5240 In Review: My Top 20

Alright, one of the things I wanted to do as I wrapped up work on this project was to try to write up a personal "top 10" list, a list of the tunes that I would recommend for some stranger who'd never heard of any of this before. As you may imagine, I had a hard time coming up with just 10. Or 15, even. Nope, I ended up with a top 20 + 1 Honorable Mention. Frankly, there are many songs that aren't getting mentioned in this post that I think could be swapped for ones that were; but in the end, not coming up with a list felt like a cop-out, and my real hope is to spur conversation, and perhaps see what some of you would put on your lists in the comments. Right? Right. Let's get to it, then:

HONORABLE MENTION: I'm Just Enjoying The View

This one JUST missed being in my top 20, but I love it so much that I wanted to bring it up. This may be my favorite “pure pop” tune of the bunch, but it also has lots of the little touches I love to add to things – I think it’s really funny that a bright, poppy chorus also has a weird, stuttery speed-metal guitar part churning away in the background. “Guitar fans” of this project were always after me to do more solos, and I think the one on this song is among the best that I got around to playing. I do think that the middle chorus is too long by half, and I’m going to change that for the “special edition” version of this song.

20. The Button Factory

This is a favorite because Mo’s performance is so freakin’ adorable, but it’s also an example of one of the times where an idea got realized pretty much exactly as I originally conceived it. Getting a concept together from brain to final recording doesn’t happen very much, and I get a big kick out of it when it does. I have a feeling there may be a long-form “remix” of this in the future, with longer instrumental passages that develop the “themes” hinted at in this “short version.”

19. Sudden Cake

This one just makes me laugh like a loon. I think it’s mostly my goofy “Sudden Cake” character voice, who keeps piping up about his “peaceful mission.” I also really like the changes, and the fact that almost all of this was written on keyboards, as I can’t play keys to save my life. The fact that the organ part almost sounds like something a real organist would play makes me happier than I have any right to be. I also have a real affinity for the line, “You don’t know what you’d do, if faced with Sudden Cake.” I mean, really – do you know what you would do?

18. Gratitude (for Lucy)

A sentimental ode to my new niece, this was written four months before she was finally born on July 6th. A unique song in my experience in that I have never been more emotionally ragged while recording a vocal performance – I kept falling apart mid-line and had to take several minutes to pull myself together to do another take. This piece wears its heart painfully on its sleeve, but it’s also a pretty bent piece of music, that took me some time to iron out. I really don’t do stuff like this on purpose, and I often spend time trying to “straighten out” the weirder things that come down the pike. It almost never works, and so the weird ideas end up staying weird.

17. Inappropriate

For personal reasons, this may end up being the most important song I will ever write. Which is kind of hilarious, because it was born out of a total dearth of new ideas – I had nothing this particular week, and so just to do something I imported Paul McCartney’s “Mother Nature’s Son” from the Beatles’ White Album into Pro Tools, and built this song on top of it. I look forward to taking another crack at the mix of this tune for the “special edition” version, there are just a few things that got buried in there that I’d like to bring to the forefront more.

16. Prolly Gonna Move

This one was conceived and finished in less than a day. The subject is something that’s always somewhere in the back of my mind – do I move to Los Angeles, or not? I admit in my heart-of-hearts that I don’t WANT to go anywhere; but I can’t figure out if that’s for practical, selfish, or flat-out fearful reasons. I’ve lived in Seattle going on 17 years now, and it feels like home to me in a way that no place else ever has. So, this song is the sound of the argument that continues to rage in my head about this question. As a side bonus, I get in a funny dig at the prog-rockers in there, and that’s always a fun time.

15. Lake Water (Hot And Cold)

Before “Zeroed Out” came along, this song was the sole “epic” of the project. There’s a lot of painful stuff from being a kid in here, and while the song sounds NOTHING like what I thought it would when I started it, I think the music sells the mood effectively. The end metal-freakout vamp makes me feel like twirling my bad-guy mustache after tying the damsel to the railroad tracks. Like most every tune I do, I had fun dropping lots of “spot the reference” bits throughout, like the “Kashmir” horns on the chorus.

