collapse of one of Jeff's favourite radio talk shows. The rest came from listening to too much NPR, due to the lack of said radio talk show.  I've been working on lyrics myself, although I'm not terribly talented at writing lyrics.  Jeff keeps bugging me about them.  "Have you worked on those lyrics yet" "Yes, but, you see....."

He also noted that at some point we should compile some compendium of what our musical influences are.  My main influence is working with whatever small talent that I have, and going with it. Some day I'd like to play some mean Farfisa organ like Jerry Harrison, but I obviously can't right now, so my keyboarding style right now is "doing sort of a keyboard bassline with a synthy organ sound and one note at a time, which Jeff has difficulty mixing because it's neither a keyboard part or a bass part."

That said, I have compiled a list of my 10 favourite songs of all time. I have not only limited it to ten, but I have also limited it to one per band, otherwise it would look like this:

1. Roadrunner
2. Astral Plane
3. Old World
4. Pablo Picasso
5. She Cracked
6. Hospital
7. Someone I Care About
8. Girlfriend
9. Modern World
10. I'm Straight

My ACTUAL list is (it's actually in no particular order):

1. The Modern Lovers - Hospital
2. Bruce Springsteen - Atlantic City
3. Wire - Mannequin (you  have no idea how many times I've been on a bus and want to go ALALALALA  LA LA LA LA LA uh uh uh  TELL MEE and physically stop myself)
4. Billy Joel - All For Leyna 
5. The Waitresses - No Guilt (I don't even know anyone in Toronto!)
6. A Certain Ratio - Du the Du (Casse) (one of the most amazing bass lines ever - and I've always thought of  A Certain Ratio as "Ian Curtis on a tropical vacation")
7. The Clash - Lost in the Supermarket (happens to me entirely too many times for comfort)
8. The Smiths - Sweet and Tender Hooligan
9. New Order - Temptation (because I think really highly of myself and like to think that you've never. met. anyone. like me before.)
10. Gang of Four - Damaged Goods (as mentioned previously, I am a sucker for a fine bassline)

That is actually a terrible list.  I've forgotten all about The Cure, Magazine, Pulp, The Psychadelic Furs or the Au Pairs or the Slits and and and..... It's like having  five million children and then having put ten in a boat to save them  from a flood. I promise I'll do better next time. The first four are certainly for real, not sure about the rest, though.

(Top 3 Cover Songs: 1. William Shatner & Joe Jackson - Common People (try it, you'll like it); 2. The Slits - I Heard it Through the Grapevine; 3. Art Brut - Catch (I usually consider The Cure covers to be sacriligious; however Eddie Argos does an amazing job,  also likes Due South, comics and the Modern Lovers, and is otherwise worthy of having the same name as my cat, so it's okay.) 

Enjoy the recordings!
xoxo

Shari

 

"What's Doin' With Diefenbaker?" volume 6 - the rise and fall and rise again of Diefenbaker and the Spiders from Mars

Well, let's get this out of the way first:

NEW AUDIO! Click here to grab the new full-band demo of "Interstate 80" in that hip new mp3 format that all the kids are raving about!

There, now that the important part's out of the way feel free to skip the rest of my nonsensical ramblings.

It's been a very bipolar two weeks for eternally struggling rock n' roll band Diefenbaker. First, if you'll recall from the last "What's Doin'?" (or scroll down if you missed it, shame on you) we were planning on working out and recording a cover of Butch Walker's cover of Wham's holiday chestnut "Last Christmas" just in time for Jesus' made-up birthday. Well that didn't go very well to say the least. More than one band practice was stormed out of by either one or both of us, and it got to the point where I assumed this lighthearted idea to cover every gay man's favorite Christmas song was going to break up the band and I was going to have to go with my fallback plan of forming a Tegan and Sara cover band. Fortunately (for everyone, Tegan and Sara included) it didn't come to that, though the "Last Christmas" cover idea has been disposed of. So I guess we won't be needing that amazing sleeve design I mocked up...

So moving on from that, the goal this weekend was to record another full band demo, this time of the song we've been working on second-longest, "Interstate 80". Shari had spent time coming up with a synth part for it and we'd done it about ten billion times in band practice, so the song was as ready to be layed down on cassette tape as it was ever going to be. I still dreaded it, though, because the "Maybe Michelle" demo (my part, anyway) wasn't very fun to lay down. When you're just playing the song in practice and you f up, no big deal, you just keep going, but when you know that tape is running and you know that the rest of the parts can't be recorded until you do a good take - well, it's a lot of pressure, and I prefer my weekends to be pressure-free. Unless we're talking about the Billy Joel song "Pressure" popping up in an episode of Morning Video Block that I'm watching on VH1 Classic. I rather enjoy that pressure. But I digress.

The recording of the above-posted demo went very well, though, with the guitar and vocal both being layed down in one take. The synth part took a while, but I scarcely cared about that, as by that time I was downstairs watching said Morning Video Block on my DVR and having a few drinkies. The thing was fairly straightforward to mix, too, and the drums sound better (at least to me) because they are now handled by the newest member of Diefenbaker, an Alesis SR-16 drum machine. Slap dash for no cash.

In closing, please enjoy these candid, rather poor-quality photos of, as I like to call it, "where the magic happens". Helpfully tagged with highlights to enhance your appreciation.

Official Diefenbaker Practice Space, Hampden, Baltimore City, MD, USA

Key:
1) My hollowbody Ibanez electric guitar, codename: Lucy.
2) Where I stand when I play, surrounded by pedals. I don't actually use them that much, I just like looking down and seeing them there and pretending that I'm in a shoegaze band.
3) "The P.A.", a Behringer Ultrabass bass guitar amp that we run everything but the guitar through. It actually sounds very good, despite the misappropriation.
4) The Alesis SR-16 drum machine, codename: Cookie.
5) Shari's Alesis Micron synthesizer, codename: Diefenbaker-1.
6) Where Shari sits when she plays. It's from the "as-is" department at Ikea.

Official Diefenbaker Mixing Room, same location as above, just down the hall

Key:
1) Cassette tapes! Fun!
2) Japanese "X-files" comic book. I have no idea why it's here.
3) Tascam Portastudio 424mkII 4-track cassette recorder, codename: The Monstrosity.
4) Mixing notes for "Interstate 80" written on a post-it. You know when they show Butch Vig or Dr. Dre mixing something on TV, and they have those giant programmable mixing boards where the sliders move up and down on their own? Yeah, well, we don't have that, so when I'm mixing something I have to make notes of any level changes in the song so I know when to slide what where.
5) The Diefenbox. It's a New Balance shoebox full of chord sheets, work tapes, and demo tapes.
6) Netbook computer that all the lyrics to Diefenbaker songs are composed on. Also contains the Diefendatabase, where everything Diefenbaker is stored for safekeeping.

So that's all for this week, kids. I know no one is on it anymore aside from sex offenders and people in bands, but check us out on MySpace here. There's a music player there (also accessible without going to creepy MySpace by clicking the amazing graphic at the top right on the main page of the very blog you're reading right now) and links to our excellent friends. Shari updates it because I don't know how and am afraid of it.

As always, keep on rockin' in the free world, Rickies, and don't forget to tip your waitress.

Johnny D.