steveblog

Hola y'all.

At the beginning of the month, my good friend Ali challenged us all to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. She has been doing this for the past something like 20 years and it seems to be a sort of sickness. Whatever her affliction, I decided to give a try. Unfortunately, after only 3,000 words, I realized that my romantic novel set in the distant future was not going to pan out. Part of it has to do with the fact that I am no good at writing. Weird, right?

Anyway, I decided to transfer the challenge into something that I had a tiny bit of skill at: muzak. So, here is the result of a month's worth of music making.



It's not super awesome, and I could probably have spent more time mixing, adding more percussion, re-recording bad samples, and generally improving things, but I suppose the point of a month long challenge is to stick to the month and see what comes out.

I also changed my name from "Steve Hazard" to "Pie Dad". Steve Hazard was a stupid, bad name, and I'm glad that it's gone. I got the idea for Pie Dad from a sign I saw in Segovia. I guess it means "piety" in Spanish, but I really enjoyed the idea of a dad that is so well known for making pies that he's known as the Pie Dad.

"Who's going to pick us up from baseball practice?"

"I think Evan's dad is coming today."

"Oh, you mean the Pie Dad?"

"Yeah..."

Even though everyone likes pie, no one knows for sure why Evan's dad is always making pies. It's a little weird.

The album is called Train Music because it was made largely while I was on the train going to or from work. I did a lot of fine-tuning at home, but I'd say a solid 46.7% was done on the train. At the least, most of the basic of the ideas of the song started on the train. It was a nice way to spend the commute.

You will probably notice that two of the songs feature what sounds like a man ranting in Spanish. These are recordings of Mohammed's next door neighbor. He yells these things almost nonstop all day everyday. It's quite a terrible experience for Mohammed, but it is quite amusing to those of us who don't have to listen to it all the time. I have no idea what he's saying, except for the occasional "ebola!" or "norte americanos!"

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my terrible and stupid music that I made on a train.