Greetings from the….OK I haven’t named my apartment yet. I have finally decided that the whole not doing nothing routine was getting a touch on the old side. Rather than treating the local open mics as a nice thing that it would be not a horrible idea for me to do, I have begun to treat them as mandatory events that I cannot afford to miss. Which to the untrained eye seems CRAY Z. But it’s the type of wack shit that is going to have to become a part of me if that whole this becomes the primary thing I do plan can get its ass all fruity. I wrote a new song on Sunday. I’m hoarding the lyrics and the demo. I just don’t feel like the posts do a lot of good. Plus it gives me an added incentive to do more work and write more songs so that they can be packaged together and shoved out of my brainplane to parachute into your ears and…this sentence has gotten away from me. I want to put together a full-length album. So I’m not just going to post stuff online as I’m writing it. I save that shit for my blog posts. Instead, I’m going to hang onto stuff, work it at open mics and see what sticks on the proverbial wall. If you really want to hear something, you can always try to butter me up and it’s highly likely that arrangements can be made. But I don’t want my inability to generate a triple-digit Youtube view count running through my head when I’m deciding if it’s worthwhile to sit down and write. So I’m going to go down to the open mic now. Hopefully it’ll be less than a month before we meet again.
Toodle-oo, go with God, and don’t take any wooden nickels,
Nick
Like a forest fire it burned a hole in me. I perspired.
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So I’ve been in Madison for about 2.5 months now (margin of error +/- 0.2 months). I have been neglecting my craft in quite the embarrassing fashion, but I have been very focused on scratching out an existence here, a process which is very near completion. I have found two jobs (and lost one), currently serving as a barista at a neat little drive-thru coffee shop on one of the main thoroughfares into the city. It is great to have a job like that that I really like. I’ve also found a pretty decent and cheap apartment, which is where I am typing this from while listening to an old Explosions in the Sky album. Sadly, I have barely touched Guillermo these last months, so I really don’t have anything new to report, other than that I hope to get the ball rolling here soon and build up some good positive momentum writing and going out and playing in front of some people. Time to let go of the clutch and see what this baby can do.
Allons-y!
Nick
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Relocated [N]
So I’ve finally gone and done it. I have officially moved. And it feels pretty goddamned amazing. If you seek me on the East Coast, for the first time in 24 years, you’d be hard-pressed to find me there. I have abandoned my ancestral home of Rochester, NY to make a new one of my own in Madison, WI. Why Madison? Because I felt like it and my dear friend Derek was nice enough to let me use the couch that I am typing this from until I can afford my own couch and a place to put it. I’m beginning to SLOWLY assemble something resembling an adult human life up here, and once I do, it’s going to be pretty great…except for all the responsibility and such.
So what does all of this mean for The Flat? Well for one, obviously, it means that The Flat is no longer based in the Rochester area, but is now a Madison-centered venture. I believe that this move will free up a lot of my hang-ups that prevented me from doing a lot of the writing and performing that I should have been doing. It will mean I’ll be able to get the next project whirring to whatever it is when machines enter full function and we bizarrely call it life. Running? I don’t know. Guillermo has been living inside the trunk of Katrina the Wondercar since I’ve been here, so as not to provide additional crampitude to a situation where there’s enough of my crap around as it is. Once I snap up one of those “apartments” for my very own, you can bet that I’ll be going to town on that brain of mine, bringing the thought-smasher online and recording what word-particles come shooting out of the collisions. And I’ll be going out, slammajamming open-mics and hopefully getting some gigs where I can make a few friends show up and semi-embarassedly support me while I play these little dripping tunes.
So my life’s gotten all crazy and exciting kinda all of a sudden. But the juices have been flowing. I’ve been putting pen to paper a bit and come up with some stuff. Nothing ready to go up here or anything, but it’ll come.
Y’all take care now, y’hear?
Nick
We know of an ancient radiation
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Love [N]
I was hanging out listening to Phish playing SuperBall IX (live in real time!) and decided to just start writing what I felt. Out popped a love letter to my favorite band. I posted it to my Tumblr, but to link you to it here.
http://whoisnicksmith.tumblr.com/post/7178036141/casting-lines
Cheers,
Nick
Like a dart in the one, like a hook in a boot.
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Laying the first bricks [N]
So yesterday I was finishing up work and getting ready to leave when lyrics began to crystallize in my mind. Somehow I managed to carry one iteration of the refrain in my head the whole way home before I ran upstairs and immediately got to work. Out popped a little ditty about the struggle between good and evil, or good and good. It is often difficult to tell. Today I recorded a little demo for you to watch. You can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0rPnzf4yaw The lyrics are as follows:
The Gilded Dream Strikes Back
The very last time I walked home alone
I’d thrown away all of my change
I’d sold away every last stepping stone
Ran east, miles out of range.
