dream_songs raze i took a bath with my clothes still on and washed my hair while a man who could have been me sang: "i also can say, 'are you mailing my way?' when i know you damn well are." a lot of accordion. a lot of falsetto. not nearly enough hot water. 230513 ... raze a dance-pop song with a chorus that included talk of "infinite father and the ways of his hero". i think it was about god. 230515 ... raze i sat in a kitchen i haven't seen since i was a child. three times i sang along with a stranger's chosen morning song. three times i was ignored. a cheerful tune kicked in on the soundtrack. the only words were: "so alone la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la" it was something no one else could hear. my own musical internal monologue. i kept quiet, honing in on the three-part vocal harmony and a chord progression that never stopped reaching for something beyond its grasp. 230608 ... raze i forget the context. all that's left is a metronomic groove and a bit of unsolicited_advice made menacing by a vocoder's sonic smirk: "stop anticipating." 230609 ... tender_square i can only recall the chorus of a soft-rock song sung by a man: "tears of joy, nothing but tears of joy." 230610 ... raze i stood at my kitchen counter with a man who owns a long-running local video company and warped "candle in the wind" into a lament for the lost hummus of a woman named rebecca. 230622 ... raze only one line remains: "mckinley carved up like an anchovy peel." 230623 ... raze a tom_waits song on "blood money" that sounded more like something from "alice". of course, it doesn't exist on either album. "tonight's the only dreaming night," he sang. so it is. 230705 ... raze (a_song_my_father_sang) 230707 ... raze (mortuary_blues) 230709 ... epitome of incomprehensibility dream_song_lyrics: there's a Christmas song about the fall of the Berlin wall. (I still remember that. The dream, not the fall of the Berlin wall - I was a baby then.) 230710 ... raze fragments of three music videos, one after the other. 1. a band playing on a raised stage. an instrumental song in e minor. no real lead voice. just chords. a baffled-looking drummer. shots of a beach bereft of life. there was something stylized about the footage that made it look dated. it felt subtly slow-mo without ever really being so. 2. travis tritt covering santo & johnny's "sleep walk". a similar scene, but without the beach. he stood on an outdoor stage at night. off to the left. almost out of frame. the song sounded wrong knocked down to a lower key. he played what was meant to be a lap steel on a stand. it looked more like a small black synthesizer. he made absurd exaggerated orgasm faces, adding another layer of vulgarity to the enterprise. 3. a single-camera shot of bruce cockburn enjoying a casual acoustic duet on the roof of a brick building with a man i didn't recognize. some nice harmonic interplay. both men smiling. this was the only time i saw a song title appear on the screen: "treme". 230720 ... raze (inert) 230721 ... raze a bit of greasy slide guitar on a national resophonic, and an observation: "you were a lot of money, girl." 230730 ... tender_square it was like the african elements of paul simon's "graceland" met the harmonies of male voices in the choruses of imagine dragons' songs: "hum bey they give it away hum bey de way way" 230805 ... raze one of my own songs was wearing more or less the same clothes it's always had on, but the vocal melody and lyrics were completely different. "i have always taken chances," i sang, double-tracked an octave above a deeper voice than mine. "but you know i walked here sad." 230822 ... tender_square women one-by-one gradually took the small dive-bar stage wearing their bachelorette party dresses and made-up looks to sing "baby one more time" by britney spears complete with synchronized dance moves, and i whooped from my barstool in appreciation. 230826 ... raze a rolling piano line told me what to feel when i was thinking about checking the mail. i considered singing a simplified version into the digital dictaphone that sleeps beside me, but i convinced myself i would remember it. i lost it, of course. 230909 ... raze a friend who was never really a friend at all showed up at my house unannounced. it was the first time we'd seen each other in twenty years. he gave me an awkward hug with his head turned away so he wouldn't have to look at me. his hair was greying and starting to recede. but when he talked about making some music together like we used to, i could see he hadn't aged a day. i said i'd have to get a better idea of how much work was involved before i committed to anything. he took me to task for being selfish. this after siphoning years of my time and talent, and abandoning me when i asked for a small bag of pot to offset all his unkept promises to pay me anything at all. he gave me the old line about how he'd take care of me when the job was done. i walked to the piano, played a few thick, angry chords, and sang, "here's what i know: people are full of shit." 230910 ... raze again, just one line: "sail again and into our arms." 231010 ... ego hum I was trying to read a physics paper when Feynman and friends started to sing "Dancing in The Dark". 