When My Baby Was Mine

My one-person band, drowsy, delivers this delicious 1950s-inspired retro-pop (with crunchy autoharp topping!) directly to your doorstep. Quick, answer the door!

I like making up songs. I often find the process of finishing them to be kind of a chore. I have a backlog of maybe 15-20 songs half finished, partially recorded, waiting for me to get back to them. Some of these songs go back years.

So in January I made a resolution: I'd finish one song a month and post it to MeFi Music. This is the first of those songs.

A glance at the calendar and some basic math will tell you how well that plan has been working out. Can I catch up over the next nine months? Or will I be posting eleven really lousy songs in the last two weeks of December? The suspense is killing me, too!

I hope you enjoy this tasty little dish. It's autoharp (two tracks -- one fairly clean, one awful dirty), SR-16 drum machine, and a little bit of Q-Chord on the bridge. More details concerning its genesis are here, and the words are here.

(Get Flash to see the track player.)
posted by Karlos the Jackal (3 comments total)

This is just awesome. I really dig the breakdown, especially.

I've got an enormous backlog of half-finished stuff, too. Dozens, maybe a hundred, maybe more. I actually categorized it all once--this is how resistant to actually doing things I am--into "finish," "don't finish," "don't start" folders. I don't think any of the "finish" stuff ever got finished, though. Maybe I'll start on it when I get through the backlog of current unfinished stuff.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:05 AM on April 4, 2008

Awesome song. Autoharp ftw. What is q-chord?

I too can relate about the backlog of unfinished songs... I've got a little pile myself.
posted by kingbenny at 7:11 AM on April 4, 2008

kingbenny -- a Q-Chord is sort of a cross between an autoharp and a synthesizer. Here is a picture of mine. In this song, it's the thing making the little harpsichord sounds on the bridge.

uncleozzy -- yeah, I like making little to-do lists -- I wrote down the 15 songs that were closest to being done in a notebook, and wrote a list of things to do under each one, with little checkboxes...then, when I have a free day, the night before I'll go through the notebook and pick out some tasks and write them down in a new to-do list. If I don't pre-focus I end up just sort of wandering around aimlessly.
posted by Karlos the Jackal at 2:27 AM on April 5, 2008