It’s All Such Bullshit

Come Together, by uh…Aaron Trumm?

A Beatles cover! Me and Eric used to cover this together - he’d play acoustic guitar, we’d both sing. At the end we’d sort of throw in some poem I had in my notes. Different ones. I remember using this one about the I-Ching at Fitzgerald’s open mic.

Kind of overdid it on the production on this one. I have like three different drum tracks plus a beatboxer (me? eric? both?) - but Gabe did a lot of great drumming and it is really fun to do this song. I added all these new lyrics so it’s this hybrid song or something.

This one we recorded on that marathon session when Eric came to Oakland. We did all these bass tracks and guitar tracks and then it was break time and Eric and Dustin went downstairs to have a smoke break and stand around outside and have break time, and I said ok I’ll be right down and once the door closed I just did the vocal tracks all in one take (or two - maybe there are some overlaps) and went down and was like “ok vocals done”. I had fun with that cowboy shit. Doing things all wam bam like that.

Later after all those sessions I did the real drums with Gabe. Then I struggled and struggled to get everything to gel and I also couldn’t really let go of anything so I think in the end it’s a little overproduced. I owe Harry Fox 9 cents or whatever.

Almost dropped the track from the record ’cause it’s a cover and you wouldn’t believe what a hassle those fucking assholes make that. Technically, you’re supposed to prepay the .9 cents per sale or whatever the hell it is. You’re supposed to say “ok I’m gonna eventually sell 2000 copies and so I give you this money” or whatever but the thing is the minimum is so out of range that unless you just kind of break the rules and say “listen fuckers I’ll send you this when I get it, like the rest of the people who get royalties on this record”, you can’t do it.

So that’s what I did. I’m never sending those guys the 9 cents or whatever I owe them. It’s just not even worth it. If ever we sell a bunch of this and the owed gets past the goddamn postage, I’ll send it.

Buy Digitally

Not Waiting, by Aaron Trumm

I’m not sure what to say about this one. Great drumming by Gabe Turow again. I played the bass and the piano and I think there’s some guitars in there by Eric. Yep there they are.

Sad song. This is actually the first song I wrote where I could sort of play piano (simply) and sing it at once. It’s actually about the time I spent in this course that they make guys take in Houston if they get arrested for domestic violence. I took it voluntarily, wasn’t arrested for domestic violence. But the thing you get eventuallly is certain things you just can never expect to be forgiven for and the only real thing you can do is stop asking for forgiveness, let it go, try to forgive yourself, etc.

So I wrote this sad song about it. Woo! Then somehow in producing it it got jazzy. It’s a fun little jazzy upbeat TOTALLY INSANELY SAD song! Woo!

But whatever.

Buy Digitally

Say My People, by Aaron Trumm

First of all, listen for the mistake in the beginning. The GUITARISTS WATCH FUCKING BEEPING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TAKE.

So I kept it! HA!

Say My People is probably my best slam poem. Have done it and won with it all over the land, etc. I always sort of envisioned it being on a record with some of it rapped and some full band action and stuff. I also thought about just putting a straight version of it, just like it’s done in slams, but I dunno, I just didn’t feel like it. I felt like a lot of times, that stuff was pretty boring on a recording.

This particular performance is too laid back I think now though. Too slow. For the drums on this one, I got this cat at Stanford named Gabe Turow. We did a four hour session in the studio at CCRMA, and he was really good. He just sort of banged out four songs worth. That was fun. It was sort of lonely in a way. Normally in a session like that I think of it like some community event with different people around. But no one was around. No one knew it was happening. It was just me and ‘ol Gabe sitting there drumming and then later it was just me sort of editing in the dark.

That’s the thing I think that’s the big appeal about being in music or entertainment is it’s always this party, this community event that involves a lot of people and makes you feel like you’re in the middle of where things are happening. That town square feeling where you might be a little aware that other things are going on in the world but you don’t feel like you’re missing anything. You feel like you’re where you should be, and you feel connected and stuff. I think that’s why stuff like the super bowl is so popular. I mean you don’t have to care about football (god knows you won’t see much football if you’re at a super bowl party) it’s just that you’re there in the community. Everybody wants to be in the community.