231011 ... raze (happy_again) 231026 ... raze lately i keep losing them. 231105 ... raze "lovers always know what to wear," leonard_cohen sang. he sounded too young to be so old. 231110 ... raze sarah mclachlan was singing from the other side of a closed door: "i was tied to the river." someone shook or struck a tambourine in concert with every snare hit. i could see her face in my mind, but i knew she wasn't really there. she looked like she was afraid of something. maybe the water her words made. 231111 ... Soma “And they slaughtered like lions Beautiful lions And turned into men. Beautiful lions And nothing but men “ 231114 ... raze "peter pumpkinhead, i can do anything." not the crash test dummies, then. 231124 ... raze (rare) 231125 ... raze a "dance version" of "come on eileen", which was really just a cover performed by a band that never finished learning the song. an awkward soundtrack for a half-assed halftime show at a basketball game. 231126 ... raze i caught a music video on tv. it was something that seemed to be recorded sometime in the late nineties or the early aughts, though it was difficult to pin to any specific era. two women stood and sang or pretended to sing in the middle of a dimly lit street that saw no traffic. they looked and sounded like they belonged in different songs. in different bands, even. the two separate vocal lines they stitched together made no sense on paper, but accidental harmonies slid out of the swamp where friction should have been. there was a long moment of silence at the video's end. then the ostensible lead singer said, "anyone, anyone, anyone, who, who, who." that was the name of the song. the band name was something like "six use and the sunsets", but the white words faded from the screen before i could commit them to memory or write them down. i did an internet search, with the first three words of the song title in quotation marks. i got one hit. it had nothing to do with the song. i didn't think i'd ever be able to find it again. 231207 ... raze daniel johns had a new band called "move to windsor" — a directive that made me wonder how a person could go to a place they already were. the song i heard sounded just like silverchair. as usual, only one line licked my brain with enough force to stick around: "you wanna take me out of range." 231211 ... raze just a title this time: "panda", by a band called knit. 231212 ... raze a soft shuffle played on the radio. there was a two-word chorus: "girl city," sung over and over again. i changed it to squirrel city. 231230 ... raze this floated up out of the ether, incomplete but perfectly formed: "save this game (save the city) what's your name?" 240103 ... raze (recto_verso) 240104 ... e_o_i As I was waking up, "The keyboard passed I know I can dance This song" partly syncopated, in a sort of Latin rhythm, to the notes (if in D minor) A-A-A-D A-A-A-A-C B flat-A ...maybe inspired by the tango-ish "Hernando's Hideaway" we sang in choir yesterday 240116 ... Soma My dream self was listening to music, in a morgue, but the music was the kind that matched my Hawaiian shirt. It wasn't Hawaiian music. It was SHIRT music. Both were distinctly yellow. I sure wish it had actually had a noise in my memory. My brain is only remembering the noise of a T-rex roaring, and EDM. Perhaps the sounds from my neighbors car, spilling over into my night. 240116 ... raze i caught the tail end of a very happy progressive metal song on cjam. the dj characterized it as "super sorta spacey punk", which seemed about right. 240118 ... raze i sang what sounded like a soulful irish ballad. a girl i knew in grade school met me at the top of a stairwell and sang the second verse. i suggested recording what we'd just improvised, but the song we conjured out of nothing had already left us. 240119 ... raze a bright_eyes reggae song. felt more like a clumsy genre exercise than anything, but it was kind of interesting in its wrongness. 240121 ... raze a doctor i wouldn't trust to treat a hangnail rapped a verse: "hey hey hey hey hey hey fucking bullshit understanding" i thought it needed a little more time in the oven, but he looked very proud of himself. 240122 ... raze i was playing a solo set at phog. kind of funny, because i haven't been there in ten years and don't intend to ever set foot in the place again. i didn't see anyone i knew in the audience. i had nothing prepared, so all my songs were improvised. my guitar was a spiral notebook. i flipped it over and swept my fingers across a page bereft of words to get the chord i wanted. the only lyrics i can remember now are numbers: seventeen, eighteen, ninety. 