The below might be the new instrumentals cover and title. I might switch it up again.

Right now, the mix down version is about an hour long:

And here’s a real pretty ballad:

dontdownloadme “I Thought Things Would Be Different When We Met Again” by Citizen Nowhere off Citizen Nowhere, non canonical, purple & smoke

On 6/25/2009 I made a “non canonical” cover that was so cool-looking to me that it basically justified the existence of a non canonical album.

In case you don’t know about the Citizen Nowhere project, it is going to end up being 8 albums. It started in 2003 and you can get six of the albums by CLICKING OVER TO THIS POST and the seventh at THIS POST.

That means there is one more to go and the post directly below this one (at least if you are reading this on the Listen Or Don’t section of my blog), you can hear “Loose Lips,” which will be on Citizen Nowhere 8.

But “Loose Lips” got me thinking about how I wanted 8 to sound, and I realized that the nearly-complete album I thought was #8 really wasn’t. It was a bunch of tracks that didn’t fit. Most of them were about the Recession, some were left over from previous albums, but it wasn’t fitting together and it wasn’t providing a listening experience.

So: there will be two additional “albums” of material before I close out Citizen Nowhere with the 8th album. This track, “Escape Sometime” will be on the disc called: non canonical, b-sides. There will also be a non canonical, instrumentals that will have - you guessed it - instrumentals only.

Despite the preview/”leak” track here, the B-Sides album will probably come out second.

non canonical, instrumentals will be the first release, and you will get that within the next two weeks. It’s really neat. I almost thought about making a cover that looked like it was an original motion picture soundtrack to a movie I’ll never make…

Hmmmm.

Maybe I’ll still do that.

If I find a way to escape sometime…

dontdownloadme “Escape Sometime” by Citizen Nowhere off Citizen Nowhere, non canonical, b-sides

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.

I thought that this year was going to see the release of a solo album that I actually got reproduced and UPC coded to sell and have. It’d be a testament to my years and years of making music for no apparent reason.

But I’m hesitant. I don’t really want to open myself up to the criticism that selling my work inevitably does, and releasing an album really only means one thing: live shows. I know a whole bunch of folks perform in “laptop bands,” but there is nothing visually exciting about what I do.

And what happens if the track is more quiet and possibly instrumental, like this current work in progress? Yeah it’s gonna have lyrics, but only because it needs to. Otherwise it’s this song mostly recorded instrument-by-instrument with one difference from normal recordings: none of the instruments are real.

Who wants to have a two drink minimum forced on them to watch me dick around? Especially since I have no business singing, but haven’t yet met someone who wants to don the mantle of being my voice for my songs.

Pish. Pish, I say! At least I’m listening to this album, and it flows pretty well. It’s 20 minutes too long and almost every song needs remixing or entirely new vocals, but it’s an album. An album equally about me and the recession.

Anyway, I’ve been calling this song both “Reality Sets In” and “Things Must Get Better Than This.” The real title will depend heavily on the lyrics, which have yet to be written.

But, I suggest this: wait until it’s raining, then stick this track on while wearing some headphones. Reality might set in.

download link “RSI/TMGBTT (Vox less)” Rough Mix.

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)”

I don’t really know what I’m doing with my side-project music, but I do know that a new phase of songwriting is coming about, one that is driven by melody, since for a few months I’ve been trapped in situations where I’m trying to develop a melody to an already-established instrumental track.

“It’s You” started out as something I was singing to myself in the shower, cliche be damned. I happened to be showering while Adam, my roommate was out of the apartment, so I had the luxary of drying myself off and sitting down to record the vocals in Garageband within minutes, before the melody left my head.

The resulting insturmental part was also sung before it was written, which slowed my process a little as I had to shift keys while writing it.

Either way, the vocals on this mix are ROUGH and TOO QUIET, but otherwise, it’s a workable outline for a song that will eventually be fun to listen to.

It’s already stuck in my head, though this means little these days.

Check it out in its rough form, since there is a good chance the finished form will sound bigger, different and longer.

download link

I’m not going to pussy foot around why this song is posted now. It was a series of events that lead me to the oft-forgotten “Joy Of Sex,” Tyler Patrick Hart’s seven-minute-and-five-second opus off his 2002 high school project techno album.

First, I needed to reduce the amount of music I had on my laptop because of expanding production efforts in visuals and music (more craziness out of the Citizen Nowhere/Mystery Project camps), an the other was that I can now e-mail this post to Tai (or at least link to it from his Facebook wall) to remind him that he still hasn’t zipped the whole damn 2002 album and sent it over to me yet.

I have “Joy Of Sex” as a WAV file for some damn reason, and I din’t think I’ve had a copy of the album since it’s inital release.

Why would I get a copy of this at all? Well, whatever the official name of the electronica album was, I had a hand in co-producing some of Ty’s tracks. Honestly, until I hear it again, I can’t tell how much I really did. In my mind I did entire tracks by my lonesome, only to take the ACID 3.0 file and have Tai do a final mix on it (it was his grade, after all).

“Joy Of Sex” is loops-based and - once again, this is from my sketchy memory - I think it was the track that convinced the Monarch High School choir/electronic music teacher Mr. DuFresne that Tai could throw together an electronica album over the semester. He did, with a little help from myself and Keith Dickerhoffee (who I recently saw again in Boston). Keith was/still is a pretty good DJ and - once again, this may be a false memory - suggested inserting the female orgasm sounds that start around 3:12.

While Tai was working on this project, Serious Bob was being born using the minor recording skills he acquired on this project.

Funny thing: if you paid Tai and I’s rent and food costs for a semester, I’m pretty sure we’d make at least 5 albums of varying genre and feel. One semester = 1 electronica album and 1 Serious Bob demo is actually low-production for us. However, both our parents and our peers had no idea that the radical shift to electronica and acoustic joke rock took place that semester, and most of them were probably expecting VOID.

download link “Joy Of Sex” by Ty Hart

So, Tai: send me the rest of this shiznat!

It’s rainy outside and some Brillhart/Gonzales commercial bullshit is stressing me the eff out.

So, I’m behind 2 days on posting and WAYYYYYY behind on the Serious Bob Retrospective.

What I’m not behind on is tracks floating around that eventually need to get up here.

So here is one of those pesky instrumentals named in a series of zeros and ones and it’s corresponding, individual artwork.

download link “0101″ by Citizen Nowhere.

The main reason Out Of Insight, Out Of Mind was late in being delivered was because of a few tracks I just couldn’t get right. The lesser reasons, like an alternate cover for the much larger AIFF version of the album were just headaches in comparison to listening to the album and feeling that one track was far from finished (the two-parter “Thank You Mario…” “…But Our Princess Is In Another Castle”) and another simply didn’t fit.

That track was “The Snake”, an electro-freakout song that isn’t that bad, but has no place on CN6 or 2009’s CN7 (as it currently exists in concept). It won’t even survive to make the secret project, because it has no pop sensibility.

So, just in case it never finds a home, here is “The Snake” for your listening pleasure.

download link “The Snake” by Citizen Nowhere.