Moss Palace All Songs

Jamuary Fun-A-Day 2023

Moss Palace Picks

We made this song for Round Zero (the qualifying round) of the annual Nur Ein online songwriting tournament in 2021. We were given the title "Semiprecious" and challenged to include "Gradual emphasis of repetitions" whatever that meant.

Nur Ein XVI

Moss Palace - Semiprecious

Nur Ein XV

Moss Palace - North Beach Vampires

Moss Palace - Chupacabra

Moss Palace - Carte Blanche

Moss Palace - Homestretch

This was our entry for Round 1 of the 2021 edition of the annual songwriting tournament "Nur Ein". We were given the title "Pareidolia" (aka seeing faces in objects) and challenged to use a field recording. We incorporated a thunderstorm field recording in this song.

Moss Palace - Pareidolia

The Song Fight! community occasionally puts on a "cover fight" in which we all cover some songs. One style of "cover fight" called "original flava" involves covering each others' songs. Back in 2013 we did one of those and for that I made this cover of "Paper Thin" by Primitive Screwheads. I tried to give it a haunting vibe. It's got acoustic guitar, real drums that I played, fake vibes, slide guitar, and I made good use of my Fender Deluxe Reverb's reverb and tremolo. You can find the original here: http://sfjukebox.org/songs/paper_thin/Primitive%20Screwheads

"Paper Thin" by Primitive Screwheads (cover)

One time in 2009 I went out to brunch with friends, and I was thinking about how much I love brunch. I went home and wrote a song about it on ukulele. Here's an updated mix/master of that song. Do you love brunch too? Then this song is for you!

Cover art from DALL-E mini using the prompt "breakfast face"
https://huggingface.co/spaces/dalle-mini/dalle-mini

I Love Brunch

Back in 2009 as part of some side thing for Song Fight! I wound up doing this reinterpretation of Everclear's "Santa Monica" and turned it into a smooth melancholy groovy song. I don't sing in a low register like this very often but maybe I should do it more?! I had forgotten I'd done this cover till the other day and when I came upon it I decided to remix and remaster it and post it here.

"Santa Monica" (Everclear cover)

Another in my series of "covers on demand". I asked my Facebook friends to suggest songs for me to cover and selected the classic "Invisible Sun" by The Police. I then threw this together in a few hours, using my trusty SH-101 and Monotron synths, melodica, glockenspiel, and various other instruments. Hope you like it!

"Invisible Sun" by The Police (cover)

I've been asking folks to suggest songs for me to cover lately. This is the second one, and I decided to take the lyrics for this terrible terrible song and just write new music for them without even bothering to listen to the original. (If I ever hear the original again it'll be too soon, ugh.) I hope you find it at least tolerable, perhaps even enjoyable, in spite of the source material.

"Achy Breaky Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus (cover)

I almost skipped making music today but then I decided to just whip something up using software synths and try to just have a simple repeating pattern with layers coming and going and some basic melodies.

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For my third cover, I picked "Policy of Truth" by Depeche Mode from the suggested songs. I went a little nutty this time, using bass, acoustic guitar, drum machine, three synths, tambourine, melodica, accordion, and glockenspiel. Oh yeah, and kazoo. Not sure that was a good idea. Also the vocals could use a bit of touching up, but in the spirit of trying to keep this relatively spontaneous I'm not going to spend a lot of time laboring over them. (UPDATE: In 2025 I touched up the vocals.) I had a lot of fun cranking this out in a few hours time, hope you enjoy it.

"Policy of Truth" by Depeche Mode (cover)

My live synth jam for day 2 of Jamuary and Fun-A-Day 2023

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My live synth jam for Jamuary and Fun-A-Day 2023 day 4

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My live synth jam for Jamuary and Fun-A-Day 2023 day 6

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My live synth jam for Jamuary Fun-A-Day 2023 day 3

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My live synth jam for Jamuary Fun-A-Day 2023 day 5

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We wrote this song for Round Zero of the 18th edition of the annual online songwriting tournament Nur Ein. We were given the title "Sink Or Swim" and challenged to write about the changing of the seasons.

Nur Ein XVIII

Moss Palace - Sink Or Swim

This weekend I threw together a quick cover of a fun weird one-off song by Homie, a band made up of Rivers Cuomo, Matt Sharp, the original guitarist from Cake, the drummer from Soul Coughing, and one other dude. It's a little rough around the edges and could use more Matt Sharpe style whacky backing vox, but I think it's still a fun song. https://weezerpedia.com/w/index.php?title=American_Girls

"American Girls" by Homie (cover)

Here's a synthwave (maybe?) jam on just the volca sample2, Prophet rev2, and SH-101. I'm using the Prophet for the bassline and the low melody line. I'm using the SH-101 three ways: sequence arpeggios through some delay, live playing with pitch bending and vibrato, and chord swells through a harmonizer. I wanted to try out making longer sequences, which meant using the Prophet and SH-101 sequencers. I also wanted to be able to sequence 1/16th notes, which meant, only using the korg volca sample 2, which can be configured to emit one clock pulse per step. (The volca keys or bass can only emit one clock pulse per every two steps.) Switching programs on the Prophet in proper time while the sequencer is running turns out to be a bit tricky. Probably it'd be better if I had a MIDI foot switch for that.

Jamuary Fun-A-Day 2024 07

Moss Palace June Moon 2024 Mix

I'm back doing live electronic jams for another Jamuary and Fun-A-Day for 2025. Here's the first jam!

Jamuary Fun-A-Day 2025 01

Here's my jam for night 2! I got a new synth today, the Donner Essential B1 analog bass synth. I'd never heard of it before but I was glad to have a new synth to throw into the mix. I've got a ways to go in terms of figuring out how to sequence the thing and get it playing nicely with my volcas.

