So there is a song posted about seeing, one about eyes, and now one about feet...  Not sure exactly how that happened...

I stumbled across the main acoustic lick in the song while playing around with my recording software, and I enjoyed it so much that I decided it should have its own song.  This is my first recorded rock-and-roll song...  I feel I'm a bit late on this.  Special thanks to Line 6 for making the POD -- a phenomenal way to record electric guitar in your apartment late at night.

The vocals are recorded on a newer, better mic.  I'm a bit unhappy with them, though -- they are a bit too crisp (seriously).  But it's fine for ol' myspace.

Lyrics are about "feeling stuck".  Enjoy.

"Opening Remarks" is (obviously) an instrumental.  I was playing around with some spur-of-the-moment instrumental recording a few months ago, and this was the best of the tracks I came up with.  There's a bit of background hiss, but it's not terrible.

I think this song would be a fun way to start an EP or album.  If I ever make another one, I may re-record this for the first track.  And that would be why it's called "Opening Remarks". 

I actually wrote and recorded most of "I Was Born To See" about two years ago while I was in grad school.  About the time that I had the majority of the vocals and guitars done, I got frustrated with certain aspects of the recording and let it sit around on my hard drive untouched.  (I have since learned that my frustration was due to the manner in which I was trying to record -- i.e. my equipment wasn’t good).  But, more recently, I decided that it sounded fine for what it was.  So I added bass and some drum loops and -- yes -- that’s me clapping.  I’d like to thank Laura Veirs for inspiring me to do it...  I haven’t rocked out on it as much as she does (listen to the album "Saltbreakers" for reference) -- someday I want to do it, though.

The lyrics should be pretty self-explanatory.  There are alot of people who seem to be totally OK with the world and themselves while believing that life has no meaning.  I don’t think I could ever do that -- I really don’t want to "eat, drink, and be merry".  And not for dogmatic or moral reasons.  I just think it’s stupid and self-deceiving.

The "samples" are from two different things:

The intro sample is from a PBS miniseries that compares C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud in the discussion about the existence of God.  I don’t recall the name right now ("The Question of God" maybe?), but if you’re really curious I’m sure you could google it.  It’s a wonderful miniseries -- it would be great to go through with friends as well.

The outtro sample is from an episode of the Apologetics.com radio show called "Miracles & The Supernatural" (I believe), which you can purchase for $2 on their website.  Of all of the radio shows they have ever done -- and of all of the talks I have heard in general -- the ideas I was introduced to here started me on a line of thinking that I have found more and more helpful and fulfilling in my thinking as a Christian.  It led me away from dreary evedintialism to a fulfilling presuppositionalism.  Proper epistemology is a wonderful thing...

Yes, yes... There's a new song posted!  A friend of mine nailed me down to record something at his house, and here's the "rough demo".  Hopefully I can fix a few things and add more instruments at a later date (this will involve me nailing him down).  I'm really happy with this song.  I'm even proud of it.  Hope any of you visiting the site like it, too.

No long ranting here about the content, though.  I'd like to see if anyone  can guess what this song's about without any hints.  If you think you can figure it out, leave a comment either here on the blog or on the homepage.  The prize?  You'll earn my undying love and respect if you get it right.  Of course, if it's wrong, you'll earn my undying dislike and disrespect.  So be careful...

And the background is new, too.  I know changing your background isn't really supposed to be a big deal, but I really like the pictures.  This summer, I guess because of all of the rainy weather, the clouds have been absolutely beautiful.  Seriously.  I've never seen clouds like this in my whole life.  I constantly take pictures with the ghetto camera on my phone through the windshield of my car while I'm driving.  Seriously.  It's at the point where I have to conciously practice self control because it's not safe.

So, the background is a collection of some of the best pictures I've taken on my phone to date.  Thanks to good ol' MS paint, I was able to put them all together.  

There are so many people on MySpace now, yet I still don't understand the point of MySpace...

My sister, Kimberly, has a MySpace site and has posted a song.  I really like it alot -- you should click on her link below.

Also: I know I rarely update this page.  Sorry about that.  I know it makes people not want to visit.  It's just that I can't access MySpace from my work computer, so I never get to do much with MySpace.

Also: I am working on a new song that is "almost" ready.  I will post it eventually -- hopefully by the end of the year.  God bless.

--Kirk

Some of you who have been here before might notice that I've added links to the "Influences" section.  Hopefully people will click on them and pay these folks a visit.

One you should seriously consider clicking on is th "Vigilantes of Love" link.  It will take you to BillMallonee.net, who was the frontman of VoL (who have ceased to be VoL) and is now a solo artist.  If you go to the MP3 store, you can currently download the entire VoL album "Summershine" absolutely free. 

If you're into music by introspective, folky musician-singer-songwriters, you should check these guys out.  If anything, at least download "Puttin' Out Fires".

Also, I'm currently finishing up another song.  It should be available for posting within the next month or so.