14. That Wine Makes My Urns Beer

This one is so weird, and I barely remember doing it. There are whole stretches of the lyrics on this one where I have no flippin’ idea what I am talking about. But I love how it all came together, I love that guitar sound on the verses, I love the weird voices (the “Evil Frenchies” at the end still make me giggle), I love that bridge section with the “caution to the wind” harmonies. And it’s all topped off with a chorus riff that would have made Badmotorfinger proud.

13. We Could Make A Baby, Baby

A lot of people have told me they were pleasantly surprised by this one – “Completely unexpected!” they would say. “I didn’t know you could be funky!” they have also said. I didn’t know I could, either, and I’m not sure if this really qualifies. But I love the exuberant silliness of this track, and I had a whole lot of fun cutting all of the loops together – I had SO MUCH FUN with the audio editing side of music-making on this project, because it was the first time I really got to do it.

12. Elephantine

This is the riff of the collection with the biggest, swingin’-est BUTT. I kinda regret that my compadres in Half Zaftig didn’t get to do this one, can you imagine Pete and Lizzy on this thing? Unfortunately, by around week 17 or so (when I moved to a new apartment), I no longer had any leeway at all time-wise, and the extra coordination required to make a recording with other musicians in the mix became just about impossible. I think this was the first song of the “second half” of the project, and I remember being proud of it as a statement at the time. I don’t even know what the chords in this song are, I just know where my fingers are supposed to go. The last ride-out with the harmony vocals is one of my favorite parts of the entire project.

11. A Really, Really, Really Bad Idea

An early favorite of the Peanut Gallery’s, my Dad told me he thinks this is the best song I’ve ever done. This was another one completed in less than 24 hours from start to finish, during a stretch where I was REALLY stuck on “Esther Hurts My Head”. The Beatles are my musical gods, from them All Things Musical Spring Forth, and to briefly pretend to be them was nothing but silly fun for me. I think my fave little references are the “Harrison-isms” on the guitar in the left speaker toward the end. As Hannibal Smith always said, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

10. Snow Day

An ode to snow days past, the original idea for this was: What if metal had existed as a genre back in 1964? I was trying to cross British Invasion pop song structures with modern metal stylistic traits; I’m not sure I actually GOT THERE with this, but I really like the song as it came out. It’s really, really, REALLY fun to tune down your seven-string to A and turn up the amps and make monster faces while you go GUNG-GUNG-GUNG gugga-GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. If you’ve never tried it, you really should. P.S. - My baby sister will tell you the part about the snow drift is absolutely true; don’t believe her.

9. Alternative To What

Doing this one was fun. I’m not sure what else I can really say about this that isn’t right there in the tune. I let that “cranky old guy” in me come out, the guy who wryly smiles (inwardly, of course) at the antics of the bands on the bill who are usually half my age when I occasionally play shows. What I do remember is that this one came along toward the end of the summer, at a point in the project where I needed a second wind, and this song gave it to me. I had a blast putting this together, and it felt easy.

8. Zeroed Out

The last tune of the project, and obviously the freshest in my mind as I sit here typing this. Somewhere in September, Darin Di Pietro, my long-suffering engineer and the mastering engineer of this project, emailed me, “I hope you’ve got a big epic planned for the end of this thing.” At that point, I hadn’t considered what sort of song would be the final one, though I’ll admit I was hoping I could think of something that felt… appropriate. The original threads of this tune came along when I was borrowing Lizzy Daymont’s beautiful Taylor 714ce in November for “Forty Today” (and “Xanthous”, actually). By then I was definitely looking for something to come along and ANNOUNCE to me that “I AM THE FINAL SONG.” As I came to these chords, I realized that this could be it. This was the only song that I missed my regular Monday deadline for, which was disappointing to me at the time, but I’m OK with it now. Said deadline coincided with Christmas Week (travel, shopping, work stuff) and this song also unexpectedly bloomed into a real-life huge epic tune, which of course takes longer to get together. And working on it happened to also coincide with some cataclysmic personal events that continue to unfold even now. So, the fact that I managed to get it finished and posted right before the one-year mark was up feels like a victory to me.

