The Grays were a "super group" composed of Jon Brion (fresh off a stint with 'Til Tuesday), Jason Falkner (fresh off Jellyfish's Spilt Milk) and then two other guys, whoever they were, who cares. They played together for a very brief year, producing a single album, Ro Sham Bo, before calling it quits.

As an album, Ro Sham Bo suffers mostly because of how needlessly slick it is. For an album that came out in 1994, the possible hay-day* of the grungy DIY indie-rock aesthetic, it's almost sad how well produced it is. It strips a lot of the feeling away, and this song is a pretty good example of this. It could be a powerful, angry piece of music but instead it just feels kind of... flat. Every instrument feels secluded in a room by itself without any other instruments around it. It's so lonely. There's not a lot going on.

Kind of like this blog for the last two weeks! Now I'm going to digress.

I go through phases. I'm currently in a "fuck this writing on the internet shit" phase. I became disillusioned. I'm tired of the endless wave of promoter emails I'm getting that are filled with pretty much relentlessly terrible music. I'm at nearly 100 unread emails and I just keep avoiding them because they have subjects like "CHECK OUT ANDREI'S NEW CLUB REMIX OF JUNIP" and I'm like, fuck, does no one pay attention to me when I say "I don't care about remixes"? And who the fuck is Andrei? Tarkovsky? He's making dance remixes now?

I think I just lost sight of what this website is about. From the start it's supposed to just be me, a regular guy, telling you, you regular but beautiful people you, about music I like that I have a personal connection to. Lately that hasn't changed much, but I've been writing about stuff that I only kind of like, and that I don't have a personal connection to at all.

I'm going to try to go back to what this is supposed to be about, maybe in a week or two, or maybe I'll just pick it back up tomorrow. I do not like music blogs, so it's silly that in the last month or two this has turned more into a music blog than I'd care for it to be. Let's go back to this being a "journal about music and me".

My experiments in music creation have been going OK. I've been dedicating pretty serious time to learning guitar and I think I've made huge, huge progress. It's stupid to think that I wasted so many years not playing guitar, and that with three different guitars in my hands in the past I totally squandered opportunities to learn. Guitar is not hard to play, and I think a lot of my prior stumbling was because I thought it was, so I was psyching myself out.

Learn some chords... strum them in time to a metronome... Boom! You're playing guitar.

I've been using MultiTrack DAW for iPad to record myself playing and fiddling with stuff. The iPad built in microphone isn't too bad, and if you want to hear what someone fumbling awkwardly between chords and scales sounds like, check out this shit. I'm already a lot better at actually fingering the chords properly. Yesterday I played for about an hour and a half, took a break, and when I went back to playing it felt like my fingers were going to split open. I have bits of skin hanging off my fingers.

ROCK STAR!

Also, the Em-G-Am progression is, like, my favoritest ever so far. I need another iPad, that way I can use a sequencer on one and record on the other... hehehe...

Also, fuck the iPad's 256mb of RAM. What a bunch of bullshit. I have no faith at all that iOS4 will run decently at all on the iPad. Ridiculous. Have to hard-reset the iPad every time you want to do something even minorly resource intensive. Still, I want to buy a second one...

* You know, like with horses. ^