December Playlist: Let's Make It Sound Bad

by John Davis & The Cicadas

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	1.	Surf Ballad 07:36
	2.	Crepuscular 03:12
	3.	Balalaika and Ring Mod 04:02
	4.	Synth and Saz Slow 03:09
	5.	Saz 3 Synths 04:33
	6.	Crash Like 05:19
	7.	Happy Synth 03:51
	8.	Joy Divisionish 03:38
	9.	Spacey Superfreak 04:47
	10.	Chopper 03:36
	11.	Can Do Lead 04:16

about

This month's subscriber playlist documents a group of demos Lou and I did for our album-in-progress back when I visited him at his place in Massachusetts in March of '22. After cobbling together a playlist from jamming on drums and bass in the attic on my previous trip to MA in July of '21, our goal this time was to work on the structures of the tunes. We restricted ourselves to just direct bass, acoustic guitar through a cheap Roland modeling cube amp, and the Patterning drum machine app. Lou said that it was helpful when working on structure to make the texture "Sound bad." The reason? Great textures can be sonically seductive in ways that can lead songwriters to overlook structural flaws in the composition that will reveal themselves over time once the initial seduction of the texture wears off. If you can make something you like out of sonically flat tones, that shows you have accomplished something with the traditional songwriting part of the composition. Then later you go and make great textures with that structure and put it all together. That's what we are working on right now.

It's been a slow process due to us being in engaged of other ways of making a living - me teaching and Lou touring with other projects - but it's been rewarding at each stage so far. All of these songs have real titles by now but I am not including them here unless we had those titles back when this stuff was recorded.

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released April 12, 2023

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John Davis & The Cicadas Durham, North Carolina

John Davis is a musician who works solo, with Folk Implosion, with a backing band called the Cicadas, and with Dennis Callaci. He also works on defending and transforming public education as a teacher - organizer with the Durham Association of Educators. ... more

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