I’m not sure many people would want to be musicians if everybody went about it in the lonesome way I usually go about it.

Buy Digitally

10,000 Mirrors, by Aaron Trumm

Here’s a pretty weird one. I had this concept in my head around, oh 2002 or so, where I thought of having songs that were about 6 minutes long, and the deal was, the first three minutes would be arranged like a regular pop song, and there’d be a radio edit where that’s all you’d hear, but then on the album, it would shift and go into something entirely different. “The 6 minute double song” I called the concept or something. Probably it’s not an original concept but I don’t know.

So this was one of those. I had this whole version recorded, where my man Larry Lines played guitars and had this whole jazz thing going in the part where the song changes, and it was getting pretty neat.

Well I lost those tracks. They’re gone forever. So a couple years later I had to completely do this song over again. COMPLETELY. And I didn’t have ANYthing but the lyrics. I had no idea what key it was in or what it sounded like. So I redid it around the same concept, and had Eric do guitars. I just sort of told him what we’d done.

And we would do the first half live, just me and him and his acoustic guitar.

The lyrics. I wrote the poem that comes at the end first. 10,000 Mirrors. I wrote it in a dance club in Corpus Christi, TX on a bunch of A4 size (that’s half size) pieces of paper. The club was mixed, but had a lot of gay patrons, and it was like any dance club, dark, misty, sweaty, etc. I used to go to a lot of dance clubs and not dance. I’d write poetry or do martial arts in the middle of everybody. Well I was writing that night, while all my slam teamates danced, and what I wrote about was the thought that I was having that damn, what a jip our society lays on you if you’re gay. You end up with this huge risk of being relegated to this fucked up existence in the dark because out in the light, nobody will let you be a part of it. Of course, that’s not just being gay. It’s being black, or small, or having CF, or a woman, or just really just ANYTHING damn near. Almost nobody doesn’t have that feeling.

Of course eventually you have to realize you’re NOT as unique as you think, and say fuck this, I’m gonna be in life, fuck anybody who says I shouldn’t be a part of life, and I don’t have to live in the dark dank places and slip between the cracks.

So anyway this is that poem. I remember telling my friend Doug about it, who happens to be bi, and feeling self conscious that maybe I’d overstepped my bounds.

Then I wrote the raps later, and they’re mostly about this one friend of mine at the time who had just taken the whole “them and us” bullshit thing too far. Everywhere we went it was “that idiot”, “those morons”, etc. The idea that there was an enemy, that people out there, other than us, were fucked up morons. This idea is of course all over the place, but seriously, here’s a little advice for all you kiddos reading this: If you have a friend who says you’re great, but “so and so” is wrong or fucked up, watch it. Sooner or later that friend will turn on you. Who you really want to be around and trust are people who are saying good things about other people who are not there with you. You WILL end up on the “other side”, trust me on that one. So the verse is about that thing of wondering “dude you’re a little hateful, I’m a little worried when you’ll turn on me”.

And there you have it. There was some interesting processing on some of the tracks where I pitch shifted something and put some weird echo and suddenly it turned into an unexpected thing, and the drums of course are all weirdy but it’s a nice change too so hey. There ya go!

Buy Digitally

0912, by Aaron Trumm

Pronounced “nine twelve”.

First off, it’s not called that because it’s anything to do with 09/11 actually. It does have subject matter that connects, but really we did the song on the 12th of September and it had no title and was labeled “0912″ in our audio folder. Kept the title ’cause of the accidental relevance.

So this is a cheat big time. This is the lyrics from a whole other song. Called “Majority Of Men”.

That was how it was for me at this time. I would do tracks and do tracks, but pushing fucking words out of me was so tough that sometimes I’d just search around in books or old albums and reuse shit. In fact that’s mostly what I was doing is just searching through journals and using shit, maybe fleshing it out. Hardly anything entirely new on this record.

I probably already said something about this rhyme, because I think I already talked about Majority Of Men. Yep, here it is.

The tracks on this song are so fuckin complex. I could remix this thing 100 times. There’s a million guitars and squeaks and drums and back up vocals. I totally make it go nuts at the end too. I improvised the shit about “do you want me to lay it down, for the rest of the world and the president, don’t act like you ain’t been there I know you ain’t paid the rent”

Of course Eric played all these guitars and basses. The drums are machines. And Eric did backing vocals. I had him scream all this Latin at the end, but I don’t remember what it means.

