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What does a musician do if he wins a million dollars?
18 years ago
He plays gigs until the money runs out.
The album is up on CD Baby for 16 bucks. You'll be able to listen to the first two minutes of each track. The album should be downloadable as digital content pretty soon, through CD Baby and/or iTunes. Here's the link:
http://cdbaby.com/cd/dalemorgan
How do you make a guitarist play quieter?
Put sheet music in front of him.
I left with Christmas money. The only person being paid was probably my dad. The venue is pretty intimate, and we certainly weren't packing a full house. A good portion of people were on the "guest list" as well, mostly family. Having an alcohol-free New Years concert is a double-edged sword. It helps reduce the number of (typically drunken) requests for Free Bird and Sweet Home Alabama, but people want to drink on New Year's Eve.
How do you make a million dollars as a jazz musician?
Start with two million.
Song list, in order:
Ruby Tuesday by The Rolling (Fuckin') Stones
Four Winds by Bright Eyes
Leatherwing Bat by John "Spider" Coen (Dad calls him "Spidey")
Opera Singer by Cake
I Feel Like Life Today by Dale Morgan
Blind Willie McTell by Bob Dylan
Hey There Delilah by The Plain White T's
Across the Universe by Paul McCartney
How does a lead singer screw in a light bulb?
He holds it and lets the world revolve around him.
Ruby Tuesday has become one of my "standards." Despite that we tend to play for older audiences, it's hard to get the crowd to sing the chorus along with me. The first verse has an egregious low note that's at the bottom of my range, so the tone and volume aren't all that fantastic.
Four Winds is a weird song to follow Ruby Tuesday with. Of all the songs I did, I was hoping to do it the most justice. Unfortunately, I was so nervous that I was shaking visibly. I wasn't able to channel my fear into something more productive. New songs are a mixed blessing. There's a lot of flippin' words in that song, with a fast cadence to boot. I had to crunch the words into my cheat sheet, which screwed me up right in the beginning. The problem with cheat sheets is that one gets in the habit of looking at them out of principle instead of just when necessary, so I read out the beginning of the second half of the first verse while I was still doing the first half. However, after having forced myself to look at the sheet less, I glossed over some words in the next verse. Oh well, just makes me want to improve more. Thankfully, I was able to achieve an amount of emotive intensity similar to what Connor Oberst puts forth in the recording, enough so that it made my mom cry, at least. :P
I butchered Leatherwing Bat even worse this year, turning an eight-verse, eight-chorus song into a ten-verse, ten-chorus song. I took it in stride, though, and I had a merciful audience. They're music lovers, and they "get" it. Me and my dad kind of turned it into a comedy routine once I started screwing up the lyrics, even stopping once to ask: "Which bird are we on?" (After the verse about the leatherwing bat, the song does a verse about a red bird, a bluebird, a robin, a blackbird, an owl, a turtledove, then the bat again.) The verses are almost identical, so it's an easy song to screw up. Once the downward spiral of self-parody started, my dad decided to distract me, making me laugh through one of the choruses. I can't remember exactly what he did, but he has a way of doing things with his guitar that can really catch you unawares. Then, while re-doing a verse with my mind grasping the lyrics better, I contorted my face in anger and sung the words with vitriolic derision, cursing them for their sameness. That got a pretty good laugh.
Opera Singer went pretty smooth. I realized a little late that the new songs I picked to practice for the gig had a lot of low registers (for me). I get decent-enough tone at low pitches, but I can't put forth the volume. I have to get intimate with a really HOT mic at times. I'll have to reference the recording, but the song went wrong at the exact place I was worried most about: "I am an opera singer/ I'll sing when you're all dead." Either I started out on the wrong note or my dad was on the wrong chord, but I had to keep singing while I was thinking: "Oh God, this sounds fucking awful." For whatever reason, the starting note for that verse is ridiculously hard for me to latch onto and remember, but the melody for the following line: "I sing the mountains crumbling apart," is etched into my mind like a stone tablet. My sister came up with my mom to see me perform (the first time she had heard me sing, actually). She's a "hip cat" so she knew all the words, meaning she was looking up at the stage mouthing the lyrics along with me.
The first set ended with I Feel Like Life Today. We had my cousin Ross on bass for that one (and then later on Blind Willie, as well). I didn't bother to make a cheat sheet for it since it would be ridiculous. I only sung the whole thing about three million times in the studio.
Jeez... this is getting huge. I think I'll edit the rest in later. And umm... I'm out of good jokes.