Past the historical markers,
The mortal remains of my trust
Clutch the sword, parry and thrust.
The very last time I drove down this road
I severed the brakelines in vain
I burned all the cyphers that broke your code
And gleefully swirled ’round the drain.
Forty-one thousand four hundred and three,
Anything else I bust.
Clutch the sword, parry and thrust.
Vault right over the turnstile
Find a good seat with a view
The orbit’s turned around on itself
And begun to rise anew.
Today I discovered the seeds you laid
In the secret rooms of my mind
Someday you’ll regret the day that I stayed,
When I pay you back in kind.
Twitching before the pistol
Steal a head start if you must
Clutch the sword, parry and thrust.
It takes every last drop from the Finger Lakes
To drown my feverish lust
Clutch the sword, parry and thrust.
I hope you like it! I am pretty happy with it. It’s got a forward momentum to it, and there’s a lot of stuff going on in the lyrics that tickles me. Leave your feedback in the comments! Share it with your friends! Make people listen to the EP! If you haven’t yet, listen to it, then make other people listen to it!
Like a grease fire on crack
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A New Chapter [N]
Today I am announcing a big change for The Slide To Nowhere. As many of you know, it was originally my personal blog to vent about shit. No more. From now on, The Slide To Nowhere is the official internet home of The Flat. I’m moving all of my personal blogging type stuff over to my Tumblr (http://whoisnicksmith.tumblr.com/) to free up this space to be explicitly for the band. Hopefully this renewed effort will help to get stuff rolling, both in terms of getting the word out there, and inspiring me to write more stuff.
So now, no longer personal Nick shit. Go to Tumblr for that. This is 100% The Flat now. Good. Glad we’ve go that settled.
I’ve got a lot of wacky life shit going on right now that will probably make it difficult to get a lot of focused work done. But I am painfully aware of how little I have managed to do since the creative burst last year that conceived, gestated and delivered Scale From One To Yes. My inner critic has been a total dick since then, and has really discouraged me from putting together new stuff. But I can feel a new wave coming soon. I feel ready. I don’t have any specific plan yet, no dates, no titles, no nothing, but I will say that I do intend to put out a full-length album. Ideally I’d love to have it in your ears and brains before the year is out. I have no idea if that is realistic, so don’t hold me to it, but it is a tenuous goal. I will be sure to keep you up to date with demos and videos here and on the Twitters and Facebooks and such. If I somehow get my shit together and start really gigging, I will be flinging that news this way, and right into your face via every electronic tool I have.
But first of all I must write. I was actually really productive with lyrics last summer. Many of which I remember being quite good. I have a hard time going back and looking at lyrics. Half of me wants to go back and try and turn them into songs. The other half of me feels that they aren’t what I want to do right now thematically, and that the past should remain in the past. We’ll see how it goes. Once I get my situation sorted out to some degree, I’ll hopefully be able to put out a plan to start writing productively again. We’ll see how it goes.
In the meantime please Please PLEASE follow the Twitter page we’ve set up for the band. And like us on Facebook. And listen to Scale From One To Yes. Links for all of that are on the right hand side of this page, as well as under the About tab.
OK. I feel like I’ve blathered to you enough for one night.
‘Til next time,
Nick
Frozen outside the lines
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I haven’t written anything here in quite sometime. Props to Kurt for calling me out on it. I need to take better advantage of this space to hurl consonants and vowels in the general direction of whoever will read them.
I have been on a massive tear of listening to the Grateful Dead lately. Namely, I’ve been heavily focused on their earlier work, between 1968 and 1971, before Jerry changed his guitar tone getting rid of that big psychedelic blues sound in favor of a quieter tone without any of the distortion that really gave the Dead this huge sound at that point. I have been really excited about this rediscovery, but have had so few people to share it with, as an overwhelming majority of my friends have little to no familiarity with the Grateful Dead’s music.
Most of my friends are my age or older, so it is far too late in their musical developments for me to say, “No you should really be listening to the Grateful Dead because they are doing some really special things.” Especially with a band like the Dead. They’ve been around longer than you’ve been alive. If you’re not on the bus by now, you’re probably not getting on. Not to mention the myriad stereotypes keeping everyone at bay. And even if I do convince you to give a brief listen to something I thrust upon you, the impetus to make something out of that listen has to come from you.
For a long time I was really bothered by the fact that most of my friends just didn’t get the music I like the same way that I do. This was back in an age when all of the music ever was slightly less at our fingertips than it is right now. Now that we have reached a point where you can literally go get anything you want to hear instantaneously without even putting on pants, there is no music that is too obscure, because it is all available all the time. I have filled at least a half dozen MASSIVE cd-binders with recordings of Phish concerts simply through the use of a high-speed internet connection. I am not the only person who has engaged in similar activities.
