Music by Luke Burrage, lyrics by Luke Burrage and Juliane Kunzendorf.

Also: NSFW

Juliane had to do a improvisational music piece for the music teaching part of her university degree. She invited me to take part and do some juggling, and help out while she was “inside” the piano.

The rules:

1. 8 minutes. 4 with Juliane at the keys and 4 “inside” the piano.
2. No use of tonal chords or structured melody.
3. An overall structure and form, but still all the music improvised.

This video is pieced together from footage from our final rehearsal before the exam. The exam was today. The examiners awards Juliane a 1.0, which is the highest grade possible!

Here’s a song I originally wrote back in 2010 as part of my “Song Per Month” project. It started life as a fully produced pop song, for inclusion on the album Two Minute Pop. You can listen to the original here:

Last summer I decided to extend it to make it funnier, to focus on the outcome of telling a girl you like them, and the true expectations and reactions of a 14 year old male. I’ve been performing this longer version of the song for about a year now, and it always gets a good response, so it’s become a fun opener for my short comedy music sets before I continue on the piano. I finally made a good video of it last night, so thought I’d share it here on my blog.

I just watched a Beatles tribute show by a band called The Beatles Experience. It’s hard to judge how good a tribute band is when they are playing such music. Even the worst karaoke performer can get the everyone joining in with Hey Jude, and it takes really bad audience not to at least shake it up a little when they hear the a band knock out twist and shout. I don’t want to compare The Beatles Experience to a karaoke set, they were way better than that, but there’s no doubt that it’s the material that is the real strength, and the real attraction.

So that made me think: what would be the “greatest” tribute band be like? Would dressing and looking exactly like the Beatles do the job? How about playing every song note for note, perfectly?

Here’s my outline for the ultimate Beatle’s tribute experiment. I’ll call them the Real Time Beatles.

• Get four guys, all about the right age.
• Make sure they don’t know too much about the Beatles, but immerse them in popular music from the 50’s.
• Make them play together in a club in Germany for years, but only other people’s music.
• After enough time, let them learn and play only the very first Beatles songs.
• We know when the Beatles wrote each song, and when they performed them for the first time. Only let the Real Time Beatles learn those songs after the correct time has passed since the previous song.
• Over the years, they learn and perform only the songs that the Beatles knew and played at the same point in the band’s career.
• I’m sure we have the set lists from many of their concerts, so the Real Time Beatles can play those same sets on the correct dates.
• They have to change their hair and clothes to fit with photos of the band at the time.

One of the main reasons the Beatles stopped doing live shows was that they became too popular. The screaming fans would scream so loud they couldn’t hear the music, and the band on stage couldn’t hear the music either. But the Real Time Beatles won’t have that same problem! They can keep doing live shows, but incorporate the material from the Beatles albums that was never performed live.

And then, at the moment that the Real Time Beatles reach the point where the Beatles split up, keep the band together. At this point they will be some of the most knowledgable authorities on the Beatles music, having learned every song in order, and progressed as musicians to fit the mould these songs have provided. We can then feed in music from the solo careers of the Beatles.

At this point they can start writing and performing their own music.

Will the music be any good? No idea. The experiment is one of nurture over nature, with four random musicians who live the same musical lives as the most popular band of the century. It would be a fake continuation of a band who played the same music, but without the fame and accolades. At least the music would be interesting. Right?

Mainly I like the idea of the commercial interest in the Real Time Beatles. If you book them in the first year, the set list would be limited. “Can you do this and this and this?” “No, sorry, we’ve not released Sargent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band yet.”

And if you want to book them for a certain date, they would turn up with a pre-selected set list and outfits. “Yeah, sorry, I know you want us to do these other songs, but this is the date of our Mets stadium show.”

“Look, we’d love to a gig next weekend, but we’ll have to do it without George. He’s going to be unconscious in a drugs haze.”

“If you want us to perform Long and Winding Road, you’re going to have to book us again in three years.”

“The Frog Song? Are you high?”

It would be cool to set up some famous photo shoots too. A recreation of Sargent Pepper’s album cover, but with different famous people as cardboard cutouts. Abbey Road zebra crossing walk. That would be fun.

Or maybe all this is only interesting in my head. Such things normally are.

I love to read comments and feedback about my blog posts. Please email me, I reply to every message: luke@juggler.net

Over the 15 years I’ve been writing music, who has had the biggest influence over my songwriting? Good question. There are intangible and tangible links between the different styles of songs I write and other musicians, but there is one artist on whom I focus time and time again when actually putting words down on paper.

