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Writer's picturezephaniah chesterfield

Song Breakdown: Song 4The Byrd

Just a funky jazzy bluesy bit of a thing. Dirty lo-fi basement and back room sounding heavy bass retro smoker's swing music. I love basement clubs. Them little curtain kickback rooms, the different styles of couches you've never seen anywhere else outside of tv or movies. The people look different. The paint looks different. There's something about the vibe of a basement club that's just better than regular clubs. Regular clubs folks go to blow money, try to hook up, and hear the same shit they heard last weekend, which is the same shit you'll hear all week stuck in traffic or in the stock room or mail room. Offices you gotta have some smooth jazz or elevator music, some kinda hold music station, which now and then do play some bad jams. But the places where people are free and regular... the lower levels, the honest folks... they play the everyday consumer music because that's who they are. The labels and corporations figure out what they want to sell, what kind of people they want to walk the streets, they pick the artists to deliver that message, and then the radios get paid to drill it into your soul. But these basement clubs? Nah man. The dj actually loves music and listens to music and PLAYS MUSIC. DEEP CUTS, shit you only hear if you know the album. The songs way hotter than the singles that get all the marketing and evil backing. The live bands there playing the real shit... playing their hearts out, leaving it all on the stage. The back rooms with the beer you never had before, and the folks talking about the shit no one else talks about on the patios and smoke breaks... them alleys that during the day you had no idea that that alley was "This Alley". Folks at the chain stores might have heard of it, and even might be thrilled with it because they found some "hidden gem" of awesomeness... but the folks at the mom and pop shops that have been on that block forever, with the cork board of fliers and biz cards, they know the spot... knew it back when it was "whatever whatever" and so and so used to own it. Elbow to elbow, holding your bottle up to get to the bathroom, bumping into "oh hell yeuh, i'm talking to YOU later when i come out" and sometimes you just introduce right then and there because the line is a few folks deep, and there's only room for one to three in that bathroom. Bartenders know it's your first time there. Bartenders know who will be back. You find the right dive spot, the right basement hole in the wall, and you're home. It's YOUR scene. You can fade into the cut and end up right where you're supposed to be, with who you're supposed to be there with, without even trying. That kinda magic still exists. Hope it never goes away.


So, diggs it, was hanging out with Byrdo, talkin about how everything is pointless... You know how you have some friends that you can talk to about some things, but other friends who you can talk to about other things, and some friends you can talk to about whatever and there's no limit and no holding back? Byrdo's the last one. Sad thing is, when you wish you were dealing with that shallow friend who won't get into certain issues and go down certain paths... that ain't that friend. That deep shit you might not want to hear? He'll go there like we will. But even when you don't want it to go there, it just might, because that's the ground rules that have been laid out in the friendship. So... it is what it is. Sometimes the talks get deep and dark, almost depressing if you're not able to think for yourself. That's the type of friends you need in living life. Even if they go "too far" for you, you can tell them, "Hey shut up with that, that's a little too much for me right now." and it's nothing personal to them. You get each other. Folks hold back and deal with each other dishonestly, so they can be "better" friends. Ironic, huh? Everything is something to do. Dig it, everything's forgivable too, if you understand. Some folks understand to the point that there's nothing to forgive. Anyways, so Existentialism popped up in a conversation, some stuff about creation and balance, Intelligent Design which is taboo in most fields, even a few scientists discredited and blackballed as the legend goes, just for mentioning it, which is kind childish of scientists but everything is something to do... a few beers later we were all throwing darts and going on about WHY any and everything, and it's all pointless... fate is scripted to the universe but unscripted to us because since we are everything we already know everything so the only thing left to do is become nothing to understand our selves one thing at a time, like shining a spotlight on your self one member of your body at a time in a mirror in a pitch black room. You know what you look like, and what the room looks like, but dig, if you play dumb and make yourself forget, then you can explore and have a full feeling re-membering each part or re-connecting to each part one part at a time. You get to go over every fine detail, see things differently, and get a better understanding of your self and the room. Like we're in a game of being and knowing all, so we forget and disconnect and dismember our self so we can re-member our self and have a purpose, to kill the infinite time we have being. I dunno... it was more like having a debate but we were agreeing with each other and at the same time debating and debunking our own points, i dunno, philosophical conversation tho.


Anyways, so Slikk is in the back, all plugged up, and we'll all just sit around in the room, jamming, talking, and then something will pop out from someone playing something and everyone's like, "Hey! KEEP DOING THAT!" and pick up an instrument or start writing or whatever.... So he's just walking down the stairs on that bassline, and Tyy's like, "Yo... yooooo......" and just slides in on the drums. We had a "Baloo Moment", eyes swirling, just kinda grooving like earthworms wiggling deep in this funkiness that was brewing. Byrdo's like, "Hey.... y'all keep doing that." And Byrdo and me were just sitting there freestyling about the cosmos and reality. I wish we had recorded that part. So then he leaves and the groove is still going, so i jumped on an old acoustic guitar we had laying around and we recorded that. Played it back for Byrdo a couple days later and he's like, "Hey... i like that. That's my kinda jam right there." Maaan, he was grooving out. So we named it after him. He mixed it all up, did whatever producers do, which worked. It's crazy, and i'm getting like them, him and Slikk. They'll be like, 'Yeah! YEAAH!!" slip on some headphones and you won't see them for hours. Just sitting there at the computer, mixing, adding stuff in, taking stuff out... every now and then you hear, "OOOOOOHH!!!" and some crazy laughter.... every now and then, "Aaaawwww DAMMET!?" and then it goes back to long periods of silence and mouse clicking. It looks creepy, they're zombied out, just into the music and the sounds moving and grooving around. Cool when it's done though. Like i said, whatever they do, it works. It's a part of an almost "lost tapes" kinda thing, in my head anyways.


We had a few tracks we thought were lost, some that actually are lost (at the moment)... found this one though. Musicians have a lot of things that never get "put out" or "heard". Really. The album you have from your favorite band maybe has like five songs that didn't make the cut, just laying around on a shelf somewhere, in someone's computer, on a drive or tape or something. So, sometimes, technology being the machine it is, things are on older formats that never got switched over. Remember zip disks?! Yup... got some stuff on some of those. Some stuff on hard drives that the computers just went, as they do, and so we yanked the drive out, got it turned into an external, so all of the files can still be read, but some computers won't read them, so some stuff gets lost that way. Some drives go corrupt, which i never understood that myself, but hey... stranger things have happened. Sometimes stuff just goes missing. You go to save a file and the program or computer or power just goes out. Lost. Some stuff gets recorded in an old phone. Good luck getting that out. Some stuff is in other people's studios, where we learned to keep everything "in house", thank Byrdo and Slikk for that, so we don't have to deal with that loss anymore... but the old computers, the one's that are just gone.... there were a few tracks that i can think of that are just lost. Some stuff you can remember enough to redo, but it ain't the same. I mean, yeah, no song is the same the time after the first, but still... you know it. The motivation is different. You're a different person playing it the second time, so the thoughts and delivery are different. Hurts a little. But oh well.


Anyways, yeah man, this was just clowns and a bear messing around and we actually found it after it got lost in the shuffle. That acoustic guitar is the same one we did "Ms.Ladyma'am" with, so if the sound sounds the same, that's why. The cover is a thing either Byrdo or Tyy did. Looks like Tyy's style, but since Byrdo's name is in there... look careful, kinda obvious but some folks miss it... it might have been him. Either way Tyy slipped it to me, and we used it for this. Pretty cool looking thing.









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