That’s actually a weird nod to a professor I had in college - Monica Cyrino (god she was SOO HOT). Classics professor, which is also “History”, so I took a lot of her classes because I was a history major! And she made getting a good grade and just learning by listening very easy, and she was a GODDAMN sexy redhead. But anyway one lecture we talked about old school Latin Lyric Poets, and the similarities, culturally, between that and rap. I decided I wanted to make a rap song entirely in Latin. I even wrote her an email at some point telling her so! But I never have gotten around to learning to rap in Latin, but Eric took some Latin and could scream a few things as a backing track on a song of mine, so I figured that was a start!

But the coup de gras on this fuckin thing to me is the guy screaming “SOMEBODY LET ME OUTTA HERE!!!” at the end. That same voice/track is the gospel style singing you hear throughout the song. That guy was a friend of Eric’s who came in to the studio one day while we were working, and I only ever met him that one time, and I don’t know his name even. He was like “oh neat I wanna try!” and so we said “get your ass in the booth then!” and he did, and it turned out he was really good at this nutball gospel singing (which was being done very sarcastically and it was hilarious but also awesome sauce!). He didn’t want a credit or anything, wanted specifically to remain anonymous, so that’s why I’m ok with forgetting his name and everything about him except his track.

He’s screaming at the end because the whole joke at that studio was “The Old Man Clothes Room” - I might have told this story in this blog before, I really can’t remember. But whatever - the vocal booth was just my walk in closet. It was deep in and very isolated and very dead acoustically, but I didn’t have to DO much to make it so, because I had Tamara’s father’s entire wardrobe in there. And this was a man who had a lot of stuff. Suits, shirts, pants, a lot of things you might accumulate as a man of taste and means and corporate need. He died and her mom was sorting through his shit, and asked me to come help out by taking away anything that I might want (he happened to be about exactly my same size). Well when I went to her house, I quickly came to see that it was seriously draining and trying for her to have to sort through his clothes, and I figured, you know, it doesn’t really keep her from having to deal with that if I just take what I like. So while she was off in another room I literally hopped to, hurried my ass off, and put EVERYTHING in my truck. I said bye, drove off, and had it all. That was my little piece of service, such as it was.

So, everyone that came in to the studio, I told ‘em what all the clothes in that closet were. So it was a bit creepy to be in there, we used to say (not sure if it really was or not, but we’d say it was). You’re in this deep hole with a bunch of dead old man clothes and a microphone. And it felt very isolated. Solitary. Fucked up man. So we lock that new dude in there, and by the end, he’s going “SOMEBODY GET ME OUTTA HERE!!!”

We laughed for days about him. What the hell was his fuckin NAME?

Buy Digitally

War, by Aaron Trumm

Really this kind of thing is my favorite. This one I thought up the chorus when I was out on the road with Poetry Alive. I remember being in this hotel thinking of that. I think it was actually the same day I wrote Walking Dead.

Then later on Eric came up with this guitar riff and we laid that down, and then we borrowed his dad’s drums and took ‘em to my place, and he played the drums and the bass on this. Then I came up with the verses and sang all that weird stuff and he did some backup screeching.

I put distortion on the vocals to make it sound all gritty like a live performance and I spread the guitars out and all this stuff. I remember I had a mix done of this but when I took it to the mastering engineer (we actually had this record mastered by somebody real, John Greenham), he said there needed to be more low end, more kick. So I went back in and put on an extra kick drum sound that I played live to tape from a drum machine. I think I enhanced the mix a bit too.

Then gave it back.

This is pretty simple, this song. It’s about the war. “What are we fightin for?” - I mean that’s pretty much it. But there is some twist in the verse because I start talking to soldiers and one thing I say that I like and I think is a twist is: “and when it comes down to the last man, i hope to god in the heavens you know you can”

You can do it! You can! I dunno - I just like that sort of encouragement or reminding hey you can get through this, I hope you remember your inner competence, or something.

Anyway that’s about it, really, when it comes to anything to say about this tune. I like it cuz it’s just straight forward rock rap stuff. I’m such a big Rage fan that I don’t know why I don’t just do more of this.

