I've got a show coming up on Monday the 29th. My first solo show in two years. The last time around, I had some trouble. I couldn't figure out how to give the songs the groove they needed by myself, so I assumed the answer was more stuff...
Singer, composer, and pianist from Queens, and a founding member of hip-hop improv comedy group Freestyle Love Supreme. I write indie soul songs, and delight in spontaneous melody and open space.
Singer, composer, and pianist from Queens. I write indie soul songs and delight in spontaneous melody and open space.
I've got a show coming up on Monday the 29th. My first solo show in two years. The last time around, I had some trouble. I couldn't figure out how to give the songs the groove they needed by myself, so I assumed the answer was more stuff...
I read this post this morning about Kanye West. He's a funny fellow, Kanye. The guy we love to hate. Now we've got this all-Autotune all-the-time new album (Blasphemy!), and then this video on SNL (Uggh!)…
Some buzz on the blogs recently…
A couple years back, I used to do these weekly updates. Every Tuesday, I would wake up, and write about my progress over the past week. It was an enlightening process for me, and I think people enjoyed reading it. At least I hope they did. So I've decided to start it back up again. Yes, I know it's Wednesday. Sue me…
My dear friends and readers, I have been absent far too long, hiding behind the veil of forward motion and career-building. I hope you have all been moving forward too, and I hope you can forgive me…
I'm taking one small step into the brave new world of 21st century music promotion. I'm opening up the first track on my album, Far Side of Town. I'm giving it a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, and making it free for download…
Never ignore your instincts. That's the lesson I've learned in the past few weeks. Never ignore your instincts. Not because they're always right about the world, but because they're always right about you…
I'm at home right now, waiting for the doorbell to ring. The master of my EP is out for delivery, and soon it will be in my hands. I have mixed feelings about this…
The unthinkable has happened. On Wednesday night, I finished all the mixes for the album. 6 tracks, 24 minutes. If We Were. I sent it out for mastering the following morning. (I can't believe how much it costs to overnight a package to California!!)…
Waiting to hear back from Red Bull. The suspense is killing me. Aargh…
Getting closer. I've been working on the mix to If We Were. It's tough because there are so many different lines going on at once. It's hard to decide what should be in focus, and what should be background. I'm also having trouble striking the balance between sound that's intense and enveloping and sound that's not painfully loud. I guess that'…
I finally got things sorted out. I was making bad judgments about this whole mixing process, the kind I think we all make. I worked on these mixes for a while, and I enjoyed the process, and I liked what I heard, so I said "These mixes are good."…
Or not. The dissenters have finally found their voice…
Thanks for all your advice, everyone. At final count, I had 7 votes yes and 0 votes no. So I spent Saturday figuring out how to export tracks for La Da Da Dee so that they still have all my little tweaks, and they don't take up too much room…
I have been mixing this record for quite some time. A couple months actually, because it's so hard to put enough time in every day. I've been neglecting my friends and family, working alone in my lair to revise and recolor something that I put together myself in the first place. Going a little stir-crazy. Nonetheless, I thought it had been…
I really was planning to post once a week. I have all kinds of drafts in a folder called "Blog" on a variety of insightful topics ranging from the Dirty Projectors show I saw in April, to the unreleased classic Stevie Wonder snippets that have been floating around the blogosphere recently and the general "Woe to the music industry" reaction…
Why is this piece so amazing? It's not just the "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" style intersection of imagination and reality. Don't get me wrong; that combination gets me every time. It's what fascinates me so much about computing – the way that such abstract patterns become part of what we call real life, without any kind of physical grounding…
I'm mixing. I'm putting out an EP in a few months called If We Were, and for the past few weeks, I've been mixing. I'm making such a big point of it because I used to HATE mixing. As soon as I was done writing and recording, everything else would become a chore. All I wanted was for someone else to be able to step in and do it. Someone who…
For a while, this domain (arthurthefourth.com) redirected to my Myspace page. Google was cool with that, and was nice enough to save my Myspace page in its cache. Then I put the site back up for real, but it was more of a "personal" blog, so I disallowed the whole site in my robots.txt file. Google said it was OK with that, but I got the…
We had a show at DROM two weekends ago with Jon Braman and Miché Fambro. We had a blast, and we were lucky enough to get some high-quality video, thanks to our friend Osmany Tellez. Thanks, Osmany…