Art, entertainment, cultural cohesion, cutting rugs, radical prehistoric themes, sex, drugs, and wannabe jazz; the third track from from Synchronized Seasoning, “Cliff Walker” has it all. It’s obviously a bit of a sequel to “Cliff Driver”, but from a different (perhaps more mature) perspective.
Following what seems to be a disturbing pattern, “Eigenvalue”, the second track from Synchronized Seasoning took way too long to finish. In fact, I’m now almost 30 years old, and this song was mostly written more than half a decade ago. The time between was filled with some tough stuff and some negative thoughts, but I kept chipping away at this beast slowly in the background. During this period I was in grad school, which is notorious for causing self-doubt, and worse. Thus, Eigenvalue is a bit dark.
The first time I saw Shia LaBeouf’s “motivational” video, all I could think of was the Pantera song, so I combined them:
The first Pete P song released in roughly three years, “Translational Frames” was a bit painful to write and record, due to both lack of time and motivation. Even though I am so sick of hearing it, I do think the tune is kind of cool conceptually—evolving from an idea on how to relate harmony to rhythm.
A few months back my good pal Travis Orbin asked if I would play bass on and mix/produce a song for him, which he composed a few years ago and actually showed me before he tracked the drums for “Bugz” and “Idiot Christmas” in 2009. I decided to take the gig since the song’s absurdity and uniqueness doesn’t end at its title, and it presented a formidable challenge—the bass. The part Travis wrote was quite difficult and took a long time to learn, rehearse, and record. In fact, there’s one tiny part that was beyond me and had to be programmed (what a wimp, eh?), though the rest of the bass is a blend of programmed samples and real bass. Travis supplied the drums fully-mixed, which only took a little tweaking to fit with the rest of the instruments, making the mixing job quite a bit easier. All in all, it was a fun and worthwhile project and I hope to work on more of Travis’ songs in the future. Check out his session video below and be sure to download the song from his bigcartel store.
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