It's been a while since I've posted some of the "blueprints" for Hosey music. It's something I've been meaning to do, and I know people seem to enjoy picking at the nuts and bolts of the tracks. I'll try to do one of these posts for each Hosey track. Soon, I hope to put together a "vault" where I can upload master tracks from the songs so that everybody can have a crack at the fun.Mp3 stream and more after the jump...
I've found myself listening to a lot of At the Drive-In lately. It could have something to do with the fact that it's been about 10 years since the band broke up. That same decade also runs parallel with my years 19 through 29 here on this planet. An interesting time for everybody for all the cliché reasons we know so well. It's also a decade that has seen an immense amount of change to our culture and the way that culture is consumed (It's interesting at this point to note that ATDI was the first label band to officially put out a digital version of an album). This Texas band--for whom there is no better description than “visceral”--summed up so much of my youth, and suddenly disbanded right as I was taking my first steps into adulthood. It seems apt that such an icon of that time in my life would vanish at precisely the same moment that my youth would be thrust screaming into the adult world.
ATDI had a profound effect on my music, too. First, for obvious reasons as a young, angry guitarist with a penchant for unconventional melody and rhythm. But secondly, and maybe more importantly, the band is one of the key reasons I got into turntablism. This was an inadvertent influence: I felt that they were already doing what I wanted to do so well that there was no reason for me to continue along the musical path I was embarked upon. I stopped focusing on the guitar and writing music in a rock format and barreled head first into the world of turntables and samples; a world in which I had already been dabbling. This is a variation of a pretty typical story of musicians in the 90s. It seemed all too often that a traditional rock musician would start branching into electronic territory. Whatever, this was my excuse.
And that brings us to the song being discussed today, “Kevin & His Band” which is built around a sample from an ATDI song. It's neat the way things come full circle, right? The sampled song in question is “Ticklish” from the album Acrobatic Tenement. I love this song, and think it's one of the best songs on the record. It features what is definitely one of my favorite lyrics of all time: “I'm kicking in windows / It makes music to me.” I snagged bits and pieces of the various guitar parts, chopped them up, and played them back through the SP-404. I used their bridge for the same purpose in the middle of the song.
Vocally, the first sample is a very brief snippet of Lokar from Space Ghost Coast 2 Coast. Do I need to talk about how awesome SGC2C is? Then we have the sample that was the inspiration for the name of the song. This is the drummer from Scrantonicity II, otherwise known as Kevin from The Office (US) complaining about the fact that none of his co-workers showed up for his band's show the previous night. Following that is a hilarious bit of dialog from Seinfeld's Kramer, as he berates a woman for contributing nothing to society.
Thematically, the piece revolves around the typical ridicule that a young, idealistic musician must generally endure. From friends, from parents, from society in general. Alternately, the piece leads a second life as the soundtrack for a fateful plane ride taken more than 60 years ago.