Britney Spears. Surprised? No, you probably saw the photo. But welcome to my brain.

The time that she released her first single, Hit Me Baby One More Time, was around about when I started writing songs more seriously. There’s a lot to like about Hit Me Baby One More Time, but the chorus really got to me. In a bad way.

From memory, it goes like this:

This loneliness is killing me,
I must admit, I still believe.
When you’re not with me I lose my mind.
Give me a sign,
Hit me baybay one more time.

What the fuck? So many problems. Put aside the weird abusive relationship overtones and just look at the rhyme scheme.

Me doesn’t rhyme with believe. Mind, sign, and time? Are you kidding me? It’s not as if there isn’t a rhyming scheme, because non-rhyming songs can work out fine. This is aiming for, and spectacularly missing, very basic rhymes. Five lines, and none of them rhyme with any other. Is it intentionally bad poetry?

But considering she doesn’t enunciate properly when singing, and is almost gurgling through forcing her voice to sound as young and sultry as possible, nobody notices how fundamentally flawed the chorus really is.

And anyone who does notice doesn’t care, because they’re really just looking at her tits.

I don’t think about Britney as a sex object… actually I do. But I don’t think about her with sexual desire, only about the fact that she was very successful because of her sex appeal. Her song writing skills (or those of whoever wrote her songs) didn’t need to be anything great, as the pop production, music videos, dance choreography, publicity machine and sex appeal could make up for it.

I don’t have the benefit of sex appeal and dance moves and publicity. The majority of my songs are just me and a guitar, or me and a piano, with no pop production to make people tap their feet. My songs stand or fall on the merits of the lyrics in exactly the way that Britney’s don’t.

Why is why, whenever I have two lines that almost rhyme, and I think, “Line and find are close enough, right?” I immediately hum “Hit me baybay one more time” and rewrite the lyric until it’s good enough. Good enough for me. Not good enough for sexy Britney; good enough for someone with no belly button on display.

I love to read comments and feedback about my blog posts. Please email me, I reply to every message: luke@juggler.net

Well, last year I didn’t post my “list of plans and goals for 2011” to the blog, and I don’t think I referred to it here during the year. One reason was that my new year’s resolution (if you can call it that) was something like “Set fewer goals for the year!”

I didn’t want to be beholden to what January 2011 Luke wanted to spend time on when October 2011 Luke had changed his mind about it. On a weekly basis I have a larger creative output than almost anyone I know, so I have nothing to prove to myself or anyone else that I’m wasting my time, or that I’m a failure if I succeeded at only “35.05 out of a possible 50 plans and goals.” And yes, that was my success rate in 2010.

So in 2011 I intentionally didn’t work towards to plans and goals on my list. If I had time free, I’d look over the list, and see if it inspired me, but otherwise I just worked on what I wanted.

And, as it happened, some of the things I most proud of accomplishing weren’t on the list at all. For example:

• The list said “Perform live set of my own music” inspired by spending time in New York with some awesome live performers.
• I started performing at small music open stages in Berlin, and discovered that people really enjoyed my performing. They liked the fun songs, and how I chatted between, but hardly anyone commented about the pop songs and love songs that I’m so proud of.
• I discarded other music plans and concentrated on writing more quirky and clever comedy songs, that I perform with just me at the piano.
• This led to me performing more at comedy shows than music-only shows, and my comedy songs got a great reaction.
• I now have 10-12 “comedy” numbers that I could, if the opportunity arose, put together into an hour-long show.

In January last year I never imagined I’d have the skills and material to do a whole new hour-long show. This is on top of the two hours of juggling material I have, AND on top of the (maybe) two hours of other music I could perform, and all of it original material.

I think that’s pretty cool. Right?

Who knows, maybe this year I’ll actually do a full-length solo music show, rather than just performing sets in longer shows.

All that aside, here are a few things from my list of plans and goals for 2011 that have been fun to track.

Travel

• Visit another 20 new countries.

Partial win! I don’t have much control of this one, as I don’t make most of my travel plans. As it happened I visited 18 new countries in 2011.

I also made sure I got a video of me juggling in every country I visited in 2011 (win), even those I only passed through without leaving the airport.

Juggling

• Berlin and EJC and at least two other conventions (to be confirmed), one in a new country.

