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