"Ang Pag-Ibig Alinsunod Sa Karanasan Ng Isang Pangkaraniwang Jeepney Driver A.K.A. Tsuper Duper"
this is probably the hardest song to write about: it was the first-born, the earliest song written for the band before the band ever took shape. and this first-born isn't a baby anymore, tsuper is a hyperactive 6 year old that knows how to read and asks you all these questions about self explanatory things ("but why?") haha.
sometimes i listen to this song and i feel like i've heard it TOO MUCH, there are a gazillion versions of this song (three lo-fi with love demo versions, an ean 8-track version that never saw the light of day, the rizal day session, and then the album version) and it has made appearances in scenes from ang pagdadalaga ni maximo oliveros, tv promos, songwriting competitions (haha) and assorted high school and college plays. i hate this song sometimes.
last night good friend and distant cousin to lourd (haha) ramon de veyra messaged me on ym, saying "u know what for someone who detests pop I actualy really enjoyed them," and i'm all "what do u mean lol" and he's all "[that's] my friend, after i sent 3 songs from your album hahahaha" and i'm all happy, thinking "yay my band is so cool" haha and then he continues, pasting another direct quote: "parang theyre not trying hard to be anything eh, i like the tsuper song the most"
and then i'm all wow, and then ok, and then fine, and then i decide to write this post about the song that started it all and i remember the time that i used to play the bassline (now the synth part) of this song between songs back when i used to play with paramita (haha old school) and norman and ria would laugh and it would be some carribean-flavored jam, then we'd stop. but i wanted to take it further and i thought it should be in tagalog, and it should be a love song, and "i dunno i wanna fall in love" haha. i was a kid.
anyway i ride this jeep, i sit in front near the driver, but between me and the driver there was another passenger, a pretty girl and she was paying her fare and the driver goes "hinde miss, sagot ko na pamasahe mo" and i'm all "omg basta driver sweet lover" and then the song writes itself and then the old cautionary tale of being careful for what you wish for happens, and the song has taken over my brain. i hate singing it cause after the song finishes my brain is still singing it and i've listened to a lot of stuff between the writing of tsuper and today, and tsuper feels amateur (hindi sya avant garde haha) and fun and it reminds me of being a kid and riding that jeep. i remember the rizal day session recording for this, me and mark v. at tracks 4am, both of us super sleepy and i'm closing my eyes playing the synth parts and while recording mark apparently has this supernatural encounter (he tells me on the drive home: "naramdaman mo ba yun?" and i'm all: "zzz") and then he dubs the song TSUPER DUPER, making this visual rhyme very difficult to say haha.
i guess the point is, if it weren't for this song, the band wouldn't be here. so yay. haha. watch out for the release of the joe fontanilla version of this song very soon. haha.
-owel
Showing posts with label markvillena. Show all posts
Showing posts with label markvillena. Show all posts
Sunday, 23 November 2008
Monday, 22 September 2008
themesongs track 1
"kagabi nanaginip si morrissey na may nagmamahal sa kanya"
xmaslights was recorded first, around november of 2006, with this coming a close second. we were going for a "rivermaya covers goldenboy" vibe, with the prominent acoustic guitar and heidi's analog yamaha doing the bleeps in the background. i remember being really unhappy about how it sounded in the early mixes, so we replaced some of the acoustic guitars with electric guitar overdubs. another curious thing about the recording is the chorus guitar part, where the harmony riff is actually more prominent, the live version sounds nothing like it and i love that.
my favorite part in the song though (aside from the alarm clock intro, which totally makes this song work) is the solo in the middle, 1:30 or so into the song. the guitar doing the solo is actually just a scratch track, to be replaced by another electric guitar overdub (possibly with one of our stratocasters, this album was very stratty, featuring my green squier strat and joe's maya and pacifica strats) but then during the mixing, me and joey santos (i love you joey!) couldn't find the actual solo take. i remember him shrugging and saying "ok na naman yung scratch a.." hahahaha i love loa. anyway the super thing about the scratch take that i recorded is that i make a mistake on the second pass, but it sounds like a deliberate variation on the guitar line haha. as mark villena would say: "that's a very human element!"
if you listen closely, there's also a new synth part that comes into the solo, that's from marco harder's roland jx3p, i love how it just blankets the whole thing without being totally overpowering. i really love the sine wave square wave saw wave synth sounds and cheapo drum machine loops, so this song is an exercise in those things, hehe. plus! the early days of ang bandang shirley saw songs written specifically for loops, we just used my old casio tonebank keyboard for all percussive purposes hehe.
the words came after the riff, like most of the songs i write. inspired by the smiths' (duh haha) song of the same title, but i was going for more of a hopeful pov. wrote this around 2003, so this is 18 year old owel talking hahaha.
yehey
-owel
xmaslights was recorded first, around november of 2006, with this coming a close second. we were going for a "rivermaya covers goldenboy" vibe, with the prominent acoustic guitar and heidi's analog yamaha doing the bleeps in the background. i remember being really unhappy about how it sounded in the early mixes, so we replaced some of the acoustic guitars with electric guitar overdubs. another curious thing about the recording is the chorus guitar part, where the harmony riff is actually more prominent, the live version sounds nothing like it and i love that.
