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missroseroseI'm not sure if I'm going to make my original goal of three performable songs by September. (If I went with "end of September", maybe, but the intention was "by the end of summer", and I'm pretty sure the bulk of September is firmly in fall.) If everyone will pardon my bad manners, I'm going to take this moment to flip a gigantic bird at every single jerk who posts "Mr. Jones" as an "easy beginner guitar!" song. The chords are easy, yes, and the riff is relatively simple, but it's fast enough that it's taken me two months of near-daily practice to get up to anything resembling speed. And not only is the strum pattern syncopated, every fifteenth and sixteenth measure uses a different one that I haven't worked out yet. AND that's not even counting the melody line, which comes in on a triplet and only gets weirder from there. AND AND AND the chords on the tab that I found online were completely wrong, along with half the lyrics being misspelled, so of course I had to sit down and do them up myself. (Come on, Google, I expect better from the first hit you bring up.)
And yet I'm still determined to learn it - even more so, now that I've actually played it through (albeit shakily) a couple of times. A certain amount of that is sheer stubbornness, plus the whole "I've come this far, might as well see it through" aspect; but I also just really, really like the song. It's got such a sweet blend of desperation and pathos and naivete and tragedy and worldliness. The singer seems to understand that the fame that he wants so badly is ultimately insubstantial and only likely to lead to misery, and yet he still wants it so badly. In a lot of ways it reminds me of my visit to Los Angeles back in 2004; I'd grown up hearing about what a shithole the place was and how underneath all the glitz and glamour its values were so awful, and sort of wondered for a long time why anyone would actually want to live there. But then I went there, and saw a little bit of the glitz and glamour for myself, and suddenly understood better - it may be gilded, but the gilding is so shiny, you almost can't help yourself.
Anyway, that one might be a bit late. But with a little work I think I can polish up both "Warmer Climate" and "The Scientist". I'm especially looking forward to revisiting the latter when I learn a bit of picking; it sounds okay just strummed, but I think some picking will give it a little more variety.
Now to work up the courage to actually record and *shudder* watch myself...
And yet I'm still determined to learn it - even more so, now that I've actually played it through (albeit shakily) a couple of times. A certain amount of that is sheer stubbornness, plus the whole "I've come this far, might as well see it through" aspect; but I also just really, really like the song. It's got such a sweet blend of desperation and pathos and naivete and tragedy and worldliness. The singer seems to understand that the fame that he wants so badly is ultimately insubstantial and only likely to lead to misery, and yet he still wants it so badly. In a lot of ways it reminds me of my visit to Los Angeles back in 2004; I'd grown up hearing about what a shithole the place was and how underneath all the glitz and glamour its values were so awful, and sort of wondered for a long time why anyone would actually want to live there. But then I went there, and saw a little bit of the glitz and glamour for myself, and suddenly understood better - it may be gilded, but the gilding is so shiny, you almost can't help yourself.
Anyway, that one might be a bit late. But with a little work I think I can polish up both "Warmer Climate" and "The Scientist". I'm especially looking forward to revisiting the latter when I learn a bit of picking; it sounds okay just strummed, but I think some picking will give it a little more variety.
Now to work up the courage to actually record and *shudder* watch myself...