240123 ... raze the denouement of a big band jazz song: seven rapidly ascending horn hits. 240128 ... raze bob_dylan stood on a stage in a darkened theater and sang for a woman sitting in the audience. her black hair looked like a wig. it wasn't. he rhymed swimming with beginning and spat sour love everywhere with a fury that almost felt earned. he blew into the grille of an unanchored condenser microphone, rotating it in his hands. the mic became a harmonica. his guitar disappeared. someone else played to pick up the slack. they were never seen. nor were the rhythm section, whose pedestrian support became the lead voice by default when bob stopped singing and smiled, letting chords that were no longer his recede into murmurs the spotlights couldn't touch or taint. 240203 ... raze i conflated robert johnson's "dead shrimp blues" and skip james' "hard time killin' floor blues" and came away with a half-baked hybrid that wouldn't have met with either man's approval. 240207 ... raze a single line plucked from the first verse of something that didn't exist outside the realm of sleep. soundtrack to a moment of unease as a man awkwardly tried to scale the side of a building while his girlfriend smiled and spoke of things that had nothing to do with the risk he was taking, oblivious. words and melody both gone when_i_woke. 240208 ... raze a group of people kept in a house against their will found the courage and opportunity to escape. before they left, they recorded a song telling the woman who held them there what they thought of her. they set the tape to play when she entered the basement recording studio. it was equal parts acidic and celebratory, with a tight drum sound. 240210 ... raze at the end of a spoken word track, a grizzled voice intoned: "the wind's broken it's broken everything i'm all broken i'm free" 240211 ... raze i played a strangely-tuned electric guitar for a small audience in the lobby of a college radio station. i had to deal with a lot of dead frets. there was a woman's face where the pickups should have been. she wasn't anyone i knew. 240212 ... raze someone was either singing "caesar, break" or "seize her brake". i couldn't tell which. 240214 ... raze "open your eyes," sang a woman i couldn't see. and then i did. 240216 ... raze some interesting vocoded singing, right on the edge of being sinister. i wish i remembered the lyrics. not that it felt like they meant anything at the time. 240220 ... raze elvis persley sang, "the new whack, the new unveil." he sounded pretty happy about it. 240222 ... raze a woman lied about her name and relived childhood scenes in a music video that was an unbroken shot of her superimposed over an old friend's living room. "the boys in blue put me in a blue box," she sang. "i was happy as a child." she followed that with a tossed-off, spoken aside: "i was kicked by my mother, though." 240229 ... raze "nobody, nobody," sang a man who sounded like donny hathaway inhabiting a decade he didn't live long enough to see. 240308 ... raze there was something melancholy and compelling in there somewhere. i was sure i sang it into my handheld digital recorder, but that must have been one of those false_awakenings, because when i opened my eyes for the last time there was nothing there. all i had to show for myself was a shard of a different song that was nowhere near as interesting: "look at the thumb of my dying bum." 240310 ... raze (the_devil_at_night) (sprechgesang) (threadbare) 240311 ... raze i discovered a penguin_cafe orchestra song recorded in 1990 that was all but identical to an instrumental piece i composed sixteen years later, though i'd never heard it before. i wasn't sure how to feel about that. 240316 ... Soma I woke up from a Disney like song and dance routine, where after having evaded the cops and killed the yakuza, I fled into an old hotel with the girl I was saving. Here, I summoned forth the fires of hell with a Mariah Carey-esque pop song that expressed joy and freedom. They danced and formed to my words, and it was pure, raw, magic. I felt powerful. It's not quite right but it's close. --- Warm us! Make the flames of the fire so they won't ever harm us A blazing thing that grows sentient and glorious It won't devour timbers and walls that were formed for us It climbs across every surface and shows a vision victorious Where we dance in the flowers and the leaves In the hills are our kings and our queens Water dancing with life in her streams As the sun watches over us Blazing life to all things! 