my favorite part in the song though (aside from the alarm clock intro, which totally makes this song work) is the solo in the middle, 1:30 or so into the song. the guitar doing the solo is actually just a scratch track, to be replaced by another electric guitar overdub (possibly with one of our stratocasters, this album was very stratty, featuring my green squier strat and joe's maya and pacifica strats) but then during the mixing, me and joey santos (i love you joey!) couldn't find the actual solo take. i remember him shrugging and saying "ok na naman yung scratch a.." hahahaha i love loa. anyway the super thing about the scratch take that i recorded is that i make a mistake on the second pass, but it sounds like a deliberate variation on the guitar line haha. as mark villena would say: "that's a very human element!"
if you listen closely, there's also a new synth part that comes into the solo, that's from marco harder's roland jx3p, i love how it just blankets the whole thing without being totally overpowering. i really love the sine wave square wave saw wave synth sounds and cheapo drum machine loops, so this song is an exercise in those things, hehe. plus! the early days of ang bandang shirley saw songs written specifically for loops, we just used my old casio tonebank keyboard for all percussive purposes hehe.
the words came after the riff, like most of the songs i write. inspired by the smiths' (duh haha) song of the same title, but i was going for more of a hopeful pov. wrote this around 2003, so this is 18 year old owel talking hahaha.
yehey
-owel
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
back to the future
there's this memory of being in baguio, december 2005. a post-christmas trip with the alvero family, i was on a couch under a blanket thinking about the band and how we ended up doing a white stripes (eg: me on guitar and zig on the drums) set cause of unforeseen circumstances, and i was using marco harder's roadtone 335, split to two amps w/ the stereo out of a dd3 that i borrowed, so at least i had some of that going on. i remember playing grand finale, habulan, and a really fast tsuper, it was one of those crash and burn gigs that you remember cause it was horrible and exhilarating at once. anyway i was thinking how "i really thought that was the band," something along the lines of "what do i do now" or "where do all the songs go" and under the blanket on the couch up in baguio i get a text message from mark villena, asking if i would be interested in recording with him, as he needed a band to demo @ his tracks job. i go "that would've been great, but i think we disbanded" or something to that effect, and he goes "e tangina sayang yung mga kanta nyo" which was what i was thinking, and i guess the idea of preserving the songs led to the rizal day sessions, recorded dec 30 of 05.
joe was graveyard shift-ing at a computer zombie job, ean was between a rock and a hard place in terms of band membership + friendships, i was having trouble with school (what's new haha), and zig had other bands and i guess i didn't want to burden him with the idea of finding stability in a lineup when he had a lot of other things on his plate. rizal day was supposed to be a graduation picture of sorts, a "hey we had great songs and a good time," postscript. mark was talking about giving labels a copy cause the material was ace and he believed in it, and that was great, but even getting a skeleton of the band together to record at tracks was difficult, so all the "getting signed" talk felt like delusions of grandeur haha.
things changed with the friendster message exchange with selena, cause i was a fan of her old band and her singing, and i wondered if it could be possible to have her on the ep, singing on habulan. she got to the studio and i was all worried about how our music sounded, cause we weren't that "indie" haha and she came from a scene with well-documented snobbery (not that that's a bad thing) but she sang and it was great, and then the proverbial snowball snowballed when we (mr rabara and mr harder) went to eat at the tapa king near the studio, and upon returning we found attorney gaddi playing bass to the early backing tracks of do you videoke, explaining himself with: "may naisip akong bassline eh.."
2005 saw the release of the fearless freaks documentary on the flaming lips. i was really deep into the yoshimi album then, and i was starting to go through their discography in reverse, liking the soft bulletin, falling in love with transmissions from the satellite heart. and i downloaded this thing, and i was all "yeah that's what i want." there was this chaos to their live sets, like there was early video of them having a motorcycle onstage at a bar, using it as a noise/smoke machine, and then some drunken mistake involving the brake and the throttle in some wrong order got the motorcycle flying off the stage. intense.
flashback to early shirley, keyboard + guitar + vocal shirley, with the first gig at the now defunct fox square club, last song was sampung buwan and ean was on guitar and i left the keyboard loop on and i went to the drums and i was floor tom and crash cymbal machine and i was really really really drunk (red horse was the new water) and i jumped from the drum stool to in front of the drums and i didn't really stick the landing, my shin hit the high tom i think, it's a vague memory. anyway the shin still hurts, haha. i wrote songs as skeletons, excuses for jumping around and being noisy and looking stupid.
somewhere down the line we started getting tight, and the songs got a lot more riffy, and gigs like the one we had last tuesday at guijo are reminders of the old days, back when i used to talk back to the audience (ean naalala mo yung bastos na host sa che dati tas nag-sasakyan kita outro for tsuper haha) and when i could jump like this
or when we were thin like this
man that picture tells so much, joe still had his pacifica, ean still had his butterscotch tele, that was the gig before star wars: episode iii came out, and we had this song written to perform for just that night, dv (darth vader) where there's this pseudo rap thing (i was trying to approximate lcd soundsystem's daft punk is playing at my house) and there's this METAL imperial march interlude haha. that was a fun gig, and we've had a lot of those.
