elvis2's blog: "News from Disgraceland"

I started work on a new song this evening with my band, actually it was a song we had written and recorded in 2003 but had never released, we always liked parts of it but as a complete piece of music it had never quite worked. So we rearranged it, threw away the bits and pieces that we didnt like, rerecorded some of the guitars (a lot of guitars!) and the bass guitar and now we probably have all the elements we need to finish the song, its just a question of working out which bits go where and so forth. This song has an almost annoyingly catchy bass line, the bass supplies the main melody in the song and its one of those freak accident things, i had no idea we were recording it at the time i played it and it sounds like something out of a russian folk song, you can almost imagine a choir of bearded russians singing it.. Im truly amazed how fast we are spewing out songs these days, before we moved into our new studio it seemed like every song we wrote took forever to finish, i remember spending 300 hours on one song at one time, now we are whipping out completed songs in around 20 hours or so from the time we start writing them until they have been recorded, arranged and we have a final version in our hands, i hope we manage to maintain this pace and finish our album this year.

By this time next week i will have become the proud owner of two more electric guitars.. A guy i know has offered to trade me a 1963 Fender Jazzmaster and a new Fender usa Telecaster for my Gretsch 6120.. Fender Jazzmasters from the 60s are being sold on Ebay for 4 to 10.000$ depending on the condition of the guitar and this one looks like its brand new, add to that a new Fender american Telecaster with texas special pickups and i gotta say that this is one really sweet deal.

I wrote a new song with my band this evening, we started out with a really basic beat and then i added bass, some synths and a whole lot of guitars and all of a sudden we had the framework of what will probably be our strangest song so far. My parents were hippies and i had to listen to a lot of crap hippie music when i was a kid, some of it is still there, lurking at the back of my mind and this evening it came pouring out of me onto what was supposed to be a dance track. So now we have a progressive house song with guitar/synth harmonies like something out of a seventies progressive rock song, like a dance version of Yes or Emerson Lake and Palmer.. And then when you think it cant get any stranger suddenly the country and western guitars come swooping in and it sounds like two totally different bands are sharing the same drummer and by coincidence they are playing in the same key, its like you were to turn on two radios at the same time and by some cosmic accident two totally different songs were playing and they would fit together like one.. I had to go to work so i left the guys in my band with all these strange elements to work out some kind of arrangement, i hope they manage to stay focused and dont throw away all those insane guitars, i think this song could be something we could look back at in a few years with pride and still shake our heads in amazement..

I bought a new guitar a few days ago and felt a little guilty for a few minutes while i payed for it but afterwards i laughed my ass off, i payed less than 200$ for a guitar worth at least four times that amount, the guy who sold it to me was totally clueless about the value of it. I think im going to sell my Gretsch 6120 guitar, i hardly ever use it anymore and seeing as this guitar goes for over 3500$ new and mine is over 40 years old and still looks like new im guessing its worth a whole lot of money, i dont need the money really but i cant see the point in owning musical instruments that just sit in a closet collecting dust.

I spent the evening playing bass guitar and guitar on a couple of hip-hop tracks at my brothers studio, he was happy with my playing but i wasnt all that pleased with the results, i thought my bass playing sounded like it were played by a white man, it sounded a lot more country and western than rhythm and blues and, well, it just didnt feel right.. I guess i cant help being white, hell, they dont get much whiter than me, im Icelandic for chrissakes, but sometimes i wish i wasnt, like this evening, i really wished i was black, i really wanted these songs we were working on to sound like The Roots, not like Vanilla fucking Ice.

My bass guitar finally died on me after 20 years of faithful service. Well, theres no use crying over spilled milk, on monday im going to buy a new bass. Im going to buy a Fender Highway One Jazz bass, actually this will be the first "professional" quality bass i have ever owned, not that i think it will make a difference one way or the other, cheap basses can sound pretty good too, its all in how you play not what brand of bass you play. I have owned around 30 electric guitars over the last 25 years, some of them have been really expensive american handmade instruments and some have been cheap korean or swedish guitars made out of plywood and plastic, i currently own a 1966 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins model that sounds absolutely amazing and a swedish Hagström made of plastic, one of them is worth at least 2000$ and the other perhaps at the most 100$ but both of them are damm good guitars, i have actually used the plastic Hagström a lot more than the Gretsch, i wouldnt trade that swedish piece of plastic covered plywood for anything.

My band started working on a new song for our forthcoming album, if we continue banging out tunes at this rate we will probably be releasing our album in october/november of this year. Im really happy with the new songs we are working on now, this stuff is so much more representative of who we are musically than our previous releases, i just hope we get this stuff released before we become sick of it, i really want to have all new material when we play the Airwaves festival in october.

I found a box of old photos of me and some friends of mine from the early 90s, we sure liked our drugs back then! Those were strange times, i was in an experimental/rock/jazz band and i had really long hair, sometimes i would wear drag on stage and throw stuff at our audience, we got banned from playing at two clubs because we were so loud. I remember back in 1992 i went to see a doctor for some reason or other, he examined my head and found out that i had a whole lot of bumps and bruises on it and he asked me if i had been suffering from some kind of fainting spells, i told him that the bruises and stuff were there because i was in a band, that i sometimes taped a microphone to my chest and threw myself at walls or even had my drummer hit me on the head with my guitar, it made perfect sense to me at the time.

If you go to my bands myspace site you can hear a remix of a song called Babylon Days by a guy who calls himself Pole Folder, also you can check out bits of some other songs we have released and some remixes we have made for others. I dont know if its just some problem with my computer or if the song player on our page is faulty but i cant see the names of the songs but they are there, just press the fast forward thing to go to the next track. http://www.myspace.com/funkhp

I added some more vocals to a song i wrote with my band and i think this is probably going to be our strongest release so far, its called "Shine" and is some kind of weird combination of dance music and rhythm and blues, its groove feels a bit similar to the song "Knock on Wood" as done by Amii Stewart (Now theres a strange disco flashback for you!) Anyway, i added more vocals and the vocals led us to adding some chords underneath them and suddenly we were in hitherto uncharted territory for us, now this is turning out to be a really complicated yet simple song if that makes any sense at all.. I also added some lap-steel to the song, lap-steel is a criminally underappreciated musical instrument almost exclusively used in country music but it is also really suitable for adding swelling chords and siren-like melodies to dance music, i think a lot of dance music bands should fire one of their keyboard players and replace him with a lap-steel player, its a much more organic and interesting sounding instrument than a goddamm synthesizer.