240319 ... raze a paul buchanan solo track with a chorus that somehow managed to be both anthemic and intimate. i wish i remembered it. 240321 ... raze i heard myself sing: "i rode through the past and the pain rose to a solid" 240402 ... raze again, all the details surrounding the song are gone. all that stuck around was this: "one day you'll do all them that's gone and they'll bend down to argue with you" 240404 ... raze it was just one word i kept singing over and over again. a word like "hospital", or "hotel", or "hope". only not any of those at all. i don't know what it was. but i think it started with an h. 240409 ... raze a jamsession leaked out of the last house i lived in and into the bunker of a man i'd never met, who told a friend he liked my voice. that felt good to hear, even if the song that struck him was little more than eight minutes of aimless wandering. 240410 ... raze my dad requested a song called "upper bend". it started like this: "once i was a poor man now i am what i was before" it was sort of a subtle southern rock thing. i never did learn the name of the band. 240412 ... raze david sylvian belted out a soul stomper like nothing else in his catalogue of recorded work. the chorus went: "take me, won't you? shake me, won't you? i just wanna be in your arms" 240413 ... raze (you_are_the_things_you_don't_throw_away) 240414 ... raze there was something really compelling that ended with this twinkling piano melody. sad and sweet. again, it was gone as soon as i opened my eyes. 240427 ... raze the beginning of the first line got cut off, so all i heard was, "...is that i'm hating to be alone." 240428 ... raze as a benevolent character's home planet exploded, killing him and all its other inhabitants, a soft acoustic version of "flim" by aphex_twin played. "way to wake_up where you are," someone said, referencing a goo goo dolls song. 240429 ... raze i drew a stink cloud on a piece of construction paper and sang: "a little cloud of every poo, all over the world." there were some nice three-part horn harmonies, too. 240430 ... raze (we_lived_alone) 240501 ... raze i was at a diana ross concert, circa 1980's "diana" album. so i was alive before i was born. only in a dream, man. she didn't look like diana ross, though. she resembled a cross between christina milian and faith evans. that was kind of what she sounded like, too. the music was smooth and soulful. none of the songs threatened to break a sweat, but they were quietly captivating. one of them began with a variation on the "too possessive, jealous" vocal hook from marvin gaye's "is that enough?". an interesting choice, i thought. 240502 ... raze joni mitchell stood on a stage wearing a grey fur coat and matching hat. she sang: "all but can see." 240513 ... raze i improvised a wry song about a secondhand affair in a pretty solid leonard_cohen impression, dipping down lower than i thought my voice could go. 240515 ... raze i demonstrated the yamaha vss-30's sampling capabilities for moby in a dance class, confusing the keyboard with the casio_sk1. a strange glass figurine provided rhythm and a bass line. i thought the music could use some words to put it over the top, so i sang about underwear. 240516 ... e_o_i A young, blond-haired woman was rapping in front of an open doorway that led into a room full of dancing people. Her verse ended, "...all walking and talking like adults, that's the law" ("adults" was pronounced "a-DULTS" to fit the rhythm). The idea? She was a "Gen Z" complaining that "millennials" acted childish. Or she was parodying such complaints: millennials should walk and talk like adults! Even while dancing!! 240516 ... raze i was listening to "frances farmer will have her revenge on seattle". the lyrics were a little different: "burn all my notebooks alarm all the letters seal all envelopes" there was also talk of someone selling kurt's diary after he was dead. talk about prescient. 240518 ... raze i played piano in some sort of informal music class. i couldn't shake the feeling that the teacher wanted to memorize the melody i'd invented so he could steal it and claim he created it himself. 240523 ... raze on a six-song ep of non-album idaho songs, "the right escape" was grittier than i remembered. my headphone cable started acting up during a nice moment where distorted guitar fanned out into wide stereo, and no matter how many times i tried rewinding on my discman, i could never get back there again. 240526 ... raze a bored-sounding baritone crooned: "never a scene for this feeling, you see." 240528 ... raze just another snippet of song, and a grammatically confusing one at that: "too will to be the oh the gay bean." 240531 ... raze someone sang about "team dubai". they seemed pretty stoked about it for an outfit they assured me was "unradical". 240601 ... raze a female artist whose name was never mentioned released a loose remake of the first strokes album. most of the songs had different titles, but a lot of the melodies and sounds were more or less unchanged. the most interesting track was a spoken word interlude with an accompanying music video. it was disappointing to learn the record company silenced half the words after deeming them inappropriate. 