Estrogen and Tonic

Nerve Tonic

Paul Brockett Roadshow

That’s the short version. :)

Longer version is: This piece is called “Ich Grolle Nicht” (translation available in that link) and is from Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe, and it’s all about how love is a cruel bitch. My kind of stuff.

Ich Grolle Nicht

(Oh, and yes, I’m also playing the piano. It’s a really fun part to play.)

Anyway.

Last week, he posted an entry to his blog stating that he had found a few rehearsal recordings he’d made for a production of one of his shows (Songs For A New World, a song from which I sang on my senior recital), and thought that it would be fun to host a little Jason Robert Brown karaoke contest. He posted the recordings of him playing the piano and asked people to record themselves singing the songs.

I decided that this would be a lot of fun.

So here are the two entries that I posted. And here’s the deal: If you listen to these and you like them, then I ask you to send an email (before August 10th, mind you) to jrbkaraoke2008@yahoo.com, and in the Subject line, put “I Vote For Andrew Coutermarsh”. I don’t hold any delusions that I would win the competition, but it would be nice to be a finalist. It’s hard to tell, with some of the fan clubs that people have online.

The songs:

(If you can’t use the flash player, the title of the song is also a link to the MP3. The flash player is for ease of use.)

She Cries

King of the World

Oh well.

I think that my audition went very well—as well as could be expected, given the relative inexperience of the teenage rather young accompanist. I sang quite well and felt quite good about the whole ordeal. They told me that I could come back and sing again tomorrow and there will be callbacks later in the week.

Here’s the thing that’ll most likely prevent me from getting the part, though: My looks. That’s not to say that I’m not good-looking enough. It’s simply that the character I’m auditioning for is, well… well, he’s Jewish. And I’m SO not. I don’t even remotely look Jewish, if you consider the traditional stereotypes. It’s not that there aren’t Jewish people who look like me, but the character’s name is Wellerstein, which would imply that it’s a German origin, and I definitely don’t look like that.

But if they can rationalize it enough, I think it’d be a really great opportunity and I know, I just know, that if I get it I’ll absolutely knock it out of the park.

Keep me in your thoughts. I could really use this thing right now.

A few hours later, he sent me another message saying that he’d had no takers on the ticket, and it was now selling for the LOW! LOW! PRICE! of just twenty bucks. I reconsidered the idea of going to a concert in Boston on a Thursday night. The travel wasn’t TOO big a deal, although it would be pushing it for me to get out at five and make it all the way to Boston with enough time to get food and hit the theatre by eight, but Nick didn’t have any desire to go see the opener, so that left me with a little bit more time. Staying out late wouldn’t be an issue, because this was my first week of working Sunday through Thursday, so my week was over come Thursday evening and I could sleep in on Friday. In the end, I decided that the price was unbeatable, and fourteenth-row seats to one of your favorite bands in a great-sounding hall was too much to pass up, so I decided to make the trip.

Naturally, though, I didn’t actually get out of the parking lot at work until about 5:30, and I knew I’d be hitting some traffic on the way into the city (and sho ’nuff I did), and then, because Boston is one of the most hellish cities to drive in, I got kind of lost on my way to the venue. I then proceeded to drive for a good half hour looking for a parking space on the street (partway through this, I picked Nick up so that he could help me find a space and so that we wouldn’t be talking it over on the phone), during which time no less than five open spaces were taken by the car directly in front of me. It was becoming positively comedic. Finally, I decided to head to a parking garage near where Nick used to live (I’d stayed there once so I was somewhat familiar with the area) and happened to be just down the street from the venue. It would be $19 for the evening (making me glad that I only had to pay twenty for the ticket) to park, but I suppose in the long run it was better anyway, given that I had my laptop and golf clubs in the trunk.

I grabbed a bite to eat (and answered a long-awaited call from Nature) at a nearby Wendy’s and then we headed to the venue, where they told me I couldn’t bring in the drink I had purchased at aforementioned Wendy’s (I was practically done with it anyway as I’d gotten a good, y’know, two or three sips out of it). It’s a good thing they didn’t allow drinks, too, because we certainly didn’t need liquid refreshment in the ninety-degree heat of the performance space. I think Berklee forgot to pay their air conditioning fixit man.

As for the show itself, I certainly cannot complain. Having never seen this band live before, I didn’t know what to expect, and what I got was far more than I could have imagined. For the first hour, they played entirely new material. None of it had even been recorded yet. I don’t remember much of it except that it was amazing. The rest of the show consisted almost completely of my favorite songs from their two latest albums. The only disappointment was that they couldn’t play their last song because the singer’s voice had started to go out on him and I guess they were running just long enough that they didn’t have quite enough time to do it.

The acoustics were fantastic. The band was just barely too loud, but if I had been smart and brought/bought earplugs, it would have been perfect. The drums were the best-sounding drums I’ve ever heard live of any band ever, and the mix was pretty great except when the vocals would get slightly buried. But my favorite part of the show was that it was a seated venue, so I didn’t have to worry about my problematic feet causing, er, problems. (I’m not sure if this is just me getting too old for rock shows or if I get a pass because of my ankle issues.)

So when they get back to England after this tour, they’re going to hit the recording studio, and then they’ll be back here in the spring, touring again to support the new album. I can definitely say that after seeing this show (and hearing this new material), I’m definitely going to catch them again on the next tour.

And now it’s entirely too late and I need to get to bed because I have to work tomorrow.

(For those curious: The subject title of this post is a lyric from one of Porcupine Tree’s songs off of their newest album, Deadwing.)

