Lauren Edman

A Website of Additional Things

Posted on January 15, 2013 by lauren

I’ve got a site redesign in the works. Fact is, I’m tired of talking only about music here. That’s all I’ve talked about on here for years. I do other things too, and I want to write about them – things like cooking and knitting. Maybe additional things as well, but definitely cooking and knitting to start.

As always, I’m making the site myself.. well, sort of. I started building my own websites from scratch in the late 90s, back when one could make a fairly respectable site armed with only HTML, Notepad, a free web host of dubious repute, and some classy GIFs. When CSS came along, that was cool and useful for my purposes. I learned and applied that and felt pretty good about it. Sadly, knowing what I know isn’t nearly enough to make a respectable website from scratch anymore. While I’ve studied scripting languages a bit, I’m not convinced spending the time necessary to get comfortable with any of them is something I should do, as opposed to doing other things that I’m probably better suited for. And maybe I shouldn’t be sad about that. I learned all that stuff in the first place mostly because so many of the templates available resulted in hideous websites. That just isn’t the case anymore. Now I’m on WordPress, which seems plenty sufficient for anything I might want to do here. I’ll probably dig into PHP eventually in order to really understand how this thing works. First, though, I need to finish knitting a small blanket so I can learn how to do a mattress stitch. Priorities!

As part of the expansion, I’ll reincorporate some of the blog-ish features that I tore out when I started using WordPress because it seemed like overkill for the type of information I’ve been presenting. I don’t enjoy a cluttered webpage look with so many things to click on that you don’t want to click on anything, so I’ll try to keep it simple, straightforward, and neat.

So yeah. Basically, I don’t like seeming dormant when there is a lot going on in the background. New music will come; this other stuff isn’t taking the place of that. But for anyone interested in some of the other things that interest me, stay tuned for my website of music and things.

Lakes of Canada cover

Posted on December 9, 2012 by lauren

I made a simple piano & voice cover of the innocence mission’s “Lakes of Canada” tonight, and here it is:

Social networking sites

Posted on December 2, 2012 by lauren

As I said a couple updates ago, I locked up my Twitter account. I still use it a little, but I feel weird about it. I hated promoting my music on it. I hate saying anything serious and earnest on it and things that are deeply important/personal to me. It’s too transient and limited for that, and there’s too much of an overload of completely unrelated stuff. Everyone’s condensed thoughts scroll by with equal weight, whether it’s what they had for dinner, a political issue they are passionate about, how they feel about a sports game they are watching, that a family member died and they’re really sad about it, or some combination of abbreviations, @s, and hashtags meant to promote some sort of thing – and so much else.

I don’t see how anyone can read that mishmash of brief unrelated thoughts from so many people without eventually feeling numb to most of it. So with this in mind, I’m most likely to tweet things that make me laugh, and nothing more. While not everyone shares my sense of humor, I like to think maybe some of the stuff I tweet makes some people laugh before they scroll down to the next tweet from whomever else. I figure this probably makes some of my few Twitter followers wonder if that’s all I’m about, but I can’t bring myself to say much of any other kind of thing on Twitter, if I say anything on there at all.

I deactivated my Facebook account this past Friday for some similar reasons but mostly other reasons, reasons that are more serious to me. To summarize, I don’t like what it does to the connection between people, this illusion of closeness with minimal or no direct communication, this need some people seem to have to try to make all their Facebook friends think their lives are more wonderful and exciting than they actually are, and what is overall a strange invitation to look into the personal lives and often hastily expressed thoughts of people who don’t know each other all that well and really probably shouldn’t.

Putting aside Facebook’s ever-shifting privacy policies and practices – and the fact that its main purpose at this point is to serve paying advertisers while its non-paying users are the product being served – the actual friendship aspect of things on there started to make me very uncomfortable. I couldn’t use it, even sparingly, without feeling like I was a part of something awful and ultimately destructive on a much bigger level.

When I deactivated my account, Facebook had the nerve to tell me that my friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with me. They also showed big pictures of people on my friends list with the words “[friend] will miss you” above every single one of them. The whole display was such an over the top attempt at emotional manipulation that it only made me happier I was leaving.

So with my personal page deactivated, I don’t have a music page on Facebook anymore. It just doesn’t seem worth it to me.

Part 2

Posted on November 18, 2012 by lauren

I knew it would feel weird to be done with my first album after it was my primary goal for so long, but I think I underestimated just how weird it would feel and for how long. For years, there’d been this inescapable drive to get these specific songs out into the world. That drive simply went away once the album was done, with nothing to replace it. I’ve been left with a vague desire to continue to make music but with no idea what music to make, as well as a general, gnawing anxiety. In lieu of working on creating my own new music, I’ve been cooking like a maniacal cooking-obsessed person; playing piano songs by Debussy, Brahms, Rachmaninov, and so on; and I took up knitting, which is a nice thing for me to stare at intently and make repetitive motions with. I’ve felt so far removed from the whole music-creating process that, at this point, I can’t even fathom how I managed to get that whole album done. It’s a weird feeling for me, and not one I’ve found particularly enjoyable.

So now, eight months later, a vision for album # 2 is passively starting to take shape in my head. Without getting into specifics in terms of sound so early in the process, I’ve decided I’m going to approach this in pretty much the opposite manner from how I approached It’s Always the Quiet One. The result will be as follows: 1) all new songs (as opposed to digging through my notebooks and cobbling something together from that, a process that was stressing me out just thinking about it) and 2) a cohesive sound/genre, something I was completely opposed to doing for my first album.