240603 ... e_o_i The University of Vienna is advertising a four-week intensive summer ballet program. The catch is that applicants have to make their own ballet outfits; there's a picture up of a young woman in a tutu made of woven candy wrappers. The brochure says the university wants to show support towards trans dancers, but how...? By letting them wear non-standard outfits. There's a picture of a young man, and the deal is he's still used to doing ballet in a skirt from when his body was more of a girl's, so he's wearing a skirt-like ruffle. And this sounds fair and inclusive until you realize that whoever gets in - whoever even *applies* - has to make all their ballet clothes themselves. Plus there's the cost. Is it really that accessible? 240603 ... e_o_i Fuck, this was supposed to be dream_school. 240603 ... raze the opening track on the new idaho album announced itself from a youtube clip embedded in a blog post. the writer asked, "can we have more albums that start with mid-nineties idaho revivalism and end in abject despair, please?" jeff martin sang in two different octaves, though his falsetto was suspect. the chorus went: "it's 1994. i know because i'm still here." 240610 ... raze (handsome) 240616 ... raze a woman sat on the roof of her house and played guitar for a squirrel. i can't describe the chords she formed, which were broken and uncertain, but i could play them for you. 240627 ... e_o_i The beginning of a chorus to a folk ballad with just singing and guitar: Hearts over to the half-devil king, Distinct as... (and then indistinct, as it faded away) 240628 ... e_o_i I don't remember the reason, but the last part of one dream had me singing the U.S. national anthem. At least the last two lines, whose words I remembered, sort of: And yet the little star-spangled banner yet waves Oe'r the land of the free and the home of the brave. I woke up and thought, "It's not 'little'. They wouldn't say 'little'." This is what it's supposed to be: O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? 240629 ... raze what was little more than a jam session that grew out of fleeting friendship became an anthem to others, and something of an underground hit. i can't remember a thing about it now. 240630 ... raze a man was working on the mix of a song for a posthumous compilation. something he recorded himself before his band dissolved. he brought up the volume of the close mics to alter the drum sound but kept tinkering until what was just right for a second or two morphed into a muddy mess. and that was how he left it. 240703 ... raze i didn't get to hear them, but i read the names of two songs on the back of an unfamiliar grand funk railroad record: "there is something more between us", and "every night i come booking". 240704 ... e_o_i What's with my dreams and national anthems? Okay, so I'm about twenty again and working a summer job with a group of other young people. We're getting lunch at some kind of outdoor food court, all of us sitting at a picnic table. One guy has a birthday. He's from France. To make gentle fun of him, I imitate a trumpet and honk out what my dream mind is convinced is the tune of "La Marseillaise." I wake up and think nope, that's wasn't the French anthem at all. It was the tune of the "Triumphal March" from Verdi's opera Aida (a childhood favourite). 240714 ... raze a man went down a waterfall, and what came out of him was pitch-perfect but more screamed than sung: "hallelujah's in the air." 240715 ... raze i flipped through a book of short_stories written by a man whose name was forgotten as soon as i read it. one story was a poem that became a song. fingerpicked acoustic guitar that never drifted from d major. soft shuffling brushed drums. a voice like a small, shy smile sang: "the sick the sick the sick knock alone" 240716 ... raze billy preston played a tribute to the departed stevie nicks while his wife dwyane wade acted out a pantomime that struck some members of the audience as being disrespectful. meanwhile, in the waking world, billy's the one who's dead, and stevie's still alive. 240717 ... raze one line over a dense bed of electronica: "soon you'll be alive for me." 240719 ... Soma Joe Biden was texting out "Last Days of Disco" by Yo La Tengo and the government made it so everyone's phones were playing the music as he texted it. It was a cacophony of sadness. 240720 ... raze i caught a shania twain song on cmt that was darker and more mysterious than anything i'd heard from her before. her appearance in the black_and_white music video dated it to the time of "the woman in me", but i couldn't find any evidence of its existence online. in an unusual move, she was more of a background character in the video, only occasionally shown in what appeared to be the kitchen of a small house. the focus was on two men with meth-ravaged teeth. they stood together outside a brick building and fell to their knees in desperate prayer. the title of the track was "rada". in polish it means "advice". 