I wrote this song sometime around 2003.  As the first and last verse goes...I was locked outside of my house after swimming in the pool. It was something that happened often to me back then and was quite a big peeve of mine.

So you may be wondering how this unfortunate situation evolved into a song about staying in bed all day?  Well, while standing out in the cold waiting for someone to let me in, I pictured myself in a better place...specifically in my bed, warm and snug under the blanket. And this led to me writing this song.  Staying in bed all day may seem like a waste of time, but the way I see it, it's an opportunity to just chill and relax.  It's where I can reflect and let inspiration take me to places I wouldn't normally go when I'm up and about.   It's where I can lay back and dream and think about writing songs like this.

Sleepyhead

I always used to introduce Moon Song in gigs as the song I wrote about the first time I got drunk.  It was quite the experience for a 14 year old kid.  So much so, that it pushed me  to put in a little more effort into writing this song.  Not that it was too hard.  As a love struck teenager, all the sappy lyrics just flowed out nonstop!

For the longest time, I went back and forth on whether to re-record Moon Song, given that there already was a more than decent version of this song already recorded with my original band Greg's House  And in my experience, whenever a musician revisits an old song, it almost never turns out as good as the original. Still, I thought that it would be worth a shot and try to and breathe new life into  this almost 30 year old song. 

This time around I didn't want to just straight up redo the original and wanted to focus on building up a more relaxed and low key "atmosphere" for the song.  So yeah, here is the more..."mature" version of a Greg's House staple, and one of the first "grand" songs I ever wrote.

If you want to check out the original Greg's House version, you can listen to it here:

https://soundcloud.com/user-859917258/moonsong

Moon Song

Back in college, my band Greg's House was invited to participate in a song writing contest. We had to write a song based around the theme of "clean living"....so we wrote Sundown. Lyrically it's not the best work we came up with. And believe me, the original version was even worse with lyrics like "it feels good to be bad!". Despite it's rather sketchy origin, Sundown was one of the first original songs that we put together as a band. And it became one of our most popular songs....with our friends at least.

For the longest time, I had the idea of redoing this straight up rocker as a more laid back keyboard driven song. I made full use of Garageband's instrument library adding jazz, tonewheel and heavy metal organs, along with a wurlitzer classic and flying clav for good measure. I also wanted to venture out of my comfort zone and experiment with an electronic drum kit and arpeggiator. In the end though I couldn't help myself and threw in a more traditional drum kit and some guitars to some portions of the song.

This is definitely one of my most ambitious projects to date. I'm not sure what my "college self" would think of this rendition, but "present me" is pretty happy with the result!

For reference, here's a link to the original version by Greg's House.

https://soundcloud.com/user-859917258/sundown

Sundown

This was the very first song I wrote for my college band Greg's House.  The original version  was a more straight forward rock song with a very "Gin-Blossom-y" sound.  After performing it a bunch of times, we decided to properly record it.  But when we were in the studio,  we rearranged and reworked it into a completely different song.  THAT version is the one that can be found in our "Demo One" recording, that has been the official version of "Don't Think Twice" for all these years.

This time around though, I wanted to revisit my original arrangement and see what I could come up with.  For a "first song", I think it was pretty ambitious since it employed 2 different time signatures between the verses and chorus.   And I think it was  for this reason we decided to rework it since we couldn't quite get the switches right. 

Anyway, I'm glad I decided to do this.  The reworked version is still special to me, but I really enjoyed bringing the original back to life.  By the way, taking a cue from my favorite band the Counting Crows and their album, "August and Everything After", the song's artwork is actually the original written lyrics  of the song from a piece of scratch paper over 20 years old.

Demo One version: 
https://soundcloud.com/user-859917258/dont-think-twice

Dont Think Twice

OK this is gonna be longer than usual...but hopefully you'll indulge me :)

Back around 2003-04, I was in a long term relationship that had hit a major crossroad.  When you've  been together with someone for a long time, the question of marriage is oftentimes brought up by family and friends.  Unfortunately, we weren't in an ideal situation to take that next step and it was causing a lot of stress between us.  And so I wrote this song.  

This was my way of reassuring my girlfriend and being thankful for the life we shared together.  It didn't matter what others around us or even societal norms expected out of us. What was important was that we had each other and that together we could see all this stress as yet another challenge in our lives and move forward together....at our own speed....we're not under pressure.

Ultimately though, it didn't work out between us, and we moved on and started our own respective families.  But we have remained friends through it all so I guess that counts for something. 

Some of the best songs are those written for or about people we love.  The problem is that if things go south with that person, these songs are oftentimes shelved and forgotten, which while understandable can be such a shame.  But I didn't want that to happen to this song which to my recollection, is the last song I ever wrote  up to this point.

Even if the relationship behind "No Pressure" didn't last, I still feel that the message of the song is still a relevant one; that it's really up to us to decide how we define all the trials in our lives as either something bad or opportunities for growth.   So I'm happy that I finally managed to revisit it.  And hopefully once I'm done reworking all my old songs I can finally move on to something new.