Win! Berlin and the EJC, plus the French Convention, Brianza Convention in Italy, Portland in the USA, and Passout in Germany at the end of the year. I’d never been to a convention in Italy before, so that was cool.

• Win Fight Night Combat (against JJ for bonus)

Win! I won in Berlin, but JJ didn’t take part. I lost badly at the EJC. No bonus.

• Run open stages and other events at EJC (with zero stress)

Win! 8 open stages over 8 nights. There was stress in the organization as a whole, but I deflected it all by being more professional and confident than others, and hopefully the stress didn’t leak out too far into the venue I had to control.

• Track and break some personal records.

Win! I broke a few. The most “impressive” record was 5 club backcrosses. I worked on it many hours in the spring, up to an hour day for many days, and smashed my old record. It now stands at 50 catches, though my 5 year plan back in 2001 was to get 100 catches. I’m okay with never reaching that goal, even after 10 years.

• Practice more (log hours per day).

Win? I’m not sure if I did practice more or less than previous years, because this is the first year I’ve tracked how much I juggle. I think I’ll release the nerdy numbers as a separate blog post.

Other juggling and performing goals included working on new material (win), building new props (win), developing routines which don’t need more equipment than I already carry (win), finishing the construction of “The Room” set (progress, but nowhere near finished), writing the show “Powercut” (fail), and working with other jugglers and artist on material for the above shows (win).

Writing

I had some writing goals, but this was tricky. Half way through 2010 I decided to keep a diary, and writing about 1,000 words per day for my private diary took up so much of the energy that would normally be spent writing fiction. I did manage to make progress on various novels. I even completed one novella and recently published it on my website.

Photography

I intentionally left this even more vague than others. Photography is something I’m still getting better at on a monthly basis, and until that stops, I don’t think I need to think about setting myself other goals.

My only goals were to learn more about small strobe photography (win), to learn more about self-portrait photography (win), and to set up a photo studio in my juggling studio at home (partial win).

Conclusion

By the numbers:

• I had 31 plans and goals for 2011.
• I succeeded at 15.9 of them.
• I failed at 11.1 (the decimal is from visiting 18 and not 20 new countries).
• At the end of the year I was still actively working on 4 projects (for example, an audio recording of one of my science fiction stories).

The numbers are nowhere close to last year’s success rate, but last year I put down loads of things that I knew I would succeed at anyway. Things like “continue to record the SFBRP podcast”, and even without trying I put out 32 episodes of science fiction reviews. And a lot of them were really simple too, like “buy a new camera bag”. How much effort does that take? Nothing compared to writing a whole novel!

And, as I said before, I decided to be happy to go on flights of fancy with my plans and goals and dreams.

I’m super happy with 2011, and how much I achieved in terms of life accomplishments and creative output. I even found an awesome girlfriend, and she is going to be included in many of my plans and goals for 2012.

But that will be a whole other blog post.

New for 2012: I’m turning off comments on my blog. Since early 2009, when I started this blog, there have only been about 10 comments really worth my time reading and approving. And for each of those, I responded individually by email, or created a new blog post. All the others were fine, but not worth wading through the spam.

So from now on, I’ll just leave my email address at the bottom of each post. If you have something to tell me, please email me. I’ve done this since 2008 on my SFBRP podcast, and have developed really strong relationships via email with my listeners. I’d love to replicate that here. Just so you know, I reply to every email:

luke@juggler.net

In 2009 I listened to every bit of music in my iTunes library as sorted by track name, and in 2010 I did listened to the entire thing as sorted by by track length, and again in 2010 sorted by play number.

It’s a fun little project, and makes me take notice of the music I have in new ways. Over the past month I’ve listened to every track as sorted by date added.

What did I find out this time?

Of the four ways I’ve listened to all my music in order, it was the one that had the greatest effect. Listening as sorted by track length told me a lot about the kind of music I own, but by date added it told me a lot about me. Changing tastes of music is only the smallest part of it.

Mostly it’s about the triggered memories. This is a great way to relive your life through your memories, in order, as triggered by “Oh shit, I remember buying this!” or “I know where I was the first time I heard this track, and ripped it from that CD!”

If I looked through a diary, that would work, but most people don’t keep diaries. But everyone has a collection of music. Listening by track name is just a whimsical thing that only someone like me would do, someone who has almost unlimited free time, gives in to random impulses, and bloody-minded enough to stick with long term projects.

I think everyone should listen to all their music as sorted by date. Then again, maybe most people aren’t like me, and might not get anything from it at all. Who knows.

