This song, “Alberta,” was written this afternoon and inspired by the photo at left, taken by Canadian photographer Christopher Martin.
Come see my new band, Juno and Jupiter, play it’s first show this Saturday, January 5th at the Drunken Unicorn. We go on around 9:20pm; please come check us out!outlook
“Alberta”
You’re not what you were before
I see you still have your old beauty and your charm, but
You’ve been left out in the cold for oh so long
I’ve not forgotten the way you were before
Roaming the hills of Alberta with you, my old love
Our first summer after college we said fuck it all
Taking only what we could carry on our backs
Oh, I still see you, I still see you, I still see you among those apple trees
It doesn’t feel like it did before
Me so naive to think I could catch those moment in a jar
Now you’re just a sign for someone else’s message
Chucked off to the side and fenced off, kept apart, ohhh, so far
Roaming the hills of Alberta with you, my old love
Our first summer after college we said fuck it all
Taking only what we could carry on our backs
Oh, I still see you, I still see you, I still see you among those apple trees
Furry with snow about a half mile from where we would go
To swim without clothes, sounds of insects and birds
would follow us home
Roaming the hills of Alberta with you, my old love
Our first summer after college we said fuck it all
Taking only what we could carry on our backs
Oh, I still see you, I still see you, I still see you among those apple trees
I started writing this song, “Thank You,” the day before Thanksgiving in hopes of posting it that week. I still don’t have the melodies finalized – again lyrically lagging behind.
The song is about being up against it, running and gratitude. Here is the first verse:
The rain is coming down but I just have to get out of the house
to feel the air against my skin and sweat my demons out.
As I pour over the asphalt the past is running through my mind
but those things they stay the same no matter how fast I fly.
But the streets are drying out as I make the turn toward home,
and the sunshine is breaking through the clouds.
We’ll be playing this and other new songs at Juno and Jupiter‘s first show on Saturday, January 5th at the Drunken Unicorn. We go on early; please come check us out!
Richard Milne has long been a musical institution in Chicago. His show on 93XRT, Local Anesthetic, is the longest-running local music show in Chicago and has been on air for over 20 years. As part of his program, Richard annually hosts the Local Anesthetic Holiday Spectacular (now in it’s 21st year), in which local bands send in 30-45s snippets of original holiday-themed songs. You can listen to some past samples here.
This week’s song, “Do You Remember?” is Juno and Jupiter’s entry into the 2012 holiday show, airing on XRT on December 16th and 23rd. The link below it, “Holiday Song,” is a song that my Radio Mango bandmates and I put together 5-6 years ago for the program.
Many of you may have heard this one before. “Ain’t No Sunshine” was one of the first electronic songs I worked on. It’s also one of the only covers I’ve ever played.
I’m struggling to keep up lyrically with the musical ideas I’ve been creating lately. I’m excited about this one, nonetheless. We will play it – with vocals! – at our show at the Drunken Unicorn on Saturday, January 5th. In the meantime, enjoy. I will post a new demo once I finish the lyrics. Wait for the hand claps.
I was hoping to post a brand new song today, but I just haven’t been able to finish the vocal parts. Hopefully, it will go up next week. Instead, I’m posting a demo of an old song, “Drifting,” which I recently resurrected. It aptly describes how I’ve been feeling lately: a bit untethered.
I wrote this week’s song, “Little Bird,” in a Seattle rehearsal space when I was prepping for a Vancouver show in June. Read more here. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but I really love this song.
I was walking home from the train in Logan Square when I came up with the original idea for “If I Stole.” I went inside and made a one-minute snippet to get the idea down (first link below). I finished the original reggae version of the song a few days later (second link), which I presented in the songwriting class I was taking at the time with Steve Dawson at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. A few months after writing the song, I formed About A Girl and re-worked the song to include electronic sounds (third link), which is how we’ve played the song since.
This week’s “Song of the Week” demo is a work in progress about internal dialogue. The synth part on the chorus is saying: “Oh, listen to the words that you are saying. Oh, listen to the sounds.”
Comments are closed 
