|
MAXEL TOFT18 (Grant)
2024 Here are some more songs specifically developed for WRiTERS' NiGHT community. I played all of these songs solo live before doing these recordings. This is the regular minimalist trio style that Maxel Toft is famous for. It includes all of my bag of tricks except acoustic/electric guitar. Different banjo tunings. Different playing styles. Different recording techniques. Noise. And it is yet another case where the sound engineer, Eric Hagen, seemed a perfect match for making the material sound great. Drivel got it's name from a writing prompt. You can sing "D-R-I-V-E-L, drivel" over the lick. But really it is just an instrumental that wasn't going anywhere so I developed it to remove it from the queue. Buried is a continuation of the new folk music concept. The lyrics are silly but this is one of my favorite tunes. The banjo part for Aimlessness was sitting around for such a long time that I forced this out to get rid of it. I wanted to write about revenge but ended up with this instead. I hadn't been writing in the finger-picking style lately so it was nice to get one of these out there again. The music for Like A Cubic Zirconia was originally written as a variation to add to The Typist but then I decided to rip off myself and match up different words. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have had a good reason to use this lyrical concept. Geographical Midpoint was supposed to be developed as a one-person-band song with drums and keyboard at the same time. But that made me tired and I translated it to banjo. It started as a silly response to all the people that send things in to Letters to the Editor. But then someone actually did write something like this but I lost it and I cannot find it online and now I am not sure if it really happened or if I imagined it. I had to eventually remake The Tinkerer Turns even though this is not much of an improvement on the original that was done for Love On Holiday. At least I tried and now I don't have to think about it anymore. I also fixed some lyrics that I messed up. I had to record this vocal track in the car so I could have privacy and silence while recording. I had trouble with the vocal range and had to sort of yell it. When Steelbridge Got A Sister was a song I wrote in a couple of weeks for a Steel Bridge live performance. I messed up the performance so bad I had to start over on live radio. But here it is along with a phone recorded sample from the Door County Maritime Museum. I was going to bring something better to record the sample but then forgot and had to use my phone. I had to have my son drive the boat without crashing so I could capture the whole sequence. And then we had to be quiet the whole time although there are some other people walking around the museum talking in the background. But the best was when my daughter tried to steer and accidentally crashed and we were trying not to laugh and spoil the recording. I considered using the samples where the boat crashes but that didn't seem to be in good taste. Old Men Still See You is based on a real event that happened at the Tambo. An old guy said something like "old men still see you" which I interpreted as still looking at young women. I heard this and thought "man, I hope I am not still looking at young women when I am his age" and decided to write something about it. I got blocked for a few weeks and then another (female) poet read a poem based the same event but took a positive "old people/young love" approach. I was disappointed and it inspired me to work harder on this and the breakthrough came when I decided that I should present the character as looking forward to getting old and being allowed to objectify women openly. Now I don't think this character accurately represents me or the old man it is based on. And that's the way I like it! I wanted to record this to old fashioned tape but ended up using my phone (in the car again) just to get it over with. |