Some more notes:

• When you sort all the tracks by date added, if an album has the same time and date (to the nearest minute) it then lists the tracks alphabetically by name, not by track number. I’m not sure why, but it meant that I listened to albums in an unusual order. Unless, of course, the track names were “Track 1, track 2, track 3, etc.”
• The first track, for the second time, was “5 seconds of almost silence”, a track I use to separate music track on CDs for my show. It’s also the shortest track in my library, as well as the most played.
• Next is a whole load of music that I copied direct from my old PC onto my macbook when I bought it back in February of 2008. This includes 311 songs, 20.2 hours, or 1.5 GB of music. A lot of this is from my collection of CDs from the previous decade, but from CDs I didn’t still have with me physically.
  What did this mean? This batch included a LOT of memories. Stuff I’d downloaded for specific shows, CDs I’d borrowed from friends at university and ripped, some music from Pola’s computer, and lots more.
• The next main batch of music is from a few weeks later, when I wanted to have the titles of every track listed, rather than just “Track 1, track 2, track 3, etc.” Instead of doing anything manually, I just ripped all the CDs I had, let iTunes grab the track titles from the internet automagically, and deleted the previous files.
  This included a lot more music that Pola and I had bought together, or that we both liked so that we’d carry the music with us on road trips in a CD carrying case. Good times!
• Once I had an iTunes account, much of the music I bought was through that, and not CD. A lot of these were impulse buys, or buying new albums from favourite artists. Also there are many EPs and albums that I bought after hearing the music on a YouTube video, and iTunes is usually the easiest way to grab it.
• At the EJC in 2008 I organized the EJC Open Stages, and put in lots of CDs to rip for the artists appearing on stage. Also someone gave me a USB thumb drive with a big collection of ska music and other stuff, and it somehow got imported into my iTunes library. I liked most of it, so kept most of it.
• Some CDs that someone gave to me. Those were ripped.
• Some music from musicians I work with on cruise ships. Well, to be honest the style of music normally isn’t to my taste, so I don’t keep the music in rotation, except for a very few artists.
• Oh look, all of Jonathan Coulton’s Thing A Week music. Mixed memories of my own attempt to make a song a week for a just six weeks, rather than for an entire year.
• And then quite a few albums bought at the suggestion of various girlfriends and friends who are girls over the last two years. Lots of memories there too!
• Albums and EPs by musicians I met on my vacation in New York in September 2010. Those guys were all super talented! I still buy their new music as and when it comes out.
• Various nostalgia trip! Downloading albums I owned on CD, cassette tape or (I’m not kidding here) minidisc when I was 20, but since lost. Groove Armada are still cool, right? Basement Jax? Air’s Moon Safari? Jamiroqui? Love it! That reminds me, I should find some Orbital and Leftfield again some time. This way I can get double memories, of when I first listened to that music, and also when I buy it again 10 (or more) years later.

Whew! A lot of memories. That will do for now.

But what next? Listen to the whole iTunes library as sorted by… release date? That might work, but only three quarters of my library has the year of release. Beats per minute? Only a few dozen tracks have that info attached. Genre? Album? Artist? Those are a bit boring. No matter, I’ll think of something.

Based on my dating life about a year ago, here’s a new song I shared with the KITAC group that met at my place again last night. It’s the first time I’ve played it for a group of people, so decided to video the performance to see if/when/why they laughed. I’m happy with the response!

Here’s a video I play during my stage show, and I play along with piano and sing too. It’s the best footage I’ve got of me juggling around the world from February 2009 to January 2011.

“Three minute hero is the new underground open stage in berlin, right on the platform of the ubahnhof schönleinstrasse.

Songs, breakdance, stand up comedy, performance whatever you want to show you can!! only limitations are the three minutes between trains arriving at the station.

Wanna show? Simply come up and you get a slot in the show. Just passing through? Well, you can always take the next train.”

Hosted by Duo Desolato.

Guitar and singing!

Hint: nobody asked permission to do this! How long could it keep going until security turns up?

Quick! Make it look as though nothing special is happening!

Magic!

Juggling!

I performed some music and juggling, but of course I don’t have photos of me.

Dancing!

Drunken singing!

Party!

Oh shit! Security! Length of show: one hour and 30 minutes.

The BVG security allowed one final act. Andy Snatch closed the show with a club routine.

Later at the Another Country English Bookshop, playing Jenga.

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