timothy e. cooney jr – skyscrape
It’s a bit of a heartbreaker, I know, but many of the memories you’ve gathered throughout this day, you won’t be able to hold for long. It doesn’t even matter how good or bad of a day it was.
But don’t worry, you are far from the only one. Rockstars who have led a life of great excitement, who’ve led such eventful lives, have the same trouble. Many confessed to this when they decided to write their autobiographies.
Most people don’t chart their evolution through life. Most people don’t even know how to begin to communicate with the world what it is that has happened to them.
There are few nobler ways to write down your journey through the world than through songs. timothy e. cooney jr is a songwriter who has made it a point to use the format of the pop songs to create a log of the experiences on this planet. “Skyscrape” is an exercise in minimalism, a tune that feels as if it was busy floating away before cooney caught it. It’s a day that’s fated to be remembered.
Matthew Squires – Song of a Cactus
Other than “Louie, Louie” and songs by The Velvet Underground, no lo-fi tunes ever came to be played on the radio, except in ungodly mornings of the nights when only insomniacs and perverts were sure to listen in. Actually, this was part of an unwritten, universally understood rule – get a song recorded and mixed by professionals, and you may get played. Otherwise, don’t bother to complain.
But that just made radio programming sound in the same way that the Miss Universe pageant looks – perfect and uninteresting. When everyone’s guitars, drums and voices are tuned to perfection, how are we to tell them apart? And what do people who sound and look perfect have to tell us about a world that is frustratingly imperfect?
Matthew Squires wouldn’t have been able to get his lo-fi compositions played by in the Golden Days of Radio, and that would’ve been everybody’s loss. That is because “Song of a Cactus” reveal a distinct songwriting voice, an imperfect singing voice and a recording that’s made better because of the warm, amateurish qualities of it. Squires writes like a college graduate who is on the run for some terrible deed that they can never take back, like someone who may never get another pancake breakfast ever again.