I finished up this song a few months ago, and no one has heard it yet but me.  I've been debating whether or not I wanted to post it for all the world to (potentially) hear.  My worry is that it may be a bit too honest and awkward for people to listen to.  But sometimes what a writer sees as "too honest" may be exactly what someone else needs to hear.  Or it could end up just being "too honest" and awkward for people to listen to.  Here are some rather lengthy notes on the song...

LYRICS:  The full title of this song is "Solomon's Eyes (a confession)", but MySpace doesn't seem to like parentheses, so it's posted above just as "Solomon's Eyes".  Painted broadly so that others can feel included, I could describe this song just as a "song for anyone who's ever struggled with sin."  But I have to put broad strokes aside, because this song wasn't written to include the rest of the world in a big "grace hug".  This song is my confession of my own failures and the foolishness I've exemplified in my own life -- and not the cute Christian radio song kind that dissipates into euphoria during the bridge of the song (notice that that never happens with this song -- I did that on purpose).   I've been watching the show "House" alot lately.  In one espisode, House says something like this to his boss, "We all do stupid things.  They shouldn't cost us everything we want in life."  She responds, "But they usually do."  This is really a a song about me feeling that way.

I used all old testament imagery in this song, mostly from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, with one break into one of the Kings (Samuels?  I don't know my Pre-Exilic history of Israel as well as others do.)  I did this because Solomon is so instent that certain sins will destroy a person, and I can relate to that because I've been party in the destruction.  I know what it's like to be feel like the "terror and reproach" (see Jeremiah).  I put the Kings reference in because I wrote the first verse before realizing that I could use all Solomon references and that would be more consistent and perhaps a little more poetic and powerful.  But I really, really liked the picture that it painted, so I kept it in.

The only issue I have with the lyrics is that they're very "stream of conciousness"  They don't really flow together with any kind of logical order.  What I mean is that I could cut the song up and re-order it, or even leave a verse out completely and no one would ever know the difference.  That bothers me.  It seems like a really lazy way to write.  But it's just the way I've always done things: I've always tended to write "idea" songs, where I have a target idea and I shoot at it from as many directions as I can think of.  But in the process of writing this song, I've realized that that's getting kind of old for me. 

So, hopefully this is one of my last purely random songs.  In the future I'd like to write songs where each verse hangs onto the last one, and if you take something out the whole thing falls to pieces.  Those kinds of songs take alot more work to write, and I think would be much more fulfilling for me to sing and play.

MUSIC:  Lately, if I ever write a song, I tend to try to break the whole "verse-chorus, verse-chorus, bridge-chorus" pattern that seems to be the only way to write songs these days.  Who came up with this whole pattern?  How did it develop?  Why do we feel so bound by it?  I've always appreciated artists like David Crowder or... other people I can't think of right now... who seem to push the mold of the songwriting "system".  There so much more we could do folks, so many other ways to effectively express our emotions than the same old radio-friendly way of writing songs.

All that said, this song does go "verse-chorus, verse-chorus, verse-chorus", but I tried to do it a little differently.   I tried out the whole "hey-yah", no-words chorus to see how it would work.  I played around with the "switching between falsetto and regular vox" thing that I've wanted to do ever since I heard the CD "Music" by Justin Rosolino, and I let the song end with just vocals, which I've always wanted to do as well, ever since I heard "Wrist" by Common Children.  I've also been wanting to try the whole stacked unison vocals thing for a while, so I recorded this with that in mind.  I think it turned out well.  It could have a stacked rhythm guitar part, but I thought I'd leave it out on this one.

And those are the notes.  Hope you enjoy the song.  Hope it's not too much awkward honesty for some people -- sorry if it is.  But hopefully there will be folks who will understand and say, "Hey -- he knows how I feel, too."

This songs a bit out on a limb.  I'm afraid it could be taken as a cheesy and over-the-top.  Oh well.  Maybe some backstory will help:

Just after I graduated from A&M two summers ago, I went to my roommate's church for a while.  One morning in the college service, the speaker talked about Psalm 23.  He did this cool presentation with lots of pictures of sheep on Power Point -- very well done.  One of the things he pointed out in his talk was how over-spiritualized Psalm 23 tends to be in our Bible translations.  They say things like "He leads me in paths of righteousness" when David simply wrote "He leads me in right paths".  It talks about "the valley of the shadow of death" when David simply wrote about a "valley of deep darkness".  David's original was much more understated and simple than our translations make it out to be.  Certainly we can make applications of Psalm 23 that will look much more like "paths of righteousness" and "shadows of death", but that should come after we understand the original text. 

(I hope this info is correct.  I believe I've heard it taught at least twice in my life by different people, so I'm not just going by what one person has said.  I don't know any Hebrew, nor do I think at this point that I ever will, so I'm going by what others have told me on this one.)

So, the main point in writing this song was to de-spiritualize the language of Psalm 23 and hopefully catch the understatement and simplicity of the original.   Musically, its actually kind of a difficult song to play straight through without a mistake.  It gets a bit more technical than I'm used to these days.  The vocals in the recording get a bit strained in the high places, but there's not much I can do about the key of this one if I want to keep the guitar part fun to play.  I also didn't feel like punching vocals a zillion times when most people probably won't care.  Hope you enjoy.