The music was written in a hotel room in upstate New York. How rock and roll is that? I occasionally find myself very inclined to throw electric pianos at everything. This comes from such a phase. The part in question here was recorded using…

I wanted something slow and dirgish (is that a word?) and twangie. I sorta got that, not really. This is another one that I got weird with the time signature setting in GarageBand for iPad and then the drummer function on GarageBand for Mac…

Boston, Massachusetts is not just a college town. It's THE college town. I mean it. Seriously. There is a major university in just about every neighborhood, and there are institutions of higher learning on nearly every street corner. Add…

Not sure about the mix for this one. My left ear hears much better than my right, and I do all of my work with headphones. Sometimes when I have two doubled tracks split left/right I end up having a hard time keeping them balanced. I over compensate…

I kinda like this one, although the cutting and pasting sounds really obvious to my ears. I usually try and get my punches cleaner than this, but I seemed to be slacking on this day. The lyrics are part of my current atheist bent. The guitars…

There's a lot of weirdness going on here. First, King's X has a song on their Dogman album called "Go to Hell". It's 30 seconds long and it's balls to the wall and just when you start to feel the groove it ends. I thought I might try something…

Last month I did a bad instrumental thing inspired by the quiet little instrumental breaks in the last couple of Pink Floyd records. I don't like the way it came out, but I did decide right away I'd try something similar again before 50/90 ended…

This one feels forced. I don't know, it just isn't doing much for me. I like the part after the first solo where the drums ride on a crash cymbal, but the rest of it doesn't seem to gel. The lyrics are gibberish made up on the spot. The guitars…

So 50/90 is an unnatural forcing of a crap ton of songs in a relatively short period of time. We're half way though and I've learned one thing. I've learned how easy it is to repeat something you've already done. This one sounds a LOT like…

An angry little ditty about the seemingly overzealous police in Ferguson, MO. Not much else to say about this one except that the guitars are all Fender. Take me away to where it’s safe get me out of this police state tear gas and flash…

This song represents the place where things got alarmingly repetitive for my 50/90 project. In another day or two I'll be posting a song that is musically very similar to this one. As I worked this one out, I had no memory of the previous attempt…

This one came really quick as I was working on another, completely different, idea. Lyric wise it's a simple little love song about the love of my life and I sticking it out. Usually I tend to match that type of lyric with something less dumb…

I spent some time last night (August 13, 2014) following the situation in Ferguson, MO on twitter. The pictures and descriptions were... alarming. When I woke up this morning I immediately wrote two songs that were inspired by what I saw…

Another song about depression that was sort of inspired by Robin Williams' suicide. It's getting harder and harder to write lyrics for 50/90, but somehow I managed to write a whole bunch today. Topics were repeated. Melodies were repeated as…

Actual, real live percussion. There's a little monkey drum that I bought at a Ren Faire many years ago, and a pair of finger drums I bought at the Moroccan Pavilion at Epcot Center even more many years ago. It's the first time since I had an…

Another simple arrangement that uses dynamics to differentiate between verse/chorus/ect. I really like that gimmick, but I have to force myself not to do it, or I'd do it 100% of the time. The lyrics are about depression and were written the…

This one is a little sloppy. There's a bum note in one of the guitars in the chorus that got copied and pasted a whole bunch of times. I don't have time to go back and fix it though. Lyrically, I haven't mined the endless source of inspiration…

I have no clue what the lyrics are about. I guess maybe it's about not wanting to go to work on a Tuesday morning and looking for some existential way out? I don't know, something stupid like that. The music to this was written while I was…

We have an interesting thing going on in my little neck of New England. I guess we'd have to call it a labor movement, but that's not quite right. When the US economy tanked a few years ago, the CEO of a local supermarket chain did the unthinkable…

A song about greater Boston traffic. Just when you think you have it figured out... urgh. I always sit in 4/4 time. I often need to just break out of it and do something different. This time it's 6/8, but I feel lots of 7/8 and 5/4 are on…