7. Twin Powers

This was one that I had had sitting around for a long time before this project started. It was one of the songs that I hoped I could force myself to finish by having the weekly deadline (side note: very few of those old tunes actually DID get finished; most of the “5240” tracks were brand-new compositions. Oh well). I love the vibe of this, and I think the vocal layering is among my favorite vocal stuff that I’ve yet recorded. I spent a lot of years of my late teens and early-20’s listening to Cure records, and I feel like it all came out here.

6. Forty Today

I knew when I started this project that I would write a song that addressed the big FOUR-OH (the project is called “5240” after all). It was just magic circumstance that my 40th birthday happened to be a “release date.” I knew I wanted it to be an acoustic tune. I had a very hard time coming up with anything, though – and as Zero Date approached I was starting to panic. Luckily I discovered an old bunch of unused acoustic ideas in a “Bits” folder I had stashed somewhere, and I ended up repurposing them for this song. I love the “Black Country Woman”/Led Zeppelin III vibe this tune ended up having, and I think I captured my state of mind as I turned 40 pretty well. Turns out that it wasn’t much different from turning 39.

5. Help Is On The Way

The first still feels like one of the best to me. Thrown together in a frenzy with my Half Zaftig bandmates at the end of 2008, I think the melody and the high energy of this song was a great way to kick things off. Pete and Lizzy rock like crazy on this, and listening to this makes me glad that the project is now over, and I can spend time playing music with them again.

4. Sometimes Just Makin’ Out Can Be Fun (Sometimes)

The second one with Half Zaftig on it - I remember finishing this one, and playing it for Pete and Lizzy, thinking it might be a little too “out there” for them. On the contrary, they practically demanded that they get to record this song with me. It’s a good thing they did, too – this is easily one of my favorite recordings we’ve done together. As much as I love what we did on the Life Like Luster album, I still think we’ve got better things in us, and this song is the proof. Somehow the three of us managed to corral all the wacky riffs and weird shifts into a focused statement, and they let me get away with the lyrics without so much as a raised eyebrow.

3. Busy Girl

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the existence of “Busy Girl” pretty much caused this whole project to happen. This is the first thing I wrote after the exhausting slog that making Life Like Luster became, and it forced me to figure out what sort of project I could do that could include a song like this; nothing I had done previously would have held it properly. I still love this tune madly: the chortling dudes in the background; the weird improvised electric guitar lines; the dissonant acoustic guitar melodies; the “Fab 4” break in the middle; the shift to “Full Disco Jacket” at the end. And I think the lyrics are pretty cute, too.

2. I Like You More Than You Do

Rob Crow’s solo record My Room Is A Mess had a big effect on me when I got it in 2008. I was already deeply in love with his work in Pinback by then, but MRIAM was something else. Great songs, great melodies, great words, but all delivered in often very unadorned settings - the exact sort of thing that I have always been terrified to do myself. I had never before written any songs that were specifically meant to be delivered solely by voice and acoustic guitar, and I decided that with 52 tries to get something like that right, I had no excuse not to make the attempt. I think this one turned out really well, and it was certainly one of the most popular of the year among those who posted comments to the blog.

1. Esther Hurts My Head

I don’t know if this is the “best” 5240 song; but it probably is my favorite. Getting it finished was a struggle, but I get real satisfaction in hearing how it all turned out. The challenge here was in getting all the competing ideas I had for that main groove section to live comfortably together, along with finding places for the song to go that made sense. This one really captures what the year 2009 felt like for me in a nutshell: it was tough to keep my optimism up a lot of the time, but at the end of the day I felt hope for the future, hope that I could get things turned around, hope that I could finish this damn fool’s errand I’d given to myself.