"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

"What's Doin' With Diefenbaker?" volume 5 - post-Thanksgiving weekend of rockin'

(cover star courtesy of awkwardfamilyphotosdotcom)

Whew, what a weekend. A nice four-day holiday weekend certainly allows for much Diefenbaker activity, don't it? For those of you reading this in Canada that have no idea what I'm talking about: haha, screw you! Anyway, please allow me to share a sure-to-be-incomplete overview of the weekend with you, at least the parts of it that relate to perpetually struggling Baltimore-based rock n' roll band Diefenbaker...

So we doubled up on band practices on Friday and Saturday night, partially to try to make up for some of the skipped ones and attempt to get some of the momentum back and partially because, what the hell, we could run as late as we wanted - post-Thursday we had nowhere to be the next day. Also, we attempted to go more than an hour for each practice. I think we ended up clocking in at just over an hour on Friday night, then probably around an hour and a half Saturday. Yay us.

Mandatory run-throughs of "Maybe Michelle" both nights (still the only song that has a keyboard part done, which frustrates, but it's a minor bitch), and I'm pretty sure we did "Differential Speed" (formerly known as "Speed Doesn't Kill") both nights as well, which was recently added to the repertoire. Of all the originals we've worked on, Shari's changed the melody on "Differential Speed" more than any of the others and the song's certainly benefitted. It's a bit tiring for me to play, especially multiple times in a row, because it's fairly fast and it's all punky, down-strummed chord bashing, but I guess that's how, as I quipped on Friday night, Jasper Future from Art Brut stays so thin. Off-topic: I'm hilarious. Anyway...

We also ran through "Interstate 80" (Saturday night only, I believe) and debuted, from my most recent set of demos, "Deafening"! It premiered Friday night and was worked on further during Saturday's practice, after which a brief, impromptu, "VH1 storytellers" segment broke out where I went into detail about the origins of the song. It fortunately was not recorded, as it layed bare the awfulness of my inspirations as a songwriter. So now I have time to craft a web of half-truths and outright fabrications regarding the song's origin and meaning that will be fit for public consumption, as I've done with virtually all other aspects of Diefenbaker. Good times.

Post the Saturday practice (the more drunken and lively of the two), we immediately adjourned to the former Official Diefenbaker Practice Space (AKA my office) and listened to a series of absolutely atrocious covers of Wham!'s hit holiday single "Last Christmas", which inevitably led to us deciding that we need to cover it as well, though cover specifically the version done by Yuji Oda and Butch Walker for the opening credits of the Japanese soap opera of the same name (now the above image makes sense, doesn't it?). Later, we discussed the need to hire a bass player, which led to one of the best concepts I think we've ever come up with: hiring our good friend Jon Hoffman of Clayton, NJ, (AKA poopbear or, as I like to call him "The Hoff") for the job, and having him stand behind us on stage wearing a red mountie suit, a la Constable Benton Fraser, RCMP, while he played. Off-topic: we're hilarious. Anyway...

Peripherally, I've just about finished another new song (well, the melody's not new, it's been around for a while... but I just whipped the lyrics into shape over the holiday weekend) that I think is very promising. It's called "Mine" - watch this space for more, kids, I think it's gonna be big... either that or it sucks and Shari will completely shoot it down. I can never tell.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go transcribe the lyrics for the Oda/Walker cover of "Last Christmas". Seriously, that's what I'm going to do right after I post this. Livin' the dream!

Johnny D.