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Hi Ho
Another crazy pirate track to add to the list:
Already in Hell
Hi Ho -
Sailing
After spending most of my life in the Rocky Mountains, I never thought the ocean was something to fall in love with. I always seemed to consider myself a mountain person. All that has changed.
I went to Yosemite for a volunteer event a while ago. I love the mountains. As I gained altitude on my drive, I started seeing all the things that I love about nature at high altitudes, and the amazing landscapes of the mountain ranges there. Usually, I would start thinking about how great it would be to live close to mountainous nature like I was seeing. This time, I could only think about how far it was from the ocean and sailing.
Since early last summer (2010), I’ve been learning how to sail. I have been racing around out of the Berkeley Marina on small high-performance dinghies. It’s the kind of sailing you often wear a wetsuit for. Lots of capsizing and trapeze and other fun stuff.
And now I’ve gone and bought my first sailboat. A little 27’ Catalina. I’m living on it in Sausalito. Pretty wild for me.
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Random Idiot Factor
I was in a play tonight. It was my first time on stage.
Random idiot Factor with Hampants Productions. Don’t be a stranger.
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Bicycle Boogie
I remember riding into Würzburg one warm day along a path beside the Main. I was feeling good and enjoying myself so I started making up a song as I rode. The song was about riding like a madman through the dancing shadows of rustling chestnut leaves.
So I put the song on tape. It was back in the day. I was just using the mic-in on my noisy G4 to get my audio into a mixing environment. It was tons of fun to make. It was also a technical disaster.
My good friend and I recently did our best to revive the thing. We replaced the General Midi drum kit I had used and a few other tracks but the vocals and most other stuff is original. We remixed it and polished it up as best we could and I think it turned out surprisingly well considering the mess of poorly recoded and sloppily performed tracks we were dealing with.
So here it is.
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Captain Blackheart and the Scurvy Sea Dogs
I got really excited about old time radio shows a few years ago. Something about rocking chairs and staring into the patterns of intricate wallpaper.
I was so crazy about OTR that I decided I wanted to produce my own show. And what better theme for such a show than pirates? Indeed. So pirates it was. An old time radio show about pirates.
At the time, I was recording my first record. It was mostly an attempt at documenting all the impromptu songs I had been playing over the years on my guitar. My good friend, Mark Humphrey, was doing something similar in Australia. He was finishing up his first record, Error101.
Mark and I started talking about the pirate album and decided to tackle the project together. Of course working with Mark on a project involving pirates and OTR meant… well… space aliens. Pretty much any project he is involved with has to have space aliens in it. God bless him.
Time passed and we were merry.
At some point, on his way to Sweeden, Mark stopped by my recording studio in Germany to work on his second album, The Machines Verses the Universe. We recorded our own projects during the day. But later, in the evening, after we had liberated a few delicious German beers, we would work on the pirate project.
The track I’m uploading here is the first thing we put together. It has several parts: the radio show host introducing the episode, a scene on the ship, and a shanty. Mark wrote the shanty. And we came up with the rest in the studio together. Drunken pirates at their best.
Enjoy: