Roxanne!
My favorite pick since 1997, a Stiletto made of aircraft aluminum (you can hear it striking the strings with a metallic sound in a number of songs, including Not An Exit's "Dead (finally)" and my own "Blond on Blonde")
Yes, I'm rockstarandy... at least on Gmail. Sometime in the mid-'80s, I began expressing an interest in making music. I'd been part of a Baptist church choir briefly, and my parents bought me a small Yamaha keyboard to tinker with. There was a recorder in the house I barely learned to play, too, and my sister eventually gave me the acoustic guitar she'd never really tried to learn to play.
In the meantime, I began attending the Dean's Summer Scholars Program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1987. Stumbling upon a song parody-writing session in the lounge one afternoon, I contributed a line or two to "Newark, Newark," and shortly thereafter, I joined (possibly co-founded, but who can remember?) the Hellevators. I brought that little Yamaha keyboard with me, and though I couldn't play very much, or very well, I was the only original member who could play anything. ;) We were soon augmented by Sue Schleck, who was much better, as was her keyboard, and we went on to perform two shows for our fellow Summer Scholars and record a tape.
The Hellevators never officially disbanded, but the end of the Program effectively spelled the end of the group. I did re-record our first song, "Newark, Newark," solo a few years later... In 1989, after dropping out of college (the first time), I decided that an electric guitar would console me quite nicely. Not that I'd really gotten any good with the acoustic yet...! Roxanne, as I call her, is not a fancy guitar, just a black Gibson/Epiphone knockoff of the Fender Stratocaster, but she served me well during the early Not An Exit days. Although she's a right-handed guitar, I've restrung her as a lefty and play her "upside-down," Hendrix-style. Makes getting to the last few frets very difficult, but... hey, it works, and I don't often play that high up on the fretboard anyway. She's got a 'PAID' sticker (from my Toys "R" Us days) between two pickups, and any number of minor dents from being battered around.
I'd have to say that I started getting 'serious' about my music in 1991. That's when I first tried recording songs that weren't just parodies, and that's when I first tried my hand at writing music and lyrics. My guitar-playing in the early days, though, was very stiff and basic. I didn't even try to learn any chords until the mid-'90s, because it just seemed too difficult. However, once Jon Wardell and I formed the duo Not An Exit in 1992, I had a reason to devote a little more time and attention to Roxanne, and I started to improve. Actually, our first few recordings were rather experimental and didn't utilize much guitar at all, with the exception of several versions of "Dead." In the summer of 1994, seeing Brazil win the World Cup led me to improvise the "Victory Samba." Late in 1996, I recorded a few covers (and "Human Thing"), and by then I was able to lay down some acceptable rhythm guitar. Since mid-'99, I've been spending much more time in front of the amplifier, and my confidence, as well as my performance, has grown. 1999 found me recording the techno/gabber "Troll Doll," the industrial "J-ded," and a straight-ahead rock 'n roll cover of Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away." The following year, I finally sat myself down and got that cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie" out of my head and onto digital media, and I began recording songs for Joy in the New, my debut album.
While I'd written the occasional song since 1992, it wasn't until I penned "For Dana" in 1999 that I seriously considered recording my own album of material. Since then, my various dwellings in Somerset, Nutley, and Lyndhurst have played host to my home studio, based on a Macintosh or two. My original optimistic schedule anticipated the album being fully recorded by the end of 2001. Um...
After the untimely death of punk legend Joey Ramone in early 2001, I wrote the tune "Joey Ramone's Dead," having decided I'd give the album the same title. I soon realized that at least two years would have flown by before I was ready to release my CD, and it wouldn't have made sense to have called an album Joey Ramone's Dead in the summer of 2004, after Dee Dee had also expired and shortly before Johnny shuffled off this mortal coil, too. Besides, both the track listing and the overall vibe of the album had changed since those darker days, and Joy in the New seemed more appropriate by the time I was recording the last few songs.
After years of promises and procrastination, Joy in the New, an album's worth of original music (with one Not An Exit tune), began shipping in August 2004; you can read the official press release here, and an August 2004 article from local paper the South Bergenite here. The release date was pushed back three times, but hey, it wouldn't have been an Andersen Silva production if there hadn't been delays involved. It's about as DIY as you can get; I played all the guitar, bass, and keyboard parts myself, programmed/sequenced the drums, and applied my voice. The recording and mixing was done by me, too, at home. A little of the package's artwork was done by me, but most was volunteered by two good friends, great artists, and fellow Toys 'R' Us survivors, Steve Augulis and Jon Wardell. The only way this could have been more do-it-yourself is if I'd printed the booklets and CD trays and duplicated the CDs personally. Of course, that would've looked like crap and taken even longer.
Two of the album's tracks have been released elsewhere; "For Dana" was included on Kid Antrim Music's 2002 Rock Compilation CD, and the pop-punk "Blond on Blonde" is on Crankspiv Records' Volume III compilation (also released in 2002), along with great music from other bands. My songs are also available on numerous Web sites; look under the Music heading in the menu above.
In addition to Roxanne, I own and play Nena, an aqua left-handed Danelectro 56-U2 guitar, a black lefty Kramer bass guitar, an Ovation twelve-string acoustic/electric, and an M-Audio Ozonic MIDI controller keyboard, as well as a recorder, a harmonica, and a few odder items. My recording setup during the sessions that resulted in Joy icluded an old Apple Power Macintosh 7200, Dana (my iBook SE), a Behringer 18-track mixing board, an Alesis SR-16 drum machine, a Shure microphone and two Realistic mikes, an EBow Plus, some effects pedals (overdrive, a wicked 'Punkifier' punk distortion, delay/flange, a seldom-used Crybaby wah, and a multi-effects unit which has all of the above plus phasing and some other great stuff), and a guitar amp and bass amp. I did most of that recording and editing with the help of what I consider to be the best shareware program I have ever found for Mac OS 9, Sound Sculptor II by Jeff Smith. Before I got the drum machine, most of my drum tracks were programmed on my Macs using Virtual Drummer, which is wonderful freeware. Nothin' like the early days of Not An Exit, when we 'multi-tracked' by using multiple cassette decks, seriously compromising audio along the way... These days, I record directly to my PowerBook G4 in OS X, using the Ozonic as both a MIDI controller (mostly in GarageBand, with some additional synth sounds from AMG's SynthPack) and an audio interface, which means that I can plug the Shure and/or the guitar/bass into the keyboard, which is plugged into the laptop. If I were recording a full band, this wouldn't supply me with enough inputs, but for a 'singer'/songwriter working alone, it's just fine. GarageBand, Deck, Peak, Reason Adapted, and Audacity all make recording and editing such a breeze.
Several people are fans of my (to-date, anyway) sole techno/jungle venture, 1999's "Troll Doll," and were disappointed that it wasn't included on Joy and that I have no intention of re-recording it. It's got so many Metallica samples that James Hetfield would probably personally kick my ass. Heh-heh-heh... I enjoy the track myself and had a lot of fun putting it together, but it's not going to be revisited. I've recorded a number of covers over the years just because I felt like it, but none of them will appear on an album, unless I get so wildly popular that I can afford to start thinking about the legal stuff involved. For a while there, right around the turn of the century, I was doing more covers than original songs, and it was hard to fight the temptation to record songs I already knew rather than creating my own. Got out of that rut, finally..."Hannah's Song" was really recorded for Gina and Hannah, not for the rest of the world, but Gina urged me to make the lyrics less specific and re-record it as a song for children everywhere. Perhaps...
I'm currently writing and recording new material (albeit slowly) for my follow-up, to be titled Tougher Than Flannel. I like to think of the title as a tip of the hat to Run-DMC and a poke of the tongue to grunge bands at the same time. Joy in the New had a vague story arc, about enjoying an all-too-brief happy moment in life, descending into depression, and eventually getting a second chance and finding joy again; Tougher Than Flannel is shaping up to be about accepting the end of romance, writing as catharsis, and getting tougher as a result. Or something like that. Hey, I just write the stuff. Hopefully, I'll be able to pick up the pace; I'm thinking it'll be ready in 2009.
My modern classical classic, "The Hate Theme from 'Waiting for X,'" will probably be included on the album. This was my only attempt at songwriting during a two-year dry spell, and the title came from an error message a co-worker and I noticed on his computer, something about 'waiting for x.' I thought it sounded like a movie title, and then I thought that that movie needed not a love theme, but a hate theme. Not that the music sounds especially hateful, but it is a bit dramatic... I recorded a demo at the time, back in '98, and a new one early in 2005, and I'm determined that I have to get it out of my system. It's probably going to sound more electronic than I'd initially intended, but the tympani will still be there. "D.V." will most likely be recorded as a thrash-metal type of song, as per the second demo I recorded; I don't even want to think about what recording the vocal part is going to do to my voice, and vice versa. The title "Too Loud to Be Eaten with the Naked Eye" materialized in my mind around 1999, and I composed and recorded the moody, jazzy instrumental that bears that name six years later, in July 2005, a week after coming up with a surf song, "Down the Shore." A week after that, I put the finishing touches on "Heavywait," and "Christmas Lonely" was recorded in November 2005, in time to generate some interest for the holidays. Since then, I've finished up "Souls Broken," "Frendy Tucker," "Rock and Roll Day," "Six Months," "Dangerous Babies" (and a 'decider mix'), "Drabbard," and "Rockhopper."
I haven't planned out the entire album yet, but in addition to the "Hate Theme" and "D.V.," I will most likely record and include "Loster," "We Go On," "I'll Live," and "When Giant Giants Attack!" on Tougher. There are other songs I'm still writing, or thinking about writing. I'm trying not to end up with a backlog of twenty written songs that are just waiting around to be recorded; as I've already got several unrecorded tunes waiting to be done, I've kinda put the brakes on the songwriting. There are some I've written in the past (like "Dorable" and "The Tunnel") that may get recorded by Not An Exit (if the dynamic duo do record again) but probably won't be by me. "The One" has a definite sound in my head, but I'm not sure I want to touch it. The Roy Orbison-inspired "Lonely Blue Dreams" was written more for fun, though maybe I'll give it a go sometime. I'm not too sure of what to do with "Sandsong." For a while there, I thought about recording it in a techno style, but if I do it at all, it's probably going to be slow and moody rather than frenetic.
I don't expect to become a rock star or a 'singer'/songwriter sensation, but I don't totally discount the possibility, either. That's not why I started making music, though, and if I don't 'make it big,' I'll be more than satisfied with having created my own art. After saying for years that I should really get out and try to play a live gig, I committed myself to performing during Make Music New York on June 21, 2008, when public spaces (sidewalks and parks, mostly) throughout New York City will be opened up to musicians and listeners free of charge. Hell, yes, I'm nervous. But it's something I have to do, and I'm looking forward to turning up the guitar at Merchants' Gate at Central Park 'round 3:30 PM. Being seen live generally helps with exposure and CD sales, so we'll see where this takes me. I've got schwag for sale, too, which you can buy from the Shop!