It’s been awhile since I posted anything music-wise. There are many reasons: I’m poor, wouldn’t I rather be outside for the summer?, none of the tracks I’m working on have vocals yet, some of the tracks I have aren’t mine, etc.

This is one track that isn’t mine, per se.

Tai and I were planning to include this track along with Doorknobs and Keyholes and Keep On for our pop album we were going to write and then rename and all that jazz.

Then Tai got engaged to his girlfriend, then he decided to get married this Halloween and have a party for all us Colorado people next summer. That’s probably the next time I’m going to see Tai.

Anyway, I’ve had this track sitting around for over a year-and-a-half. I occasionally revisit it to record more vocals (the lyrics haven’t ever changed, but the melody does…a lot). The version I’m going to post (because I love content and don’t mind people making fun of the process) has two versions of the vocals laid over each other. It’s a weird way to listen to the song, but as a guy who has been trying to find the right way to sing it for almost two years, it allows me to make second-by-second notes on one track while hearing two vocal lines simultaneously.

Who knows when, if ever, this track will be finished.

dont download me “The Only Thing I Face Alone” WORKING VERSION by The Bright Side Of Death

Important things to keep in mind, you ask?

1) When the song is finished, I will not be the one singing on it.
2) The instrumental was written and performed by Ty Hart
3) I’d still love to make this album.
4) This track is not one you want to download and listen to a lot. More of a glimpse into the process.

It’s got a weight
It’s got a height
One big corporeal afterthought
It hits you hard
It hits you fast
You feel the punch in your gut
It’s hard to erase
We can’t forget
It’s over all our heads.

These things. They are a bane.
A scarlet letter hanging ’round the necks of the tame.
The silent are guilty and the loud they aren’t much better off
We can’t just throw it away, we have to turn and face the ugliness

Please don’t say you won’t
Don’t say you can’t

We’re all in this together, now. We were all in this together anyhow.
If I’m not the last one left, the only thing I face alone is death.

Here’s a song that I’ve been sitting on for awhile. Mostly because I never got to do the vocals for it that I wanted to. Mine are pitch-locked, layered and artificial, but I was always planning for someone else to step in and re-record them. This is what the vocals sound like without the backing track or the chorus:

download link “The Drama”, lead Vox, no chorus.

You can hear me getting locked into the right notes by computer, and, yeah, I wish I could sing, but I can’t.

The funny thing about pitch shifting vocals is that they sometimes sound like songs of their own, like Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” which is actually a cool song without any backing track:

download link “Lollipop (a cappella)” by Lil Wayne

The debate about pitch-shifted hip-hop being its own genre rages on, meanwhile, I have a whole bunch of demos with my pitch-sifted horribleness sitting around.

So enjoy the demo of The Drama, a song about your friends talking behind your back. This song was written for two of my friends who were the subject of lots of internal debate amongst my friend group. I don’t think either of them heard the song when it was relevant, so this isn’t one of my digs at my friends’ collective subconscious. It’s just The Drama.

download link” “The Drama (Demo)” by The Bright Side of Death.

You’ve got to know
You’ve got to give
You’ve to think
You’ve got to live.

Oh my god, the drama

Oh man, I bet Tai is going to be kind of pissed at me for this. But I’ll try to make the best argument possible as to why I wanted to get this out there.

Ok: as quick as possible, that’s the goal.

At some point, Tai approached me with a cool idea that he and I write a series of songs that we would eventually bundle into an album that we’d polish until it shone. Then, I would fly out to Los Angeles, we’d hold auditions for singers (one male, one female) and have them come in an re-record all the vocals with, you know, people who could actually sing.

download link “Keep On (Demo)”

The idea being that Tai and I both had grander visions for our music than either of us were able to accomplish on our own and it has been something like 5 years since Serious Bob was doing loads of songwriting as a team.

I sent him a track I did called “Keep On.” He enjoyed it enough to send me his instrumental track called “Doorknobs and Keyholes.” With some auto-tuning fantasticness, and a trip out to Colorado to get Jess to lay down rough female vocals, I managed to turn “Doorknobs and Keyholes” into the kind of pop music Tai and I used to make together all the time.

I still miss doing hard-core poppy stuff.

Anyway, why am I posting about The Bright Side Of Death Now, after months (years?) of referring to it as the Mystery Project or just BSOD? Because Tai can’t overload his computer with Pro-Tools recordings and I’ve started to render a bunch of instrumentals to run by Laine in hopes that I can put out a CD sometime in 2009 with her silky-sweet vocals on it.

I’m not going to turn over BSOD stuff to this new project I’m thinking about, since it’s distinctly a Tai/Da7e project, but I thought I’d at least let you guys hear two of the songs just so maybe you can bother Tai of TYHART.COM about it.

Tell him to update his computer.

download link “Doorknobs and Keyholes (Demo)”