"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