Alright. At times, for some reason, we don’t have direct access to our own motives. We have to guess and deduce about why we do what we do. We don’t think we’re a certain kind of person, but then we find ourselves doing the kinds of things that a certain kind of person does, and we have to wonder. Right? This sounds familiar to you. You’ve been here before.

So. I’m not the kind of guy who likes cheesy arena guitar and bad glam rock transitions with squeeling slides down the guitar neck. And yet, in the two most recent songs I’ve MIDIed up in GarageBand, you’ll find cheesy arena guitar (MIDI arena guitar, no less). The newest one (below) is the glammest yet.

So what gives? Granted, since I left my indie rock band so many years ago (10 of them to be exact!), I’ve slowly drifted and flailed about for a defining musical genre, but it’s hard to do that when you’re over 25. I have a hard time wearing anything on my sleeve anymore. This is what comes from being a top secret behind the scenes guy. You know what I mean.

When I sit down to make music these days—when I can find time between work and school and being married and making sure to walk the dog enough—it’s hard to know what kind of music to make. And even if I knew what kind, I have to keep in mind that you can only do so much with GarageBand. Certain musics just sound god-awful when rendered in MIDI. So you quickly learn just not to go there. Metal. Margaritaville. Reggae. Just don’t do it.

I’ve never been one for genres at all (in fact, I hate them). So I don’t know what kind of music I make anymore. This new one sounds a little like some incarnations of Robert Fripp—maybe if he’d taken some valium before recording one of the ProjeKct albums of the late ’90s—so I called it The Frippertastic 5. It may be a rough draft, it may be finished. Hard to tell. When my new 24" 2.33 GHz iMac arrives in the mail next week, I might just have enough CPU power to do more than five tracks at a time. So maybe I’ll augment it and release a remix called The Frippertastic 16 sometime in the future. But don’t hold your breath. You know better than to wait for me to do anything blog related. It’s like watching grass grow.

EDIT (11/12/2007)

I've substituted The Frippertastic 6. My iMac arrived months ago, but the three-day weekend finally gave me some time to add the tracks necessary to do this one right. The rock-out guitar flourish that follows the bass line for one measure at about the 0:58 mark is the one that has me rolling on the floor, though the fleshed out coda is actually almost “pretty,” if you can use that word in reference to a song that has a MIDI arena guitar with heavy use of pseudo-whammy effects.