I do have a certain sound in mind. Perhaps this is an odd thing to say, but what I want to do in this case is fill what I think is a genre void. I want to make the kind of music I’ve been craving in recent months but haven’t found many satisfactory examples of. It’s going to take some tinkering to come up with sounds that will fit in with what I’m thinking, but once that happens I think it’ll come together relatively quickly (for me). And I hope to keep things interesting and to have the music be expansive within that sound. I intend to not feel hampered by this approach.

I’ll end this with a song by somebody else, “Wake of Swans” by Ruby Throat. Headphones and darkness recommended.

So what’s going on?

Posted on October 8, 2012 by lauren

Well, I decided to lock my Twitter account because, after feeling weird about it for a while, I finally came to the conclusion that I don’t enjoy using it as a promotional tool. I do enjoy saying assorted things about stuff, which Twitter lends itself to quite nicely, but connecting that with public self-promotion for my music – particularly in the form of 140-character tweets – felt incredibly awkward for me. It kind of made my skin crawl for reasons I haven’t quite sorted out. So I decided to put an end to it. I’ll keep using my Facebook music page as I have been, and I’ve still got my email list, for anyone interested in those things.

Musically, what’s going on is I’m finishing up recording for For Every Story Untold’s full-length debut. We’ve only got a couple songs left in the tracking phase, and then mixing will commence. We’ll start playing some shows again once the album is done. Looking forward to getting back on stage; I have all these dresses and makeup and shoes that I bought for the sole purpose of performing with the band, and they are forlorn.

FEBRUARY 2013 UPDATE: Since writing this post, I decided to unlock my Twitter account again. I’ve managed to be at peace with it. So there you have it.

Behind the Scenes: Orchestration

Posted on September 15, 2012 by lauren

I always really liked playing in bands. I’m talking about playing clarinet in symphonic bands. I did this from fourth grade to the end of high school. I did this not for the camaraderie offered by the shared musical experience, not to make friends, nor even because I really loved playing clarinet – I tended to prefer singing and playing piano, although I did enjoy playing clarinet also – but because I loved being a part of this morphing musical entity, hearing the interplay of all the different instruments, hearing how the different timbres sounded weaving in and out around me and how they related to what I was playing.

I didn’t always like the music we played, but when I did, it hit me hard and I’d become somewhat obsessed with it and want to hear it over and over again. This happened in one piece with an English horn solo, in another piece with a piccolo solo – hearing these instruments used in ways I’d not heard before, possibilities I hadn’t considered.

I came across this piece by Poulenc, for a long time one of my favorite composers, earlier this year. It had that same effect on me.

From 0-35 seconds in, I almost feel like I’m floating if I close my eyes. The combination of the flute/oboe/bassoon parts from 0:37-0:45 makes me think of shiny, clean glass (in no context – just glass on its own in the universe) every single time I hear it. So does the piano part from 0:50-1:00, though a little jagged, maybe cracked. I ended up buying the score to this just to study it.

I mentioned in my last post that when I first wrote “Silent,” I had a more diverse arrangement for it that I ended up replacing because the MIDI instruments sounded too fake. I did really like the idea of a French horn, a bass flute, and an English horn playing these parts. I even liked some of the harmonics that came out in the MIDI programming… but ultimately it didn’t work as a whole.

Here’s what that looked like (might need to click on this twice to see it at full size).

There was an organ part, timpani, string bass, bass clarinet, and so on – all instruments that did not make the cut. Neither did that long piano solo at the end there. I imagined it sounding better than I could manage to in real life, without having a real orchestra to play it. The tempo was also slower. Quite the dirge.

Below is a clip of how that sounded. It starts at the section marked as “Verse2″.

Behind the Scenes: Banjo and I

Posted on May 1, 2012 by lauren

“Silent” is the song that made me get a banjo.

I’d written the song for piano and voice, but I had some orchestral parts in mind also. Strings, flute, clarinet, timpani, french horn, pipe organ and so on. So this song was playing in my head for a while, and one day I was just sitting around in my room when suddenly, still in my head, I started hearing these notes plucking along with the piano chords in the beginning. I liked it. I didn’t know what instrument that sound came from, but I wanted it. Was it a mandolin? No. It bugged me for a few days before I finally figured out that the instrument that would provide that sound is a banjo.

I’d never held a banjo before, but I then started looking into banjos to see if it was something I might be able to play and if it would make sense for me to get one. I ended up getting this extremely lightweight one along with a couple introductory lesson books. It wasn’t that easy finding banjo accessories tailored to small humans, but I was able to get some wee fingerpicks along with a strap that I could pull all the way up to my head if I wanted to. Here I play for you “Worried Man Blues” as it is written in the book Splitting the Licks, which is what I’m looking at in this video.

The banjo came in handy for “This Is It,” also. As for the rest of “Silent,” I simplified the arrangement a lot from what I’d originally been working on. There were a couple songs on the album that I’d made elaborate orchestral arrangements for using a sample library I have, but they sounded too much like fake instruments once I recorded real piano. The other song this happened with is “Desperate Times,” which I wrote with bassoon and english horn playing the counterpoint in the second verse. So I played all those parts on clarinet instead… which I’ll get to in another post.