Thoughts in passing (somewhat chronological, though I didn’t take notes or anything):

• At first I really didn’t like the opening, but then I realized that there’s just no other place that they could have put “Seasons Of Love.” After all, it’s almost as appropriate at the beginning of the show as it is at the opening of the second act.
• My God, they REALLY chopped up “Rent,” didn’t they? And what’s up with Mimi already knowing everybody?
• At first, I was really worried that they chopped up one of my favorite songs, but it looks like “You’ll See” ended up in there, at least in its majority. And just in the right amount.
• While we’re on the subject of things that made it into the movie, I’ll say now that I was very upset that “Christmas Bells” wasn’t included. I can understand why they cut it: it would have cost millions to film a scene that convoluted. But seeing as I think that “kiss me, it’s beginning to snow” is one of the most romantic phrases ever, I still felt awful at it not being there.
• Other than that, I was quite pleased with everything, even Rosario Dawson’s performance. From the previews I’d seen, she was much below the ho-hum level, but I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised.
• So I’m watching the bonus features on Disc Two, and I want to notify any of you who were as upset as I was at not having “Halloween” or “Goodbye Love” in the movie have it in its entirety in the Deleted Scenes section, as is a very interesting and much more stage-like alternate ending.
• Having worked with Wilson, and seen him in the show back in ’99, I knew how his performance could affect me. What I wasn’t expecting was how much Jesse Martin’s performance would affect me. I was ecstatic that they included “I’ll Cover You (Reprise)”, and I just… cried like a little girl.

Overall reaction: Much more pleased with it than I thought I would be. I’m definitely purchasing this one.

I’m also wondering what they’re going to do about the score. My thoughts are that they’ll definitely cover more than the traditional keyboards/drums/guitars instrumentation. I would love to hear this show done with a full orchestra in addition to a band.

I can’t even begin to express how psyched I am for this movie to come out.

Toward the end of the show, they played a story about a song by Eliza Gilkyson called “Requiem.” She wrote it last winter, after the tsunami. I was a little skeptical for many reasons, including the fact that I’d never heard of this woman or any of her music, and I was about to write it off as some unknown folk singer writing an overly-emotional song about something with which she had had no experience or understanding. Naturally, they were doing the story on the song because of the rather apropos connection between what happened there last year and what happened on our own Gulf Coast this month. I wasn’t expecting much, but then something amazing happened.

They started playing the song. And God, was it ever beautiful.

It isn’t much—just a piano, guitar, cello and two voices (Gilkyson’s and her daughter’s). But this song just… grabbed me. It’s quite hymnlike, and while its lyrics are slightly overwrought, it’s got this amazing quality to it. I think that ultimately, its simplicity is what draws me in: the song is just two people singing, in what I instantly recognized as that mode that I get into when I’m singing in a church. It’s that feeling you get where you just feel like the music you’re making is going directly out the roof of the church and right to where it needs to go, if you get what I’m getting at.

I just couldn’t stop playing it. I highly suggest you give it a listen at the NPR site. If you like it, it can be bought at the iTunes Music Store.

Also updated/added are some dynamic updates to my Music Page, not only with a few new songs, but also so that I can add a song to the list just by creating a page in WordPress, which is going to be a huge timesaver when updates or changes are made. It’s a nice little hack, if I do say so myself, because it allows me to create a new category (right now there’s just “Songs” and “Projects”, but I could add more if I felt like it) and auto-sort the entries into those categories.

I’ve also futzed a little bit with the text formatting so that it looks more the same in Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Firefox. Talk about a war, there, though: Internet Explorer’s text formatting using CSS is a real bitch, and just when you think you’ve got it right, you notice that the sizing for IE is about two times as large as the sizing when looking in a “real” browser like Firefox or Opera.

Despite its obvious flaws, I was quite happy with the result, and my family and friends loved it as only family and friends can do.

The song lived its life out on cassette tape for several years, until the MP3 revolution first started hitting. When I had my first website, I took the tape, hooked it up to my computer, and recorded it in. I cleaned it up as best I could with the technology available to me, and encoded it to MP3. At the time, MP3s weren’t encoded at super-high bitrates like they are nowadays, and the result was pretty audibly compressed. I always wanted to re-record it from the original DAT, but I found out that the master had been broken, and as such the only version of it that I had, digitally, was the one I had made. I suppose that if I can ever find another cassette copy of it I could copy from that, but I haven’t been that fortunate.

Fast forward a few years… I’d had the website for a few years by then, and I’d moved servers a couple times. In the process of one of these moves, I accidentally deleted the only copy of the file that I had. I didn’t have a single backup of my website at the time (and yes, I know how stupid that was). And just like that, I was sans MP3.

Well, I was looking through some old CDs I’d burned, and came across a backup I’d done of some of the files on my computer back in 1999, and what did I find when searching through an MP3s folder (it must have contained all of about 50 files tops–that must have been every single MP3 on my entire hard drive at the time!) but the file, in all of its super-compressed, 128Kbps glory.

So naturally, I’m re-posting it on my website. I will warn you ahead of time that not only is the quality not so hot, but having written it at age 15, it’s not very… let’s say it’s not very mature-sounding. It’s repetitive and a little self-indulgent at times, but if I can say so about my own work, I think that there are really some great moments in it. It’s also a little ponderous at a whopping 10 minutes and 16 seconds.

So if you think you can handle it, give Untitled a listen. Comments, of course, are welcomed.

A special note: This is my first LiveJournal post using my new blog software on my website, which syndicates to LJ automatically. I’m planning on doing all of my updates from my website from now on, assuming that it works okay, but there will probably be updates that I do on the website that don’t show up on LiveJournal. I believe that you can subscribe to find out if there are any updates on the website, and if you can’t do that, then I’m going to figure out a way to get that functionality.