Buy Digitally

Voodoo Daddy, by Aaron Trumm

This is a slam poem that almost anyone around me during the slam phase of existence would have heard. It became one of the ones I would use a lot. Of course that means originally it was non music, more spoken word slammy (although I did sing that melody the same at the beginning). So I didn’t rap any of it. But it was designed to be able to either rap some of it, where some would fit really nicely into 4/4 time, and some wouldn’t. The guitarist is Eric (dominguez) again.

So Eric wrote the guitar part to fit with my “voodoo daddy” singing. He was great at that kind of thing.

At first we did a full band version of this song, which went unreleased. It was all ready to go, but then in I guess it was August 2005, ‘ol dominguez flew his ass out to Oakland, stayed with us in the studio/loft on an air mattress we had, and spent I don’t know how long - a week maybe? two? - recording the 2nd half of his album “Bugs, Wine, Demons”, which we’d done about half of in Houston, and more stuff for Bleed (and some poetry for a straight spoken word release of his that we have yet to put out and some side stuff). Man he was great to work with.

Of course, we were both disturbed heart broken drunken fools. Then we had Dustin there too, hangin with us. That was actually a hilarious and fun week. Mostly we were ensconsed in the studio, it was sort of a dream come true, only it was weird that we were able to have this studio lockout like we were some kind of rock stars, when in reality we were nobody with no money.

We’d record and record, then sometimes, Dustin and I would take Eric down stairs to the ghetto street to take some pictures of him smoking or sitting on a dumpster with his guitar, or me looking cool with a hat on against the wall, or something. Or we’d take him down to some coffee joint and have a coffee.

We didn’t get hookers and blow. In fact I think we pretty much locked anybody else out of our lives, other than whoever we saw at the coffee places. The funnest outing, though, was we got up relatively early (for us) one morning and went up into the Berkely Hills (which are STEEP - steeper in some cases than over in San Fran) to pick up some piece of equipment or something that Dustin needed. Well it’s a bit hard to fit a driver, a dude, and a 6′4″ 280 pound man (Dustin) in the cab of an 88 Nissan Pick Up (they’re small, yo), so Eric opted for the back (camper shell on it, so he wouldn’t fly totally out!).

Well Eric liked to read a paper and sip coffee in the morning (dude is an amalgam - sometime he’s such a fuckin academic - getting his PHD in Philosophy right now). Well it’s not like he’d had a chance to do this before we left, and he’s never one to miss out on an outing, so there he is, while we’re going up a 60 degree incline, trying to fucking sip a goddamn cup of coffee with a paper and not fall out the fucking back of the truck. And we’re in the cab just looking through the rearview mirror literally laughing our fucking asses off the whole way watching this cat balance his coffee cup. Fuckin guy HAD to drink his coffee and read his paper and also come with us into the Berkeley hills. Hell I’m laughing out loud right now remembering that image. Demure Eric, poet, philospher, teacher, being tossed around, not spilling coffee, trying to be collected, getting his ass kicked by gravity. And it’s not like we forced him to the back! He wanted to be there! But the funniest shit is he didn’t spill his damn coffee. But his disturbance was hilarious.

That, and when I picked him up from the airport, he had to crawl in the driver’s side door (everyone did, including Dustin and girls) because the passenger door was duct-taped shut (it wouldn’t stay shut otherwise). And I neglected to tell him, the window was kinda broken too. So he starts rolling it down, it gets crooked, he’s freaking out trying to get it to roll up hoping I don’t notice he fucked up my window, making it worse and worse and more and more crooked and stuck down, like a sitcom, and I just look over and start laughing my ass off. That was his introduction to the Oakland NQuit scene, right off the plane. *LAUGH*

Well ANYway, back to the point. MOST of the time, we’d record or mix or edit in the day, be serious, be smart, be sober. And at night, we’d get shitfaced on wine and beer and whatever else we could find (Eric’s a wine guy) and record new tracks.

So one night we decided we’d drink hella wine and beer, and then start improving. So we improv’d tons of poems, and then started doing live takes of songs. A couple of those live takes made his Bugs Wine Demons album, and one, Voodoo Daddy, played live, drunk, him on acoustic guitar and me on vocals (you can hear him singing along in the background), made Bleed.

