I spent yesterday afternoon recording, and this morning mixing, a cover of a wonderful Daniel Johnston song called True Love Will Find You in the End.

Follow that link to listen to it over at Metafilter Music.

I learned the song from playing it with the Harvey Girls; it’s a bit different to be singing both the main and the harmony vocals on it, but I think it works reasonably well. I haven’t been recording nearly enough music for a while now, so I’m hoping this is a dam-breaker and I’ll get back in the habit.

Hiram and Melissa covered another Johnston tune, Walkin’ the Cow, on an all-covers album they released a while back called Our History is Your Kitsch. You can listen to the whole record at that link; there’s a bunch of great stuff on it.

From the frenzied mind and hands of bandmate and engine-of-creativity Hiram comes a stop-motion film about heartbreak, nude beaches, and tiny plastic dinosaurs.

He did a really good job with it. It’s not a recording I had any hand in creating, but he borrowed my tripod so technically I helped.

The song is from a new Harvey Girls album of stuff Hiram and Melissa had been working on for a while. The album is called Nutate, and some folks are doing some remixes of songs from it, too.

I’ve been not recording (at home) for a little too long now — nothing really substantial since late 2007 — and I had the apartment to myself tonight, so I decided it was Get Back On The Horse night.

Accordingly: Fidelity (Regina Spektor cover).

I’ve also posted it (with a little more explanation) in this thread over on Metafilter Music.

I made a rather silly recording, dubbed Sgt. Pepper 2.0, working from a parody of A Day in the Life written up as a metafilter comment by tremendously clever fellow mefite It’s Raining Florence Henderson.

So go listen to it.

It’s done.  I made an album.  And I think it’s pretty good.  I’ll make a nice page for it sometime soon, but for now, here’s the tracks in order, and zip and tar files for easy grabbing.

1. At the Open Mic
2. When You Get a Girl
3. To All the Girls that Broke My Heart Without Trying To
4. I Spend All My Free Time on the Internet
5. I Just Got Back From the Dentist
6. Let’s Just Pretend that David Bowie Wrote this Song
7. The Human Condition
8. All These Little Metal Things
9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
10. It’s Only Portland When it Rains

The whole thing in a gzipped tarball (OS X, Linux) and zip archive (Windows).

I spend—I think I’ve mentioned this before—a lot of time at Metafilter. The site as it exists is a product of, and house for, the community of users who have been there over the years (Mefi’s been around since 1999), and so there’s a lot of memorable personalities and landmark moments in its history.

It’s something I’ve thought about a fair bit, and detailed in some sense in entries on ReFi, and so I’ve collected a lot of MeFi trivia over the years by default. And I decided to turn it into a song, with annotated history-tracking lyrics.

Hence:

88 Lines About 44 Mefites. Go there. Listen. Be, probably, confused by all these metafilter injokes. Read the lyrics, click the links, get a little peek into some of the social dynamics of the biggest little community blog on the web.

I’ve been doing a lot of singing the songs I’ve written to myself, and worrying out little arrangement details and ideas, but I haven’t really got anything physical to show for it for a few days now—except for this:

• I Just Got Back From the Dentist

And every word of it is true.

So. 9 days down. 19 to go. February doesn’t divide evenly by 3, so I can technically claim to have more than two thirds of the month left. Right? Right.

New demo, written this morning and recorded this afternoon. Simultaneously more and less complete than many of the others—I sort of let the vocal ideas fly here, but there’s a lot of revisions I want to make already, and a missing verse. This is the album’s my-home-town song, I guess.

• Portland Rain (working title)

Two more demos, actually recorded the other night at the same time as the previous four but I hadn’t had a chance to apply compression, mix down, encode, tag, and upload as of yesterday morning.

• When You Get a Girl
• I Spend All My Free Time on the Internet

The first, When You Get a Girl, give you a reasonable idea of what I intend to do with the song. I’ll probably get really involved instrumentally with the album cut, but that basic, driving, unwavering form is going to stick around. The song operates as a sort of manifest of pre-adolescent playground-era received wisdom on the subject of girls—simplifications, half-truths and misconceptions handed down to clueless 10-year-olds by clueless 12-year-olds.

The second one, I Spend All My Free Time on the Internet, is much more an idea-reference track. I intend to make this an ass-thumping, grin-forcing exercise in sure pop energy, and so the current demo is, well, lame. It is to my vision what a science room skeleton is to Christopher Walken—similar in gross morphology, but not nearly as compelling or attractive. Ah well. Still have 19 days to go. Plenty of time!

I sat down last night and recorded some rough reference demos of a number of songs I’ve been working on.  Let me emphasize rough: these are sloppy, lofi first-take attempts to hammer down some initial details.  Lyrics aren’t final, verses are missing, chords and notes are flubbed, etc; and none of the crazy elaborate production ideas I have in mind are present.

Still, the ideas are there; you can get an idea of what I’m thinking.  So here’s four:

• At the Open Mic
• Pretend that David Bowie Wrote this Song
• The Human Condition
• To All the Girls that Broke My Heart Without Trying To