240724 ... raze (range) 240810 ... raze bruce springsteen performed "57 channels (and nothin' on)" as part of his appearance on some anonymous late show. the band was just him on bass, a drummer, and a guy playing electric guitar and organ at the same time. bruce slipped in some lyrics from "state trooper" about radio relay towers. a thick shoegazey chord hung in the air. there was an ominous, resigned quality to the whole thing that made it a lot more interesting than the studio version. 240811 ... raze (daylight_again) 240813 ... raze an entire album this time, by harry nilsson. all of it sung in spanish. i got to see and think about it. i didn't get to hear it. 240814 ... raze a woman sang, "this is like a suicide," over a musical backdrop that seemed too propulsive and too bright to carry such a loaded statement. 240816 ... raze a music video director sang to his cast and crew: "the sun is beating down on my head and i'm feeling tired tonight." night was nowhere near him or anyone else, though he was right about the sun (they were filming on a beach). 240819 ... raze fleetwood mac's "the chain" had a completely different intro. it felt like it was in 3/4 time when it was really in 5/4. i thought that was a neat little trick. 240829 ... raze the opening track on a big thief album i wasn't familiar with was an instrumental piece. between the drum patterns and the jazzy piano work from adrianne_lenker, it reminded me an awful lot of bud powell's "un poco loco". fine company to be in, says me. 240901 ... raze a nameless power trio jammed in what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse. no words, but there were some powerful discordant electric guitar stabs from the woman leading the charge. 240902 ... raze all i got was a title on a vinyl record's blue center label: "we'll be back". 240906 ... raze some of the funkier music i've heard in a while had these lyrics to recommend it: "you teach enough deaf chickens that you think you can sell a river by heaven and a river by hell" 240908 ... raze big band music that only lingered long enough for one line to sneak through: "i see something wrong in here." 240911 ... raze (audio) 240917 ... raze an R.E.M. song with michael stipe meowing a melody that was a dead_ringer for the flute intro to "house of the king" by focus. 240925 ... raze (over_and_over) 240928 ... raze nick lowe filmed a music video for a catchy tune called "person to person" outside my grade school, even after lou_reed showed up to steal his thunder with a near-identical song that was nowhere near as compelling. 240929 ... raze there were at least four last_night. all of them are gone now. 240930 ... raze a few lonely notes played on an out-of-tune piano. 241004 ... raze a soft shuffle with some nice three-part harmonies. two lines stayed with me, but only the tail end of one remains now: "your demons to die with you." 241006 ... raze there were two this time. one of them went, "maybe you love me. maybe you don't. but i'm right on the money anyway." the other one went, "i got nothing to use my head as, but now i got a used head." both of them were pretty catchy, with just a hint of desperation squirming beneath the glossy surface. 241007 ... raze david_bowie revealed a hitherto unexplored facility for working a synthesizer pitch wheel. he traveled through octaves and traced out melodies with a dexterity that didn't seem possible. 241010 ... raze (susan_someone) 241012 ... raze i discovered a lost peter_gabriel album recorded between "scratch" and "security". it was a failed attempt at making something with more commercial appeal. the first song was called "if this is what you say will happen, it's happening now". it was pretty happening, i gotta say. 241026 ... raze jason isbell was really jason collett, though he looked more like sufjan_stevens. he was riding a horse on every one of his album covers. my mother wanted to listen to a song called "new animals". i could almost hear it just by seeing its name. 241028 ... raze "fire stone, i'm getting weaker," was sung with more enthusiasm than the moment merited. 241029 ... raze (burden) 241031 ... raze a parody of olivia newton-john's "physical" called "ridiculous", as sung by john travolta. there wasn't much to it, but it was amusing for about half a verse. 241103 ... raze "when i was young, i was against you," i sang. "you were an impediment to being understood." that was the pre-chorus hook for a song i wrote for my carburetor. his name was henry. 241104 ... raze a solemn performance on a soundstage was intercut with interview footage as martina mcbride revealed one of the deep_cuts on an early album was about an abusive relationship she lived through herself. 241108 ... raze "i get to dig deep deep deep" the final repetition of the word stretched out into a melismatic rallying cry. 241114 what's it to you? who go blather from