Ava's Scary Shirley Debut Pics :)

here's ava's second crack at live gig photography :) just follow this link: SHIRLEY SCARY DEBUT PICS

a bit of shirley nostalgia [april 17, 2007]

here's an owel-less and zigless shirley giving tribute to the best band that ever sported bowl haircuts -- The Ramones!!!!! ramones songs include "baby i love you", "judy is a punk", and "poison heart". kudos to mikey of ciudad for lending his precise primitive pounding, and to kathyg for getting it all on video :D finally at the end, owel joins us for tsuper duper :)

Scary Debut 10-25-08

From Ang Bandang Shirley, SOBRANG SALAMAT! THANK YOU! sa lahat ng nagpunta sa party lalo na sa mga naka-costume ang effort! haha We love you all! (naging best in costume yun Spy vs Spy couple haha) sa mga nagtext at nakaalala! sa mga tumulong!!! sa Level Up! Crazy Kart, GSM Blue, Coke, Kolektib & Bong Rojales, Cubao Expo & Ms. Annie, Loudhouse Soundsystem & Sir Stephen, Sir Toti/Francis/Terno Recordings, sa MP3 crew!, sa MTV crew!, again kay Ekong Caruncho tsaka kay Bok (sa last minute tarp drawing) tsaka kay Betty La Joanne hehe.

love, Kathy

why you should get an ang bandang shirley album!

our good friend jaton zulueta who's in new york right now because it's a lot cooler to be a struggling writer in new york than a struggling writer in the philippines (haha i love you jaton sorry about this picture) is making up for his inability to attend saturday's party with an incredible post about running around central park and loving fried food and getting onto TFC, with the incredibly compelling title "why you should get an ang bandang shirley album" haha.

read it here!

ANG BANDANG SHIRLEY'S SCARY DEBUT & FANS' DAY! (w/ revised poster haha)

Start:	Oct 25, '08 7:00p
End:	Oct 26, '08
Location:	Kolektib, Cubao Expo, QC

JOIN ANG BANDANG SHIRLEY IN A VERY FUN PRE-HALLOWEEN COSTUME PARTY!

FEATURING PERFORMANCES BY

TWIN LOBSTER!
HALIK NI GRINGO!
THE RADIOACTIVE SAGO PROJECT!
AND ANG BANDANG SHIRLEY!

with DJ SETS by TOTI DALMACION and MARIO SERRANO of GROOVE NATION

fun and games!
ALBUMS, BAND MERCHANDISE AND MISCELLANEOUS THINGS FOR SALE!

AND THE PREMIERE SCREENING OF:
"DEBUT" (THE ANG BANDANG SHIRLEY VIDEO DIARY!)

OPEN BAR IF YOU'RE IN A COSTUME!!! (costume validity will be judged, so dress up seriously!)

KOLEKTIB, CUBAO X!
OCTOBER 25, 7PM!

SPECIAL THANKS TO: LEVEL UP! CRAZY KART, GSM BLUE, KOLEKTIB AND EKONG CARUNCHO (for our super astig poster!)

*GUYS! PA-REPOST! SPREAD THE LOVE! :)

themesongs track 8

"Di Ko Ma-take"

I wrote this around late 2004 or early 2005, a time when i wasn't really part of any band where i took part in the songwriting process. I worte a couple of songs for Narda then -- "Saan Na?" and "Kometa Astrolabe" -- but that's as far as it went. Maybe I wrote this song in the hopes that I would perform it with a band of my own. Some friends have asked me to form bands with them, but none such bands ever materialized -- until ABS, that is. When I joined the shirleyfold after inadvertently laying bass tracks during the Rizal Day Sessions, this song had already written itself. It was just waiting to be jammed and nailed down.

It may seem a bit tangential, but DKM's main riff i ripped from "Sunshine Barato" by The Mosquitos. I had just discovered them that time and was practically drooling over their music which in Timi Potenciano's words sounded like "astrud gilberto and belle&sebastian put together". The main G-Gm riffing stemmed from the fact that the guitar I was using at that time had a broken D-string. Thus, I was stuck to playing power chords on the E & A strings. This proved quite helpful as I was able to experiment with different chordal voicings with just two strings.

I rarely wrote songs about frustration so I thought then that this would be perfect time to start hahaha. The frustration in DKM stemmed from a whole host of stuff. Although I suppose it started with GMA's SONA about the "bangkang papel". However, I didn't want to pin it down on just that. So, I kinda gathered up all my frustrations, sifted through them, and selected choice parts so as to project a feeling of general frustration not particularly directed at anything or anyone.

