The Freshman Experiment

Hey guys, so here’s the chorus that kait and i currently have.  kait’s also got text for the first verse, but i haven’t set it yet.vermont is amazing, expect lots of juicy bad years videos soon.xo, b 

Brian and I are off to Vermont to work on Tales from the Bad Years at the Paramount Theatre. It will be us and the mountains for a few days. My hope is that (1) I will get to work on Last Week’s Alcohol once I finish off the work on my check list for Bad Years and (2) I have internet in order to post.

In the meantime, be jealous. I know I’m supposed to savor the sun for as long as I can and I’ll miss it come winter, but the idea of 70 during the day and 50 at night? Mmmm. That is some good sleeping weather. And we get to go swimming, which I LOVE. So I’ll try to write soon, but I just wanted to let everyone know. I haven’t forgotten about Last Week’s Alcohol. I’ve just been called away.  Right now I’m trying to structure out the story and it’s kind of messy. I can’t figure out how much time to spend at the parties and how much to spend on the top and bottom where they’re together. What do you guys think? Party? Right now I’m thinking party. I love the way it loops around and that the entire reason she goes back is because of all the drunken shinanigans around her.

Saw Vicky Christina Barcelona. While I don’t like the title, it is an incredibly fun place to be - both in location and plot. Reminded me of Superbad in that you could end it positively wherever but good job ending it at 90 minutes, Woody. It was lots of fun… And if acting were a sport with points, Penelope Cruz would have kicked everyone else’s ass. I would have given her a 6.2 for difficulty and a 7 for execution. According to the tepid and rambly reportage of the Olympics scoring system on MSNBC earlier today, that is very excellent.

I culled all of ChristineCoke’s posts about the weekend that will make up Last Week’s Alcohol and I made something of a poem out of them. I took out some of the less singable words and more specific details that make it her life instead of the life of every college kid in the country. Then, I started changing the tense and the person. As much as Wishy is out of the picture - this is the weekend about them getting back together. That’s one of the cool things about the post - we begin with her telling us that they are trying to be friends, and the tension builds and the barriers break until finally they find each other again. It’s something every one of us have done - for better or worse.

But without really adding anything, I’ve edited down the details that CC wrote that I’m interested in trying to use. The only thing I drastically changed is the part in italics. It was originally: “This is how I felt when I began falling in love with The Ex. The first time it reminded me of those moments in movies when someone’s riding in the back of an ambulance holding the hand of her boyfriend or daughter or mother. It’s that mixture of sadness and affection and urgency that was swarming in my stomach.” I don’t know know if I can get that image of the ambulance into this song as well but I’d like to. It’s a hard thing to make work in a song because each word takes on such potency - I feel like the literal-ness of an ambulance could confuse the point but if it doesn’t, then it could be coo.

Here are CC’s details:

Making assholes of ourselves.

Drunks passing by just couldn’t catch our vibe

“Let me see your fingers.”

“I like your military hair.”

You come closer and we both forget that night when I yelled.

And we both forget about the girl from home.

It was just me and you in your small twin bed, your computer humming gently against my lap.

Angry, bitter tears fill up the bottom of my eyes

Slipping a mini skirt over tights

Give me a call and we’ll find each other.

As shots are being passed around, I draft a text.

“Sorry, I’m about to go to bed. Let’s get dinner tomorrow night?”

I wanted to send it to you later tonight.

We’re drinking last week’s alcohol.

It’s warm and sears our throats on the way down.

German techno

Their voices pound against my ears.

We are stumbling, laughing.

Our cell phones keep falling out of our hands onto the wet ground.

I’m happy drunk.

We catch up, both of us holding Natty’s in our hands.

Vodka paired with any juice you can find.

No one cares.

No one will remember but her.

She uses the wall to balance herself.

CALL FROM YOU blinks up at me.

I press ignore and feel his hand on my waist.

We don’t hook up because he stopped calling.

My lips brushing against his ear

I give him my cheek when he comes in for the kiss.

The alcohol is making my brain careen from side to side against my skull.

So we could stay, have fun, be happy drunk.

She wanted to make him jealous, I think.

Prying her off the lips of the random guy once again.

But I like you, the random guy says. I fucked things up, didn’t I?

I shake my head in disbelief.

I know his name, of course.

But we’d never spoken before.

I feel my phone vibrate again.

I flip it open to see CALL FROM YOU.

This time I pick up.

Yes, it is partly because of the Smirnoff and Bacardi we drank that I’m playing connect-the-dots with the freckles on your arms and ignoring the butterflies.

The feeling makes me suffocate.

But when I finally leave your room and climb into my own bed, I cry because I know I was willing.

This is how I feel when I begin falling in love.
A mixture of sadness, affection,
Of urgency swarming.

I’m working on Last Week’s Alcohol and I want to share with you guys what Brian just sent me. It’s cool to hear what came out of his long ramblings that he posted a couple months ago. Right now it’s 3 minutes and we anticipate the song being about 7 or 8… but this is what the basic groove will be based on.

I want you to know what you’re listening to: this isn’t what the song will be. This is the groove I’ll be listening to as I write lyrics… so the lyrics end up almost feeling like a descant above this main melody. At some point, we hope that the main motif will be sung with a lyric on it but that probably only happens once.

Take a listen. My notes so far are mostly schematic. I don’t have a plan for where the story goes yet but I’ll start to map it all out pretty soon and I’ll share this as I go.

I was just looking through a bunch of the older posts and I finally recognized how fully CC’s titles almost always have hooks for songs in them. Even when it’s not a song I want to write or it’s a song that doesn’t really match the post itself (Rolling Thunder being a prime example), it’s still a song title.

This is not to disparage any of PC’s post titles (or mine for that matter). It’s just one of those things. Some people’s writing lends itself to hooks. We never asked for song titles. This was not something that was planned. It just happened. That’s sort of the beauty of it. Sometimes, we found hooks in other places within the post, but generally speaking - it just sat there in the title.

For those of you who are wondering what a hook is - it is quite simply the repeated and defining phrase that is sung in a song. Generally speaking, it’s the title: Some Enchanted Evening, Oops I Did It Again, I’m Not Gonna Write You a Love Song (actually - I don’t know if that’s the title of the song but that’s definitely the hook) … Born in the USA. Basically, when a musical hook and a lyric hook are working in tandem - they are ridiculously memorable and catchy. When they aren’t, there’s some other memorable musical idea of the song.

Anyway, some people write in cliches, some people write in axioms, CC writes song titles.

Today, I’m going over to Brian’s to do some work on the epic Last Week’s Alcohol. I know we’ve been remiss in our Fresh X song writing. It’s been a long hard few months on our little brains. So many songs, so many concerts, so many rewrites. But we’re excited to isolate this and just do a bit of good and dirty work today. Nothing refined. I’ll let you know how it goes.

After the Bruce Springsteen concert. Because yes, we’re going to that first. Remember when they call him The Boss? I do. I think he still dresses like he’s in the 80s - which is about to go out of style AGAIN.

I might also let you know how that goes.