The album is up on CD Baby for 16 bucks. You'll be able to listen to the first two minutes of each track. The album should be downloadable as digital content pretty soon, through CD Baby and/or iTunes. Here's the link:
http://cdbaby.com/cd/dalemorgan
How do you make a guitarist play quieter?
Put sheet music in front of him.
I left with Christmas money. The only person being paid was probably my dad. The venue is pretty intimate, and we certainly weren't packing a full house. A good portion of people were on the "guest list" as well, mostly family. Having an alcohol-free New Years concert is a double-edged sword. It helps reduce the number of (typically drunken) requests for Free Bird and Sweet Home Alabama, but people want to drink on New Year's Eve.
How do you make a million dollars as a jazz musician?
Start with two million.
Song list, in order:
Ruby Tuesday by The Rolling (Fuckin') Stones
Four Winds by Bright Eyes
Leatherwing Bat by John "Spider" Coen (Dad calls him "Spidey")
Opera Singer by Cake
I Feel Like Life Today by Dale Morgan
Blind Willie McTell by Bob Dylan
Hey There Delilah by The Plain White T's
Across the Universe by Paul McCartney
How does a lead singer screw in a light bulb?
He holds it and lets the world revolve around him.
Ruby Tuesday has become one of my "standards." Despite that we tend to play for older audiences, it's hard to get the crowd to sing the chorus along with me. The first verse has an egregious low note that's at the bottom of my range, so the tone and volume aren't all that fantastic.
Four Winds is a weird song to follow Ruby Tuesday with. Of all the songs I did, I was hoping to do it the most justice. Unfortunately, I was so nervous that I was shaking visibly. I wasn't able to channel my fear into something more productive. New songs are a mixed blessing. There's a lot of flippin' words in that song, with a fast cadence to boot. I had to crunch the words into my cheat sheet, which screwed me up right in the beginning. The problem with cheat sheets is that one gets in the habit of looking at them out of principle instead of just when necessary, so I read out the beginning of the second half of the first verse while I was still doing the first half. However, after having forced myself to look at the sheet less, I glossed over some words in the next verse. Oh well, just makes me want to improve more. Thankfully, I was able to achieve an amount of emotive intensity similar to what Connor Oberst puts forth in the recording, enough so that it made my mom cry, at least. :P
I butchered Leatherwing Bat even worse this year, turning an eight-verse, eight-chorus song into a ten-verse, ten-chorus song. I took it in stride, though, and I had a merciful audience. They're music lovers, and they "get" it. Me and my dad kind of turned it into a comedy routine once I started screwing up the lyrics, even stopping once to ask: "Which bird are we on?" (After the verse about the leatherwing bat, the song does a verse about a red bird, a bluebird, a robin, a blackbird, an owl, a turtledove, then the bat again.) The verses are almost identical, so it's an easy song to screw up. Once the downward spiral of self-parody started, my dad decided to distract me, making me laugh through one of the choruses. I can't remember exactly what he did, but he has a way of doing things with his guitar that can really catch you unawares. Then, while re-doing a verse with my mind grasping the lyrics better, I contorted my face in anger and sung the words with vitriolic derision, cursing them for their sameness. That got a pretty good laugh.
Opera Singer went pretty smooth. I realized a little late that the new songs I picked to practice for the gig had a lot of low registers (for me). I get decent-enough tone at low pitches, but I can't put forth the volume. I have to get intimate with a really HOT mic at times. I'll have to reference the recording, but the song went wrong at the exact place I was worried most about: "I am an opera singer/ I'll sing when you're all dead." Either I started out on the wrong note or my dad was on the wrong chord, but I had to keep singing while I was thinking: "Oh God, this sounds fucking awful." For whatever reason, the starting note for that verse is ridiculously hard for me to latch onto and remember, but the melody for the following line: "I sing the mountains crumbling apart," is etched into my mind like a stone tablet. My sister came up with my mom to see me perform (the first time she had heard me sing, actually). She's a "hip cat" so she knew all the words, meaning she was looking up at the stage mouthing the lyrics along with me.
The first set ended with I Feel Like Life Today. We had my cousin Ross on bass for that one (and then later on Blind Willie, as well). I didn't bother to make a cheat sheet for it since it would be ridiculous. I only sung the whole thing about three million times in the studio.
Jeez... this is getting huge. I think I'll edit the rest in later. And umm... I'm out of good jokes.
......
you slapped me across the face with that goddamn dildo and it hurt me.
Emotionally.