As for the chorus, I was being challenged that time by former Tungaw-mate Mark Villena (If Owel had a songwiriting soundboard with Ean, Mark was my Ean then as we had been bandmates before in Tungaw) to write a song with what he called a "real chorus". He claimed that I was being "madaya" because the choruses of my past songs weren't really choruses in the strict sense of the word. He said they were more like verses set to different chord progressions. So I put up to his challenge. When I played DKM for him one time we were throwing songs at each other, his resounding comment was "Now that's a chorus!".

Another source of inspiration for DKM is Dong Abay and his knack for the catchy chorus. I had known Dong since our Tungaw days when we first fronted for them at Club Dredd EDSA waaaaaay back February 1994, when Dredd had just reopened. When Dong resurfaced in the music scene in 2005, Mark and I were playing in an early incarnation of dongabay, Dong's comeback band. I guess my playing for Dong also rubbed into my songwriting process.

Recording the song was quite an engaging experince as well. I remember Owel telling me that I was to play all guitar and bass parts since it needed an 80s Violent Femmes kinda feel. So after nailing my bassline, which I ensured was simple enough to let me sing simultaneously, I went on to lay down the guitars using Joey LOA's pearl white Epiphone SG with three pickups, which has a nice warm growling tone. For the guitar solo, it's actually comprised of 2 parts -- the "rhythm" solo (as I'd like to call it) where I played a melody using octaves, and the high-pitched "lead" solo where we slightly detuned the strings as to produce an eerie desifinado (off-key) feel. Then the song was superbly topped with the spooky keyboards which greatly added to DKM's overall quirkiness.

=jing=

themesongs track 7

"sa madaling salita"

a less is more approach to words, with the simple G-C verse and the Em-D chorus, then the G-C-Am-C outro. i guess this song is a high point in my songwriting efforts, reactionary output to early comments to my work haha. the story goes like this..

vin dancel of twisted halo and now peryodiko is a great person, and when i was the excited little kid who first got to go watch gigs, twisted halo was one band that stood out, what with that intense drumming on brad, and the mindblowing outro part of hiram, and MAN THEY HAD THREE GUITARS and i was really amazed when vin went up to me after seeing deltajoy play and telling me that i could play bass well haha. then i auditioned to play bass for twisted halo (remember that day ean? hahaha memories) but then they picked some better guy (buddy zabala!!!) haha. and even though we really didn't become bandmates there was this sort of distant mentorship going on between me and manong vin, sort of, kind of. haha. i remember this gig at millenia and he was there and i was there and i was just telling him about how my studies were going (bad) and he was all finish that shit and i was all wow and anyway, when i gave him a copy of the rizal day sessions ep, he said it was good stuff, but it needed something anthemic.

so i went and thought wtf man these are anthemic but then i thought about things and i wrote sa madaling salita, exploring the duality of crippling love and incredible uplifting love in my brain, and realizing that there was no way to put it other than just really saying those words in the song and then that freed me up, anthemically speaking. the riff was a fun thing to play, and it's me studying a wolf parade song and magnificently failing, landing on some other totally different beautiful thing, and the chorus part where joe's guitar is all chicosci on top of everything, and man this song really wrote itself. i remember the practice when we were arranging this, and it was a pretty good time for shirley, getting things in place really fast.

zig's drumming (a lift from dcfc with minor revision haha) and the BASS + SYNTH W/ WHITE NOISE AND EBOW bridge part is what i think makes this anthemic, the outro just riding in like a cowboy and then the song ends with the same killer "chorus" riff except it's slow and jing's harmonizing on bass and that was perfect which was why recording this thing was such a bitch, cause it had to sound really good, and honestly the recording still doesn't sound as good as the song sounds in my head but that's okay cause we got it out. i remember doing the main guitar part and just being totally frustrated, breaking down in the middle of some takes saying "DISBAND NA TAYO GUYS DISBAND" and joe and ean and joey santos just reassuring me hahaha that was fun.

then endo came along and man endo that's a whole different story, crippling uplifting love and if you guys haven't seen it you gotta see it, and if you feel like it changed you afterwards then you're my kind of person, and if you haven't, then you gotta live a bit more i guess? that movie really killed me, i remember reading the script and crying in my room (the early drafts were a lot more hardcore emo haha) and well sa madaling salita just snowballed in meaning

cause i had this meaning X for the song, which is really hidden deep inside, and then since it's so simple and then because of endo meanings Y and Z and A-W also add up and then it's such a meaningful song because it's just about a feeling and therefore you can attach that to whatever makes you feel that feeling so the range of possible meaning only depends on the person listening so everybody can sing along to this and feel like the song is about something about them and i guess that was what vin was talking about when he was saying it was anthemic.

tayong dalawa ay dakila/alila

hehe

-owel

ang bandang shirley: where dreams come true

hi guys! remember this article that came out on supreme? where me and the guys had our influences and shoutouts broadcast? well funny things happen!

kathy wrote in "john lloyd cruz" as an influence and even threw in a (hi) so when i met up with my good friend JLC as i call him (haha) i showed him the copy of the article, and well, dreams come true!