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Short on time and inspiration and motivation tonight, so, I threw together an experimental noise jam based on the idea "What if the drum 'beat' is just all the drums playing all the time?" and going from there.

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Here's a bouncy repetitive groove. Mostly usual setup but I sequenced the bassline on the SH-101 and I played leads on both the Prophet and the reface CP (which is still all set up from last night).

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Big departure for tonight! I recently received a "Synth-A-Sette" cassette sized monophonic analog synth, and today the Stylophone CPM DS-2 drone synth I ordered arrived. Obviously I had to make something more ambient and drone-y with those, although I did play some melodies on the Synth-A-Sette.

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I finally decided to swap the volca sample 2 in place of the volca beats, at the nearly last minute. This is a groove with a beat, bassline, bloopy parts, and live and sequenced leads.

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Final jam! Tonight I have a jam that switches between having drums and having drones. I play leads on the Prophet and the Synth-A-Sette. And now I'm done with Jamuary and Fun-A-Day!

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I wrote this song in 2022 for the Nur Ein songwriting tournament. For this particular round of the tournament the given title was "Novel". For some reason I was inspired at that time to write a song about my cat, Jesse James, aka JJ. We also had to include samples and make them integral to the song. I sampled my cat, which seemed to me inherently integral to the song since without him the song would not exist. Beyond just meeting the demands of the tournament I tried to write about the general feeling of having and loving a pet and knowing that they live short lives and are to be cherished while you have them and forever after. (JJ passed away in June 2025.)

Novel

I wrote this song for the Song Fight title "She Has Magnets In Her". It's a very silly little synth pop tune about a guy making a robot girlfriend powered by an LLM.

She Has Magnets In Her

Here goes the first year of my second decade of making music every day in January. I wasn't able to get set up in advance so today I hastily threw together a basic synth rig in the afternoon and jammed out this off the cuff drone piece tonight. I used a Korg volca beats, into a Stylophone CPM DS-2 sequenced by a Korg SQ-1, into a Korg NTS-1 that I played via a MIDI keyboard and used for effects. I've been making live instrumental synth jams so that's my starting default but I may mix things up more this year.

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Tonight I made another beats and NTS-1 repetitive jam with the keys.

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This is Merisan's entry for Round Four of the Nur Ein XII songwriting tournament. We were given the title "A Sense of the Absurd", and we were challenged to write our song around a "mondegreen". Classic examples of mondegreens are people thinking Jimi Hendrix is saying "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" instead of "Excuse my while I kiss the sky", and CCR singing "There's a bathroom on the right" instead of "There's a bad moon out tonight". The term "mondegreen" was coined for this phenomenon by a woman who misheard "Laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen". We decided to write our song around that original mondegreen, and make "Lady Mondegreen" the character in our song's story. Musically we were inspired this time by the New Pornographers.

Nur Ein XII

Merisan - A Sense Of The Absurd (Nur Ein XII Round Four)

This is our entry for Round Five of the Nur Ein XII songwriting tournament. We were given the title "Elevator Men" and the challenge of incorporating "prominent musical repetition". We thought of the band Stereolab, and of singing the title in French, and we wrote a song about the old elevator operators on the Eiffel Tower.

Merisan - Elevator Men (Nur Ein XII Round Five)

Guess what? It's Nur Ein time again! Yes, the annual Nur Ein songwriting tournament has begun its fourteenth iteration. This is our first entry, for the title "Message Received" for the open entry Round Zero. We had to incorporate spelling into our song. Erin wanted to rock out this time, so we rocked out.

Nur Ein XIV

Merisan - Message Received

This is our entry for Round Four of this year's Nur Ein songwriting tournament. We were given the title "No Memory" and the challenge to use chiptunes or computer sounds. We wound up making an Abba inspired dance pop song. We also went all in on the chiptunes and mostly constructed the song from the sounds of the Teenage Engineering PO-20 Arcade Pocket Operator. Since we had already made plans to be out of town the weekend this was due we wound up recording it in a hotel room in San Luis Obispo! I went back after the round was over and spent some more time on the song though. I think this is a really fun little pop trifle.

Merisan - No Memory

I started writing a guitar rock song this morning using an alternative tuning, inspired by the inimitable Glenn Case. He's doing the song Jamuary flavor and is absolutely crushing it. Unfortunately I can't quite crank out a song as fast as he can. I got derailed and wound up just having time for another synth jam. Same setup as the last couple nights only I used the built-in sequencer in the SH-101 instead of the SQ, and in addition to the usual EQ/compression I also added some reverb to the SH-101 in Cubase.

Jamuary Fun-A-Day 2020

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Moss Palace is a new project lead by Erin that I am helping with. We're participating in the annual songwriting competition, Nur Ein, which is having its fifteenth iteration this year. This song was written for Round One, with the title "The Handbook" and we were challenged to include step-by-step instructions in the lyrics.

Moss Palace - The Handbook

This is our entry into Round Two of Nur Ein VIII. We were given the title "I Don't Want An Answer To That" and were challenged to incorporate a title from Song Fight! ( http://songfight.org/ ). 

Merisan - I Don't Want An Answer To That

This was our entry to Round Five of Nur Ein VIII. We were given the title "Firestorm" and the musical challenge "Falsetto". After finishing second a few times we decided to play to our strengths and do a song featuring acoustic guitar finger picking and harmony vocals. It must have worked because we won the round! It was only victory of Nur Ein VIII. I think the vocals and pedal steel and accordion all turned out really good, and that this is one of the prettier songs we've made.

Sam Douglass

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