Well… this weekend was busy.
Friday I mostly slept, aside from some phone calls and SMS messages. I didn’t get enough sleep, but I did sleep.
Saturday I wrote an email, which I won’t get into here but it was important for me to write it.
Saturday afternoon, I planned on reading and writing and working on my blog a little, but I got a call from Myoung Jae telling me that the band needed to meet that afternoon, if possible. He was sick and medicated on Contact, so I didn’t feel my own slightly sore throat, by then mostly better, was a good excuse to whine and ask if we couldn’t meet Sunday.
So we met, and ended up finalizing plans about our practice room and a drum kit, some gigs next week, and plans for our CD-recording project. The gist is that we’ll be practicing a lot over the next two months, trying to prepare some songs for our next CD.
So Saturday night we went to the new practice space, set up, and practiced some of our newer songs as well as developing two new songs. The new songs are still a little incomplete in our minds, bits disconnected or mistakes we still make about what comes next after this or that section, but the new tunes are looking good. One is very groovy, but with strange grooves stretched over odd numbers of beats, and three-and-a-half measure patterns, things like that. (And a very cool polyphonic section where I sing this talky thing over Myoung’s singing, and, eventually, Seong Hwan will also sing… I really hope we can get him to do it.) The other song is the Jeonju Jew, my own song, though it’s nothing like what I originally envisioned.
(It was hard for me to accept the process of letting a song become something rather different from what I’d planned. I spent a lot of time developing the lyrics, form, and melodies of the original, but because I couldn’t figure out the harmony, and for other various reasons, it turned out we’re playing a very different song. This shouldn’t bother me, and if I’d developed the song in the right way… loosely, with the band trying it out first before it became a fixed structure in my head, like a composition… then the whole change might have been less of a shock to me.
(But now, I’m feeling better about it. This is how bands come up with songs… even though my taste and Seong Hwan’s really clash sometimes, like when he suggested a certain pop-song sounding chord progression and the dark modal tune I suggested to use in its place didn’t do much for him. But I know my taste clashes with everyone else’s sometimes, too.)
After that, we (all except for Seong Hwan) ended up at the Deepin, and while Myoung and Thai and Kathleen were wise enough to leave early, I got into a long talk with someone I originally didn’t know very well, Myoung Hee… we talked a long time. It was interesting to get to know someone who everyone else seems to know, and who seems to have been around the world of the anglophones in Jeonju for a long time, and the fact she was happily buying drinks for me, and then that Min was happily giving them away, kept me at the bar much later than I should have stayed.
I woke Sunday feeling a little icky but not too bad, however. But I always wake too early because the sun comes into my room very early in the morning. OR maybe it’s the army of children chanting their cathecism? I don’t know. Anyway, I went out for lunch and then took a taxi over to the practice space. The taxi driver who took me there was kind of crazy. He had gone to Vietnam and kept telling me that, while mimicking the action of shooting a machine gun at people walking on the sidewalk. When he compared his service in Vietname to the Korean soldiers sent to Iraq this year, I asked him whether he thought it was good or bad for Korea to get involved there. He said it wss good and then mimicked the machine gun thing again. I tried not to bring it up because I wanted him to pay more attention to the road than to our conversation.
Anyway, I spent Sunday from about 2:30 until 7:00 practicing with the band, working up those new tunes and reviewing our more recent (post-CD) songs. Then Myoung gave me a ride on his scooter, and I got some groceries and broke down and bought a pizza on Myoung Jae’s earlier recommendation. It was from a pizza truck, and I had to ask the woman to not give me corn or ketchup on my pizza, but it was, as Myoung said, pretty good.
And now I am going to sleep. Good night, so long, to you and you and youuuu… ugh, I am quoting The Sound of the Music. This is a sign of something, but I don’t know what. I am scared, though. The HILLLLLLLLSSSSSSSSSSS…. ARE A-LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE…… WITH THE SOUND OF MUUUUUUUUUUUU-SIC!
ungh. sleep well, all.