We are all these unique little snowflakes, who have our own very unique and very specific tastes. We get there by slowly annexing one new musician or band after another. The amount of work it takes to really dive into the work of a musician is quite sizable. Depending on the size of their back catalog (I’m usually discovering things that already have a large repertoire to digest) it can take anywhere from a week or two to 2 months. Last year I had a half-hour commute each way. I assimilated a few albums by burning them onto a cd and just letting them play over and over again for a week or two. By the end of that time, the music would seep into the fabric of my being and become a part of my musical tradition. I think there must be at least a brief period of obsession for a song or an album or a band’s whole catalog to become a permanent part of who we are and not just some passing fancy.
Really latching onto some new group is a serious undertaking that I can’t just do whenever a friend says, “You need to listen to these guys.” Over the last several years, I have been very selective about the places I branched out. This has led me to create this strange set of tastes with islands in various genres where I listen to absolutely nothing related to this one act I have completely fallen in love with (see The Magnetic Fields, The Mountain Goats, Explosions In The Sky). I’m sure that there’s a lot of other music like it that I’d love. But finding it and digesting it just seems like too much work.
So now I understand why my friends never really give the obscure things I like a chance. It’s just too much work to add that one more thing on top of all the other music you’re processing. It sucks that we can’t share all the fucking awesome stuff that’s illuminating my brain, but you’ve got your own thing going on. And if you’re ever looking for something that I think is gonna make you go “OH SHIT!” I’ll be here, ready to deal you the top card off my deck.
On the 1s and the 2s,
Nick
Searchlight casting for thoughts in the clouds of delusion
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Invention
I can’t sleep so I thought I’d write what’s kind of been on my mind lately. I have an intense longing to create. I want to put forth something new and original in some medium that resonates with people. Unfortunately I am at a total loss for just what form this creation should take. I have not been feeling it with music these last few months. Also, this current impulse is toward something with more narrative focus. I have been watching dangerous amounts of Gilmore Girls these last few weeks and it am finding a lot of inspiration in it. It led me to realize a vitally important aspect of all the writing I was doing and thinking about doing that I was neglecting. Characters.
I have invested no real effort into creating characters, which I think is something that I should very much remedy. I was making these shells of people and telling them what to do. I need to invent complete people and make situations and their reactions to these situations should flow naturally from their characters.
I have decided that I need to create a fictional world that will contain all of my creations (in whatever form they take). In watching Gilmore Girls, I am left enchanted by the town of Stars Hollow. I have decided to make a unique world and populate it with characters before I begin trying to write anything. Ideally my plan is to fill it with fully imagined characters who have unique backstories, to the point where I am creating characters that I will never even use.
How I will use this world I create, I am not sure. I could use the backdrop as fodder for writing songs. If only I had some semblance of artistic talent, I’d love to do a webcomic. Maybe I could try my hand at writing straight prose, be it short stories or something in longer form. I don’t know. There are reasons I feel ill-suited to any medium.
Regardless, the first step is for me to design an imaginary world and fill it with people.
By Zeus’ beard.
Nick
Throw it in the fire.
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On Saving Terriers
Hey TV Fans,
I don’t know if you are watching the television show, “Terriers” but I strongly urge you to start if you haven’t already. They are really struggling to gain viewers which is a shame because it’s on of the best things on television. There is a campaign going to save Terriers and I figured I would do my part to support the show by spreading the word. You should watch the show somewhere where they can measure it (Hulu, iTunes, Amazon) and send an e-mail to FX (user@fxnetworks.com) letting them know you want them to bring it back for a second season. I recommend being respectful and pointing out all the things you like that FX does. Here’s what I wrote:
Dear FX Network,
Keep the rubber side down,
Nick
You are the live grenade in my life
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My thoughts on Girl Talk
I contributed to a larger piece on the new Girl Talk album and the concept of Mashup in general. A lot of it is very heady and philosophical, which is not my style of communicating, but my stuff in it is very visceral which is more of where I am coming from. Check it out: http://onlywordstoplaywith.blogspot.com/2010/11/girl-talking-or-why-writing-about-music.html
Shoelessly,
Nick
Ante up
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Recent Entries
- First down on the forward progress [N]
- All that wasn’t broken or left behind [N]
- Relocated [N]
- Love [N]
- Laying the first bricks [N]
- A New Chapter [N]
- The Islands We Live On, And Their Slowly Expanding Shores
- Invention
- On Saving Terriers
- My thoughts on Girl Talk
- A number of songs I think you should hear
Categories
- Uncategorized (55)