I used it because it just seemed cooler. It wasn’t a full band, it was unique, just acoustic guitar and voice, and it had more life and it was just a better fit. So I used it instead of the full band version, which was already done before I even moved to California. It’s the first take too. That’s what makes me laugh.

We wrote that song in Houston, and since I knew the poem up and down ’cause I always did it at slams and features, and he knew the guitar real well, we’d go around to parties and open mics and do that song together live. We’d done it a lot actually. We actually even did it live at a poetry party in Berkeley at slammaster Charles Eilik’s house that week when we recorded.

So it was easy to just bang out and even though we were drunk we just banged it out first take and said fuck it and used it. There is at least one pretty good sized mistake I make on the track, perhaps you can catch it. But I just thought that was so tits to be so good at something that you could do it first take drunk. So what if there was one mistake? I made it sound at least like improv on purpose dumbassness.

Either that, or you can totally tell we’re wasted and it sounds like shit, and I’m blind. Them’s the breaks, if that’s so.

Buy Digitally

Understand, by Aaron Trumm

Man I dunno if as I get older I just grow up or what but this song is like a whole third too high for my voice now. How did I do this? Jenny said it was too high. I sound young? I dunno. I sound better just a bit lower.

Other than that I love this song. This song sort of goes unnoticed in my realm of being, but in one sense it’s the most important song I’ve ever written - at least from a personal standpoint. And honestly, your own personal story is the most important one you can tell.

See this song is directly and purposefully about CF. The only piece of art (poem, song, whatever), I’ve ever written about it (and published - I wrote a poem I thought was too angry once and never used it for anything).

But it really de-emphasizes the importance of CF, which maybe is perfect. I make this big deal out of this tragic story and really, when you get down to it, it’s a laughable side note. It is NOT the most important song I’ve written, having CF (and not dying) is NOT the most important contribution I can make, it’s NOT really that deadly a thing, and really the big “here’s my personal story here’s my big thing!” song turns into a pretty good filler song on an album chock full of other issues.

I do like a lot of things about this song. The first thing is I feel like I really succeeded in being sneaky with the lyrics. It really sounds to me like a romance song. Like somebody breaking up with somebody else. The other person cheated, the other person’s not on the right path, etc. But they’re trying to be compassionate and reconcile. But they’re still mad at this ex-lover. But they realize, fuck man, they have to reconcile. They have no choice but to love each other. Maybe they work together. Maybe they have a kid together. Hell I bet some people would think this song is about Tamara. We were inexctracably linked together for a long time after we broke up. We had an album out, an act, she was on the label, we had a whole Houston poetry scene we were leading, a slam to manage, a slam TEAM to manage, this whole realm of our children. She was ALWAYS there. I HAD to reconcile.

But it is NOT about her, not even a little.

The other person, you probably understand by now, is ‘ol Grim Reaper. This is a song about my relationship with death, which I might have thought to be unique, but it’s everyone’s path. I found that out reading the Tao Te Jing. I read a chapter or two every night - been doing that about 3 or 4 years now - it’s short, I’ve read the thing enough times that I’m starting to memorize it - never the less let me look this up…(Stephen Mitchell translation for you academics):

Chapter 33:

If you realize that you have enough,
you are truly rich.
If you stay in the center
and embrace death with your whole heart,
you will endure forever.

Of course that basic theme recurs a lot in there. So this song was no longer unique, but it was still personal and still important, and even though the task is the same for everyone: get to a point of not fearing death, few will ever achieve it.

You can notice that this song is not about me having achieved total embracing. Otherwise the lyrics would be more like “I love you so much I want to be with you and love you all day” or something. It’s more of an honest thing of look I’ve had this “person” (’ol grim) as this enemy my whole life, and wait just a damn minute, I HAVE to eventually talk to him, go with him. And it occurred to me while writing Understand (I usually write a lyric FIRST and THEN learn something, not the other way round like you might expect), “wait a minute, maybe this guy is not out to hurt me. Maybe he wants to free me and maybe he’s a compassionate and professional guy who wouldn’t even think to take me somewhere I’m not ready to go.”

