Singe Again

So apparently Devin is on the Singe blogging train now too!! Very exciting.

Picking up with yesterdays topic, the dissection of the creation of Singe songs, but with the added benefit of a short conversation with Devin which has clarified for me a bit the early order of songs written. Yesterday I believe the order I laid out was correct except I forgot to mention the song "The Birth of Robert Kling". Which I believe we wrote right after "Cellophane", but it is possible that we wrote it just before "Cellophane" as well. Any whoodle. The musical part began from Joe, who I remember at the time mentioned it was inspired by the Ted Nugent song "Strangle Hold". My GOD! Nuge. Distasteful, but it was always one of my favorite Singe songs so I can't believe I forgot how early it was in the cannon. Devin's keyboard part in the verse is in my mind sort of a Devin signature part, he can feel free to refute that if he'd like, in his own blog. Lyrically I thought I was being very clever with the idea behind it. I had read in the paper that Timmy McVeigh had rented his Ryder truck of death under the name Robert Kling. I thought this was a fine idea for a song using the point where a persons actions through an alias make them into a person that they were not before... something like that. I also remember that I didn't remember the article all that well when I wrote the song so that for at least a year the song was called "The Birth of William Kling". Glad I looked it up again... that would have been embarrassing.

It's at this point that the song writing gets blurry for me, if I had my notebook from the time, which is alive and well at a box in my parents house I could probably figure things out pretty precisely. I am pretty certain that in the order discussed thus far that the song "Dying World" came next. I had felt the need for an acoustic sort of song, and so I wrote a chord progression for the verse, which Joe snazzed up with his usual palm muting and a nice note run fill. He and Devin then composed the chorus together in a rehearsal. Lyrically I like maybe 4 lines in this song, which is more than I can say for the rest of the songs up to this point.

At this time there also emerged a song called "1/1". I had a verse progression, which Joe of course played better than I did, which allowed it to become a song. Devin for his part got very creative with the DM5, making the entire build of the song up from adding in different percussion sounds as we progressed through it. I remember being so very thrilled with the way it worked and sounded. I told a good friend Dan that I believed we had found "our sound" in reference to "1/1".

Singe played exactly one outdoor show. It was a local music festival at the local college. We opened the show at noon. Joe and I had been so foolish as to not bring our amps, opting instead to go through our multi-effect units direct to the board. which caused a bit of a problem for the men behind the board. The real kicker though was that Devin had forgot to bring the DM5, leaving our drum sounds 27 miles away in Russel. Luckily Ronnie had the DM4, and was able to run home a few blogs and bring it back. All things considered it went better than the circumstance allowed, but I remember the Four of us feeling pretty defeated afterwards. SO much so that we drove the 27 miles back to Russell where we ended up rehearsing for several hours after we had played the show. It ended with us sitting with our instruments on the floor flushing out 2 brand new songs, "A.O.S. B.O.S." and "Step Over". Both songs came from a very organic sort of jamming process, except for possibly the Chorus to "A.O.S. B.O.S.", which I believe was a riff Joe had just been dying to use somewhere. For those of the curious nature "A.O.S. B.O.S." stands for Abs of Steel, Brains of Shit. OH MY GOD! The Horror.

Somewhere along the way, and for the life of me I can't recall where, there was a song called "Reach Inside", or as it was originally titled "The Hole". It was our only Drop D number. And that song, I am almost certain, there is no real recording in existence, barring maybe a live from video camera recording or direct to boom box rehearsal recording. Devin and I always thought it was one of our best though.

Towards the end of the early singe years, and just as we were starting to record the album that has recently resurfaced, "Transformation Through Decay", we wrote the song "Wrapped Around Your Middle Finger". I believe it's a Joe riff that started it, and that I'd wanted to use that title for a very long.

As far as I can tell these where the songs that make up the early Singe years.

From there things get pretty blurry, the songs at this point start to get a little less interesting and defined in my memory, which is odd because this is the point that Mike left, and Chris came in, which for me is the point in the band that I really love and cherish. Chris for me was the best thing that could have happened. He was so positive and excited to be in our band. He revitalized the entire process, except for somehow the song writing didn't really go much farther from that point. We learned all the old songs and began adding a few new ones, but for a strange reason none of them gelled in my mind as much. I would imagine that the lack of recordings of the songs makes up a large part of their diminished recollection, that and the fact that we probably were only making music together for another year at this point, therefore they didn't have near the amount of time to gel in the head the way the early ones did.

Of this time, my favorite, was a song called Peel, which we must have wrote right before Chris joined or right after. I really liked the song, but I don't recall much about it's creation.

There was also a song that I know we played live at least once, based on a riff a I had written, called something like "get away". I think the crowd at the old abandoned Tupperware building was asked to name it, and creative forces that they are came up with that...

There was a very heavy song Joe brought a riff in for, which we humored him in the creation of, I can't without the notebook remember anything else about it. Except it was so much heavier then the rest of us cared for.

So that is what I recall for the time being. That's it. That's four years of collaborative creation between five individuals resulting in 10 years later some blog entries and some old recordings. And at least 2 new bands. And all told something like 10 albums since then. That momentum that we started back then, starting with an awful song like "closed mind" hasn't been stopped yet.


So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.