No Pressure

For the longest time, "Look Inside" existed as an unfinished song scribbled onto my lyric notebook.  Just a bunch of random lines I wrote down and basically forgot about until I rediscovered them a few years later.  In any case, I finally fleshed out a basic acoustic "pop song" song out of it and figured that I was good with it.  But that was years ago and I figured that it was time for an update.

To get me excited about reworking "Look Inside" I set out to try something different.  In my head I had the peg of the song "I Believe" by Tears for Fears which is a beautiful low key piano ballad.  I would ditch the usual rock song set up, and play around with a brush drum kit, stand up bass and throw in some strings and brass instruments...like I said, different.  But the more I worked on it, the more I found myself speeding up the tempo bit by bit, until it evolved into something a little more closer to a breezy Ben Folds or Burt Bacharach number.

Once again this is quite a departure from the original version, or from any of my other songs, but it was fun to do, and that's all that matters.

Look Inside

Mr. Big is one of those bands that casual listeners tend to only associate with their acoustic hit "To Be With You". Which in my opinion is rather unfortunate since this multi talented band definitely has a lot more to its resume than that.  Case in point is this gem, Green Tinted Sixties Mind.  Upon first listen, it's the melodic guitar intro riff by Paul Gilbert that instantly grabs your attention.  But for me what I always loved about the song were the beautiful 3 part harmonies in the chorus. So this is what I decided to focus on in my cover version of the song.  

I hope I didn't bastardize the original too much.  It's definitely not a note for note cover. I wanted to try and shake it up a bit with something slightly different. There's no way I could replicate the iconic intro, so I just decided to simplify it a bit and split the notes between trumpet, piano and bass.  Anyway I also decided to slow the entire song  down a bit for a more laid back groove.  And as for the horns....I guess that it was a bit of a hangover from using them in my previous song "Look Inside".  Ultimately, their similar style works out as I originally recorded these songs together way back in 2004.

Green Tinted Sixties Mind

I Will Never Let You Down

This will long but please indulge me :)

After over two months of working on church songs...I took a break to do something different...a "church song" he he.

When I first joined Luke 18 way back in nineteen ninety something....I met and group of dudes whom I shared  a common love for jamming glam rock music with.  They called themselves the Nasty Little Bastards (or N.L.B. for short) and it wasn't long before I joined them as their lead singer.  "Walk the Dog" written by Martin Valdes was our first original song and quite a hit with all our friends.  While it was originally played as a straight up rocker, it gradually evolved into an almost entirely different song a few months later. Chino Yuson came up with a more chill and laid back chord progression for it and  David Esteban and I added a rather cheesy rap in the end because if Winger could rap....then so could we! 

Anyway, fast forward to a few months ago and  Enzo Lim randomly hit me up on FB messenger with scans of most of our original NLB song lyrics typed out on Word Star and printed out on a state-of-the-art Epson dot matrix printer.  This inspired me to bring to life our most fleshed out song of the bunch...Walk The Dog, so here it is.

Yes the song is cheesy and jokey at times....we were kids....but underneath all the kalokohan was a universal and poignant message of making the most of your limited time here on Earth.  Just "walk the dog" and things will turn out fine!

Walk The Dog

The late 90's was probably the lowest point in my relationship with my dad. While  I wasn't really a problematic child, we had our fair share of misunderstandings and disagreements.  Aside from the huge age gap between us,  I was also a teenager absorbed in my own world of "my dad just doesn't understand who I am as a person" mentality.  

Anyway, back then,  I would spend a lot of time at night in my local park alone to blow off steam and stew in my own hurt feelings.  And it was one of nights that led me to writing this song.  

The main problem with us is that we often times tried to hash things out while emotions were still raw between  us, so as a result, our "talks" would just lead to even more fighting.  Yes the song is rather overly dramatic, but it was written at the height of my period of teenage angst and rebellion. And I was also heavily into Elliott Smith's music at the time, so there is a whole lot of melancholy resignation in the feel of the song.  

For years I lost track of this song, until a few weeks ago during a random cleaning when I found my original lyrics scribbled on an old sheet of scratch paper.  Reading them brought me back to that place in time with my dad and made me thankful that despite all we went through, we did manage to mend our relationship well before he passed in 2004.

Out For A Fight

Starting the week with a new song.  If you have a few minutes...and some headphones (or earbuds) please indulge me :)

This was another "forgotten" song from years ago that I recently recovered.  At the time I wrote it, I was heavily into Elliott Smith and his influence was showing up in the songs I was writing at the time. I was pushing myself to produce more introspective and quiet songs. This is the third (and last) song in my "teenage angst" writing period  with the first two being "Some Reassurance" and "Out For A Fight" (currently out on Spotify and other streaming platforms!).  

For "Nothing Left To Say"  I wanted to build a more low key but atmospheric song, if that makes any sense.  Given that, the focus of this song for me were the instrumental parts, the intro, middle and outro, with the lyrics taking a backseat.  For the "solo" I opted to use a solitary trumpet because I felt it matched perfectly the melancholy feel of the song.  But of course, I ended up fattening the later part with a bunch of strings and other random instruments.  

Anyway, I guess there's nothing left to say about this song, except that I'm quite satisfied with the end result.  Now hopefully I can move on to happier or at least more upbeat songs next.

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