I think that thought came second actually. First, I think the thought was “Maybe I should have a good relationship with grim. If we’re friends, maybe I can say hey, man, I’d like to stick around awhile, can we arrange that? and he’ll help me out.”

Nevertheless, I’m not ready to die, not even close. I love life and I want it and that’s why in the song I’m like “look, man, I’m sorry I was hating on you. I’m realizing you’re only out to help us, ok? Let’s just shake hands here, let’s bury the hatchet, but dude, not in my back, ok? I’m willing to stop throwing hatred at you, if you understand I’m not ready to go where you take people.”

Shortly after doing the song and releasing the record, I made a huge shift in life based on that idea, and am quite a huge bit healthier than I was then. Interesting.

I talked a lot about the lyrics again so I guess I’ll paste them again (notice in the last verse - the rap - how I’m still pissed off, but at doctors and shit - little bit of sarcasm in the last lines “sorry doc, can’t stay long, gotta go DIE (asshole)” *LAUGH*

time is of the essence now
you’re gonna come home too late
and find I haven’t been around
so make me worry make me cry
or make me lay me down
I don’t care as no one thinks I’m missin
and wear your costume
I don’t care ’cause i’ll still know your name
and everybody you been kissin
but I guess it’s not too late to make amends
and maybe we can still be friends

just as long as you understand
I don’t wanna come with you where you’re goin
just as long as you understand
I don’t wanna come with you where you’re goin

Buy Digitally

Bachelor, by Aaron Trumm

I still really like this one. Ok first things first. Guitar and bass on this one are by Guy Schwartz.

He came over at about 2AM one day, smoked some weed, and just banged out these tracks. I owe him maybe a penny just like I owe Rob and Sandy. I also gave him partial song writing credit because in my mind, if you make up a guitar line, that’s writing. That’s NOT song writing from the traditional ASCAP/BMI point of view, but fuck those people, honestly.

Poor Guy. I think he was pressured by his squeeze, Marlo Blue, to go ahead and make a smart political connection by going over to this young cat’s house and doing a track or two. Poor kid’s desperate for players! (Poor kid would be me.) But in the end, Guy loves playing, and he’s so good he just knocks whatever it is out and I’m such a laid back producer that it’s like, you come in my studio, you play through a couple times and I’m like “cool that was great see ya later”. Later on I edit and tweak and you get this weird thing.

He played two basslines and I just freaking put them on top of each other in the song. It worked, screw it!

That session was a real millenium falcon moment too. I was running with my relatively new Linux audio machine and it was just always hanging on by a thread. The session ended when the whole machine just died and would totally not boot. The hard drive was wacked in some mysterious way and I had to go “well Guy, that’s it for us, hopefully I’ll be able to rescue what we did just now otherwise it’s gone” and he went home, I think. But I managed, through IT geek magic, to rescue it.

That’s one story of this song. The other story is this:

In very early 2004 (day after Christmas 2003 if you want to be precise) me and my long time famed girlfriend Tamara broke up, and after a bunch of hemming and hawing, I found an apartment in the Montrose of Houston. I left my studio in the room it was in in the house we lived in, me, Tamara, our friends Jill (now married and in the UK), J (a badass guitarist/singer/songwriter, like truly exceptional), and Rebecca (an incredible poet).

See I left the studio in that house, even though I was moving out, because like happens so often, I figured me and Tamara were just on like a 3 month break. Oh lord how dumb is that? Well after a month or two of occasionally going over to work in the studio (not enough) but having to see Tamara and deal with her new relationship and all of that really insane shit (including J, who was previously with Jill, moving out almost at the same time), basically being this weird obsolete cracker with everybody in the house moving into different relationships (ever hold a crying ex girlfriend while she sobs about her dying father while reading a note from her roomate saying she needed cuddling from NewGuy? Not recommended), I got instantly fed up to no end and in one day, without telling anyone in the house I would, dragged the whole studio down out of that room, packed it in my little Nissan truck, and carried it to my apartment.

Originally the apartment was supposed to be JUST apartment. Not having home and work combined seemed like a good healthy idea. Then again I also thought Tamara would be coming over banging my brains out on the futon.