(hope to meet you, kathy)




JLC with his copy of themesongs! get a copy now!

-owel

Follow this STAR

shirley friends! :D do check out this phil star article on themesongs:

Pieces of the people they love
ARMY OF ME By Gino De La Paz
Saturday, October 18, 2008

Ang Bandang Shirley's Debut Trailer 2

theme songs track 6

"sasamahan ka pa rin"

the song opens with a very hetfield-ian RATATAHH, harkening back to that saguijo METALLICA tribute gig, where shirley did a weird set, haha playing our originals, back to back with a sick cover of FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, sung by jing, and since joe and ean were both absent, i was playing guitar, and manix of gorgoro was subbing for the extra Em droning noises haha (we weren't able to practice with him, but it was still awesome) that was a great gig. and if memory serves me right, that was one of the last few gigs of HOPSCOTCH, where most of the loa engineers are from. hehe. anyway, back to the hetfield shouts, which i think provide that contrast between track 5 + track 6, cause they sort of flow into each other, and both sort of tackle the same idea, but you know how they're different too. Ean's song on the album (not counting our co-write on bato) is this amazing track, especially after the rhythm section did their thing, putting a very dark beatle shuffle into the thing. then the horns!!!

that was a very eye opening recording session, being at loa with the sago horns, finding out how brass really really really makes a difference to a song. sasamahan is probably just the beginning, expect more horny tracks from shirley haha. the supposed "fadeout" outro where everybody still played to an "ending" also worked, since it allowed the horns to pull off that great jam at the end, and letting jing do his talking head-y guitar riff. and the drawbar synth heidi has also shines on this track, and haha i dunno there's a lot to say and it's all circumstantial really, if you like this kind of stuff that i'm typing then it's great, but if you watch debut you'll see video of ean and me and kathy and joey and marc and wacky and that very controversial yeag-vah section of this song and that's all you need i think, haha.

track 7-11 writeups coming this week, tapos na yung album notes before the launch haha

-owel

themesongs track 5

"together forevers"

most noteworthy is the amazing snare sound that joey santos gets on this song, the release/decay of that 80's hit is really what makes the song! also, forevers is the selena solo track for this album, and the first of many selena oriented songs. the owel-sung demo version released on the today is tshirt day comp was a take-off point, but where that was a stalker-ish "sigurista" lovesong, this is an out and out guarantee of sorts. and and the outro, where selena and the synth duet into this papapa-fest is this suprise that came about while we were recording. the live version of forevers used to include a "time after time" outro, where we'd sing time after time haha. but the album version couldn't include that, of course, so we had to figure out something, and then amazing amazing amazing selena just pulls out of her indie-pop hat this papapa phrasing and papapa melody and then we were all "do that on the synth!" and then that ending comes out and then we were trying to mix it and then during the final mix of that joey has this miscue where only a few tracks were faded out and then what happened was a gradual fade, leaving selena's voice and the guitar chord, and then that was another OMG moment.

i remember the time when after recording most of the basic tracks for forevers, me and joey santos really considered it the least like-able of the shirley tracks so far, so we kept on figuring out ways to re-do it, but then the gang vocal recording day came along and i guess what we just needed were the "barkada" shouts and the voices of the whole band + melvene (sobrang lamig ng boses ni melvene!) on the sing-along chorus. also featuring the keys (as in susi) in tribute to a song on the rivermaya green album (plus points for whoever figures that out hehe)

i love you ang bandang shirley! see you at our fans' day and debut premiere!

-owel

Ang Bandang Shirley's Debut Trailer 1

Trailer for the upcoming Shirley dokyu. Thanks Kathy!
-joe

Masters in Shirley

tinext ako kagabi ng kaibigan kong nagtuturo sa filipino department sa UP Diliman:

"Nagpresent nga pala ako ng thesis kanina at pasado naman. At ang ginawa ko lang bilang paghahanda nung umaga e makinig ng cd nyo... yun na, pumasa na dahil dun. Imbes na "driver," ginawa kong "basta writer, sweet lover!"

sagot ko naman:

"Whoaah! Asteeg! Congrats sa thesis presentation mo!"

follow-up question ko naman:

"Btw, ano yung thesis mo, for Masters or PhD?"

sagot naman niya:

"MA pa lang. Dun sa next album na yung doktorado"

=====================

kaya't kung nais magtagumpay sa inyong thesis, halina't makinig ng Themesongs! :D

=jing=

The Manila Times: Ang Bandang Shirley

Great article on Ang Bandang Shirley by Cris Ramos of Revolver fame. More required reading. May quiz sa October 25.

