Diefenbaker's not dead!

In fact, we've been more active than ever... just not on the recording demos front. For that reason, we have been remiss in our blogging lately, as having a fresh new song to offer up is a concrete and immediate reason to post, while steady growth and development of the overall Diefenbaker product is not as tangible. Anyway...

First, our new website:

Click this link, bookmark it, then delete all of your other bookmarks

The last website you'll ever need is diefenpop.com! Links pertaining to all things Diefenbaker, eternally struggling Baltimore rock n' roll band, can be found there, presented in a delightfully stylized, way-too-indie-rock design. Here's what the critics are already saying about diefenpop.com:

"It looks like it should be Justin Bieber's website, especially with all the Canadian flags everywhere!"
-Cookie Vecchio, noted Boston-area record producer, website designer, and blog commenter

Second, Diefenbaker is now a trio!

The band's exhaustive search (read: one craigslist ad) for a rhythm section has resulted in us practicing for the past month or so with new bassist Brendan. Things are going swimmingly so far; the songs sound a lot better with bass added to the vocal/guitar/synth/drum machine mix we already had going. In addition, yer boy John D. has been working on adding himself in some capacity as backing vocalist, further expanding the sound as well as his own ego.

So, as for the future? Well, we've already got the official Diefenbaker T-shirt in the prototype stages (obviously the priority over anything involving actual music), we've taken some exploratory steps toward recording better quality demos with the expanded lineup that don't involve a 15-year-old cassette 4-track in any way, and we've either got to find a drummer or figure out how to program the drum machine better (or both).

Oh, and the bassist needs a stage name...

Yours,
@JohnDiefenbaker
#bobmouldismyhero

TUNE US IN AND RIP THE KNOB OFF! IT'S YOUR SPOT ON THE DIAL FOR THE LATEST DIEFENSMASHES: WDIEF!!!

"Hey there cats and kittens, you're tuned in to WDIEF radio, broadcasting live from the demilitarized zone known throughout the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and points beyond as Baltimore Em... Deeeeee! Charm City, where we always keep the republicans at bay no matter what Bobby Ehrlich may say! Keep that radio dial right where it is, Diefenfans, 'cause have we got some platters heading your way! Whether you're tuning us in from The Dief's official myspace music player or grabbing the MP3 links below while you're on the go, it's all Diefenbaker, all the time here at WDIEF!"

WDIEF's Top 3 at 8 for April 8, 2010:
Posing For Pictures (music: Borneman, Fedak; lyrics: Borneman)
Good Songs Bad Songs (music: Borneman, Fedak; lyrics: Fedak, Borneman)
I'm Ready (Fats Domino cover)

Oh the humanity

Diefenbaker shall be demoing this weekend, it has just been decreed, demoing to the tune of "hurry, HURRY HARD!" On the diefendocket for friday/saturday are:

-"Posing For Pictures" (an original... fast, punky, riot-grrl-y, yet very melodic and Buzzcocks-esque... if only Lush were still around so I could offer it to them, I think they'd like it)

-"Good Songs Bad Songs" (also an original, it's been speculated that it's our naturally loudest song... for whatever reason I feel like we're disturbing the neighbors when we play it; Shari's first lyrical contribution to the Dief, btw!)

-"I'm Ready" (a Fats Domino cover, of all things! Shari still needs a bit of coaching on the vocal, but I'm sure we'll iron it out this weekend... if not, the above image will be all the more fitting)

Note that perhaps one of these will be mixed by late sunday... I am by default Diefenbaker's producer though I absolutely hate mixing and am not smart enough at it to get consistent results, so the trade-off was that we can record as many of the backlog of Dief smash hits that have been piling up as S.F. would like, but I can't promise they'll be mixed anytime soon. If only there was an "ap", as the kids are calling computer programs nowadays, that you could just dump your raw tracks into, hit the button that says "Butch Walker" (or "Martin Hannett" for Shari's taste) and it would poop out a properly mixed song. If that retarded looking iPad could do that I'd buy one tomorrow.

Anyway, off to watch American Idol, then to... The Diefenbed!

Keep on rocking in the free world, jerks,
J. Diefenbaker, esq.

"What's Doin' With Diefenbaker?" volume 8 - a quick check-in before Wednesday band practice

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.

Full-band demo of World Winds Down, plus full-band cover of the most Canadian song ever!

New buns fresh from the Diefenbaker oven! Grab 'em here, and take care not to burn the roof of your mouth:

World Winds Down (new full-band demo!!)
Tournament of Hearts (Weakerthans cover, also full-band!!!)

We put "World Winds Down" on the fast track for full-band demoing this weekend, both because we both really like the song, and also because Shari already had in place, when we'd practice the song, this really cool synthesizer arpeggio that was missing from my solo demo. We couldn't find a rhythm track on the drum machine that was as fitting as the origninal loop I used off of the CTK-601 keyboard, so I just re-recorded that for the foundation. Unfortunately, since we record on a 4-track, we had to leave off the additional percussion track I had on the solo demo, but I think the synth part more than makes up for it.

We started practicing "Tournament of Hearts", by Winnipeg, MB's own The Weakerthans, during the Vancouver olympics, when I realized that the entire song is about curling. Or curling as a methaphor for life. Or something like that, it's a dang catchy song. I already considered it a highlight from their 2007 album "Reunion Tour" even though I had no idea what most of the lyrics were about when I started watching coverage of curling matches and thought, "Hmm, I seem to remember hearing a lot of this jargon somewhere before." Of course Shari was all for doing a cover of it, as her father had won most of the major appliances her family had at curling matches while she was growing up in Manitoba (I'm not kidding). The song seemed a perfect fit, considering band Diefenbaker's mixture of genuine Canadian-ness and Canada-philia, if either of those are words. I'm pretty sure that they're not.

As always, personel on both recordings is:
Shari Fentastak: vocal, synthesizer
The Prime Minister Johnny Diefenbaker: guitar
various cheap drum machines and keyboards: drums

"World Winds Down" lyrics: J. Diefenbaker, music: J. Deifenbaker, S. Fentastak, published 2010 Let Me In I'm Having A Baby Songs

"Tournament of Hearts" lyrics: J. Samson, music: the Weakerthans, published 2007 The Weakerthans

Bury me out on the prairie...

Johnny D.

"What's Doin' With Diefenbaker?" volume 7 - Good Band Practices/Bad Band Practices... and Jeff Bridges, too

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.

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.