So it was small. And I took every stick out of that studio (which was one room but with lots of hidden storage, really); the mix desk, the gear, the acoustic treatment, the label product, rugs, blinds, all of it, everything I’d built, and I just shoved it in my apartment. I just literally piled it all up. I had this dining room table and there was this pile of foam (like picture bed foam, egg crate bed foam) completely covering it and mounding all the way nearly to the ceiling. And gear was strewn about completely engulfing the front room, the kitchen, into the back in the bedroom. Literally, there was only a path as wide as a human to walk through to the bed in the back, and you could kind of step over to the desk in the corner of the front room and get at the computer.

For MONTHS I left it like that. It was all this gear and foam and wood and CDs in this pile, and on any given night or day, you’d come in and see me passed out at the computer with these sheets of music from music theory class at University of Houston strewn all about me on the desk and on the floor, and just beer bottles and bottle caps every where, next to me, on the floor, on the desk, everywhere. Maybe there’d be some beer staining some of the sheet music.

What I’d do is, every night I’d get the cheapest six pack I could find - on sale stale keystone ice for 3 dollars, and I’d come home after class (I was also on prosac and it can make you kind of hazy), after my music theory and computer science and history and Choyun Ryu (basically taekwondo) class (held in the UH basketball arena), and I’d put on either one or both of:

Manu Chao
Jack Johnson

And drink the whole six pack as fast as possible. Sometimes I’d have two. And do my theory homework. None of the other classes had homework that I wouldn’t be done with by the time I got out of my job as a computer lab monitor. I’d get as drunk as possible and bang out the theory homework, and sometimes the phone would ring, and it was Tamara enough times that I just said “I’m gonna ignore this for my own good”. To this day I ignore phones. I didn’t have a cell phone. The reason I played Manu Chao or Jack Johnson is because my friend Tamantha gave me CDs of them right when I moved. She was sort of sharing new things with me, giving me new comforts, and watching out for me. In fact she would come and physically drag me out of the place and put me in her car and take me to Yoga class. Which sometimes sucked ’cause The EX would be there sometimes.

I never slept regularly. I might crash out at 4am and be up at 7:30 and stumble down to work at 8am at the lab. I got a second job at some point doing audio and stage hand work at Cullen Performance Hall on the campus of UH. I LOVED that job. I love theaters.

But for those first few months, I think it was two, maybe three, I’d either be on the floor in there on the tile, crying or hitting something, or doing that homework. I did nothing else. I can’t even recall if I ate. I must have sometimes. The apartment was red tile, open kitchen/bar, not fancy, but really neat and would’ve been great for cooking, having friends over, being a sort of cool collected graduate student. Nope. Not happenin.

I’d lay on the floor and occasionally I’d hear the neighbors fucking for their webcam. They were webcam sex people. You could hear them discussing what the customers wanted to see.

And I never set up that studio.

Then one day I get a call from Dustin, and I think for his demo reel, he wanted a - well I don’t know what he wanted, to tell you the truth. I know he needed a swing song, which we tried to turn Larry’s Cat In The Desert into, and anyway, he needed it like tommorrow.

So that night I threw the whole fucking studio back together. This is not like you might be thinking, where it’s hook up the computer and plug in a speaker and you’re good. By this time, my studios were massively complex project studios with 32 channel patchbays and full on accoustic treatments that I’d developed over the years to be able to travel from place to place. So I had a LOT of hammering, screwing, nailing, rebuilding furniture, tacking up foam, and wiring to do. I just did it that night, all of it. I - you guessed it - drank my six beers in a row and hammered all fucking night.

Then without stopping, I started trying to make a song. I just started making a song about being a bachelor, now that I say that I think that was what Dustin wanted.

I’m sure he really wasn’t expecting what I did, but really at that point the ONLY thing I could write was this freakin song. A couple days later Guy came in, I banged out the mix, and voila.

And well, here’s the lyrics:

I’ve got my head shaved
I did it with a hunting knife
bet you didn’t know
those things are sharper than a bad life

Buy Digitally

Bleed, by Aaron Trumm

Man I still hear what I always heard in this and it really frustrates me. What I hear is its potential. For me this song is like a 6′4″ 275 pound high school senior of a son who can run a 4.1 40 and doesn’t like football.

Or worse yet, is on the team, is killing everybody, but won’t do his college applications.