Read the article here.

click the city listens to ang bandang shirley!

many many thanks to the very tall marian hernandez for the kind words and the needed exposure!

ang bandang shirley loves you! andami nating memories! (see picture, feat raya hehe)


required reading begins here hehe



-owel

themesongs track 4

"theme song"

the track opens with a very frustrated zig drumming the ending of the song and then making a mistake and throwing his sticks angrily hahaha. see, themesongs was made differently from most albums (im guessing normal bands use metronomes hehe) because we didn't use any metronomes for the album, all the drums were recorded from zig's memory. honestly that was an amazing two sessions of recording, just watching zig pound away at the drums, with no other instruments. sometimes i'd play along on a guitar, but the early love one another studio setup did not allow for comfortable headphone placement for the drummer, so we had to make do. and then the whole idea stuck, no more metronomes, and we'd use zig's natural tempo for each song, so that if he lags a bit then the whole song would lag, and if he reaches back to his thrash metal roots and then the whole song would feel a bit faster. that and zig + joey's decision to keep the drum level lower than most albums really makes it sound different. early listening sessions with some friends would often result in a few comments along the lines of "pare ang hina ng drums.." or some variation of that. i didn't get it at first either, but then you get it, and then it's a wow thing. haha.

anyway all the drum parts were done in one take ( ASTIG NO? imagine the monster drumming zig did on patintero/habulan/larong kalye, or the triplet break in the bato outro), and theme song was a particularly difficult one for zig, resulting in the gorgeous AAAAAAAARGH growl at the start of the song. haha. mikey amistoso commented on the not so polished cut of that take, leaving an abrupt end to the growl before the song starts. he kept on saying that that moment was a work of genius, or something like that, like "other bands would have wanted to keep that a clean fade or something" but we just left it like that. haha love one another magic.

the song is full of the kind of recording techniques you google and then decide to try and then i dunno something happens. we used a pignose amplifier, the one with the latch that opens and closes the thing, and we close-miked it with one mic in front and one mic at the back of the speaker (phase inverted) and we had a room mic, and then there was this wide open sounding guitar that we got. i love the sound of the guitar parts in theme song, and the pignose amplifier was one of those important bits that just made everything work (i miss you!)

marco's roland jx3p also played a huge part in this song, adding the disco pad at the ending, the vibe at the disco outro, and the arpeggios in the main song, with that wonderful filter just opening up at the end of every phrase. i dunno why i'm rambling on about how we recorded this song, but i really feel happy when i remember how this song just fell into place. hehe.

at 0:17 into the song, i do a wrong harmony part into the right speaker, and then i laugh, and that bit just whizzed by during all the mixing, we really didn't notice that. and then listening to the mastered tracks on headphones it was all like "OMG WHAT A HAPPY ACCIDENT!" haha i love that part.

the video is also very cool, haha. it features marc inting of twin lobster, doing his best to win the hearts of music video channel viewers everywhere. vote for his band twin lobster in the nu rock awards this year! hehe.



==========================================

jugs of the itchyworms texted me the other day, congratulating us on the cool video, and thanking us for placing their "self-titled" album poster on the wall of our earnest manliligaw protagonist hehe. if you haven't gotten yourself a copy of that album, buy one now, for your own good hehe.

my mom bought a copy of themesongs! she found it at the odyssey branch in alabang town center, and as she was bringing it to the cashier, the saleslady remarks "bakit ang daming bumibili nyan, sino ba sila?" hahaha

AND AND FINALLY, THINGS ARE GETTING EXCITING FOR THE SCARY DEBUT + FANS' DAY ON THE 25TH! LOTS OF SURPRISES TO COME! (pero secret muna para ma-surprise kayo para pati hindi malaos hehehe) 


-owel

Sa pagitan ni Aiza at Aegis

text sa akin ng isang kaibigan ngayong hapon: "Nabili ko ang mailap na nag-iisang kopya ng THEMESONGS sa sm fview, nagtatago sa maraming aegis at aiza"

reply ko naman: "Waahoo! :) sana'y maibigan mo ang aming mga awit tulad ng pagtangkilik ng marami sa 'luha' at 'pagdating ng panahon' :) "    =jing=