the album's still on it's way (after a couple of years of being on it's way) and there are new hitches (letters of consent and film alignments and size discrepancies and whatever else) and i don't know what to think anymore about that album cause i've been living with those songs for quite a while now, the oldest songs on themesongs come from 2002, the newest one (bato) came from 2006, and between the time of writing and the time of release we've written a ton of stuff. my bandmates are fucking intense songwriters and musicians and COOL people and i feel like that's been a secret for the longest time, and when themesongs finally does come out it'll be like, letting other people in on that secret.
and i miss love one another already, and i can't wait to get into the studio again, and i can't wait to start playing new songs, and i can't wait for everybody to hear the album and attach meanings and feelings to songs that i've attached meanings and feelings to and i can't wait to write about the things on that album and show the documentary to people so that when you have your copy and you're listening to it and you're wondering what that weird sound was or why that happened on that song or how cool this band is, then you can refer to the future post about the music or the documentary so you get your question answered.
-owel
joe was graveyard shift-ing at a computer zombie job, ean was between a rock and a hard place in terms of band membership + friendships, i was having trouble with school (what's new haha), and zig had other bands and i guess i didn't want to burden him with the idea of finding stability in a lineup when he had a lot of other things on his plate. rizal day was supposed to be a graduation picture of sorts, a "hey we had great songs and a good time," postscript. mark was talking about giving labels a copy cause the material was ace and he believed in it, and that was great, but even getting a skeleton of the band together to record at tracks was difficult, so all the "getting signed" talk felt like delusions of grandeur haha.
things changed with the friendster message exchange with selena, cause i was a fan of her old band and her singing, and i wondered if it could be possible to have her on the ep, singing on habulan. she got to the studio and i was all worried about how our music sounded, cause we weren't that "indie" haha and she came from a scene with well-documented snobbery (not that that's a bad thing) but she sang and it was great, and then the proverbial snowball snowballed when we (mr rabara and mr harder) went to eat at the tapa king near the studio, and upon returning we found attorney gaddi playing bass to the early backing tracks of do you videoke, explaining himself with: "may naisip akong bassline eh.."
2005 saw the release of the fearless freaks documentary on the flaming lips. i was really deep into the yoshimi album then, and i was starting to go through their discography in reverse, liking the soft bulletin, falling in love with transmissions from the satellite heart. and i downloaded this thing, and i was all "yeah that's what i want." there was this chaos to their live sets, like there was early video of them having a motorcycle onstage at a bar, using it as a noise/smoke machine, and then some drunken mistake involving the brake and the throttle in some wrong order got the motorcycle flying off the stage. intense.
flashback to early shirley, keyboard + guitar + vocal shirley, with the first gig at the now defunct fox square club, last song was sampung buwan and ean was on guitar and i left the keyboard loop on and i went to the drums and i was floor tom and crash cymbal machine and i was really really really drunk (red horse was the new water) and i jumped from the drum stool to in front of the drums and i didn't really stick the landing, my shin hit the high tom i think, it's a vague memory. anyway the shin still hurts, haha. i wrote songs as skeletons, excuses for jumping around and being noisy and looking stupid.
somewhere down the line we started getting tight, and the songs got a lot more riffy, and gigs like the one we had last tuesday at guijo are reminders of the old days, back when i used to talk back to the audience (ean naalala mo yung bastos na host sa che dati tas nag-sasakyan kita outro for tsuper haha) and when i could jump like this
or when we were thin like this
man that picture tells so much, joe still had his pacifica, ean still had his butterscotch tele, that was the gig before star wars: episode iii came out, and we had this song written to perform for just that night, dv (darth vader) where there's this pseudo rap thing (i was trying to approximate lcd soundsystem's daft punk is playing at my house) and there's this METAL imperial march interlude haha. that was a fun gig, and we've had a lot of those.
the album's still on it's way (after a couple of years of being on it's way) and there are new hitches (letters of consent and film alignments and size discrepancies and whatever else) and i don't know what to think anymore about that album cause i've been living with those songs for quite a while now, the oldest songs on themesongs come from 2002, the newest one (bato) came from 2006, and between the time of writing and the time of release we've written a ton of stuff. my bandmates are fucking intense songwriters and musicians and COOL people and i feel like that's been a secret for the longest time, and when themesongs finally does come out it'll be like, letting other people in on that secret.
and i miss love one another already, and i can't wait to get into the studio again, and i can't wait to start playing new songs, and i can't wait for everybody to hear the album and attach meanings and feelings to songs that i've attached meanings and feelings to and i can't wait to write about the things on that album and show the documentary to people so that when you have your copy and you're listening to it and you're wondering what that weird sound was or why that happened on that song or how cool this band is, then you can refer to the future post about the music or the documentary so you get your question answered.
-owel
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