This song will never reach the potential I see in it, let’s just face it.

I intended for this song to really bust us out, and I intended for it to incite a bit of revolution around us, the kind where people get up and do something. And maybe the song’s good enough for that, maybe it’s not, but either way, I think it could’ve really done something - IF I was already relatively well known -

and IF I had been playing it a lot live.

Neither happened. Really the potential I see in this song - this vision I have of it sounding like the beginning of something - which is why it’s at the beginning of the record - this vision I have where it starts not only my imagined career as a celebrated rap/rock/poet superstar, but the start of something bigger than me, bigger than NQuit, big like

I’ll just say it - big like Barack!

Seriously, that’s the kind of thing I was thinking. Take all the kids, everybody over 18 and under 40 and band them together around the inspiring idea that perhaps it’s time for a change. Perhaps Playstations and television aren’t doing it, perhaps we ARE smart enough and good enough, perhaps things can be GOOD, not good, GREAT. And get everybody together, and get something done! Like saving the fucking planet from carbon. Something real.

It took him two years to get the small something done of get the man voted into office. And as historic as it was, it’s nothing. Are we going to band together and actually DO something now? Or are we exausted from just getting to the starting line?

But back to the song. See the potential in this song and how I saw it as so much huger than it actually was is actually the thing that I was doing for a decade with NQuit. It was me pretending to be something I had yet to even try to become. Hell, that kind of pretending is so prevelant in the entertainment realm that sometimes it even works and makes you become huge!

But for us at NQuit, all of our pretending to be something we weren’t didn’t ever lead us to being that. What it did was paralyze us and prevent us from becomming it, which may, in the end, be a good thing. I’m certainly more committed to my health and family than I would’ve been had Bleed gone platinum the month we put it out (by some odd miracle).

It’s like they said in a seminar I was in once: If you start out in L.A. and want to drive to New York, it’s doable. But if you tell somebody you’re in Philidelphia and they give you directions to New York, they’ll be the wrong directions! You won’t get there.

So it’s not about wallowing around saying “oh boo hoo i’m in L.A. I can’t get there” and it’s not about pretending you’re already there. It’s about knowing where you are now, letting that be real, then going from there to your new reality. You follow me?

But listen, you didn’t come here to hear me tell you how to realize a dream I didn’t realize, or any dream for that matter.

You came here to find out who played that smokin GUITAR! YEAH! Eric Anthamatten, baby, otherwise known as dominguez.

He and I cowrote this song, actually, in that he did all that guitar work, and I fit some lyrics to it, created the melody, wrote more lyrics, and went and did my producer/editor shtick and made it the song. He did all the really weirdo backing vocals too.

And there’s a video for this song! Dominguez is the naked guy who sits on my shoulder like the devil - I think that’s what he does.

Oh man see doing this shoot really started making me think I was right about the potential. People were actually becomming involved. Dustin took this really tiny crappy camera he had and just said fuck it and put something together with it. We used chocolate sauce like Hitchcock would do and we had our friend Christian Temple (no shit that’s his name) and dominguez extraing and this hot chick licking me and the whole bit.

The reason we had people in on it besides just ME is because Dustin is the ultimate connector. I’m the stage rock star, and I’m damn good at that, but behind the scenes HE’s the rock star. He’s the one that goes out and gets people involved. If only we had had a band doing this material live a lot, or we were doing porn, I’d probably be a lot more rich, famous and dead right now.

Later people said this video was extreme or disturbing and I still can’t understand why. I shave my head, and then we play with fake blood. I don’t have a clue what’s so extreme about it. I remember when I first met Jenny and somehow her family got to see that video. They didn’t all run for the hills, in fact we just had ‘em over for Christmas! Wow! Maybe they understood that *I* was not the visionary behind the VIDEO, that was DUSTIN. *LAUGH*

Here’s a tidbit: I can play/sing/rap a version of this song on the piano. Maybe I’ll do that someday and video it for ya. Don’t wait up for it though.

Lemee just leave you with this, though, because god I still DO wish we’d have taken this thing platinum and people had heard the last line, because I think - well I like it:

WITH ENOUGH LOVE THIS FUCKED UP WORLD IS JUST STUFF

Buy Digitally