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Mountain Station
My and John's band: covers, originals, freak folk.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Mountain Station is opening Friday's Songwriter Showcase at Studio 12 in Montclair. Come on time at 8 if you want to hear our music! -- We're doing two short sets, the first at 8 and the second later on after some of the featured acts have their sets. We'll be playing a couple of our old favorites and a couple of brand-new songs. Hope to see you there.
posted evening of October 19th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
Bob and Janis are coming over this afternoon to play some tunes -- I'm eagerly anticipating my first jam using the custom shoulder rest I carved this morning. Ever since I got this fiddle I have been thinking that a wooden block shoulder rest would work better than the contraption the maker provided, to attach a standard violin shoulder rest. Fate forced my hand a few weeks ago by ordaining that I should lose the said contraption... (come to think of it, I've been playing with no shoulder rest for a few weeks, and have been making some interesting music that way too... Mountain Station recorded a fun take on Odds & Ends last week.) Turns out I was right! It's extremely comfortable to hold the violin with this extension.
I've been listening to some old (well not that old I guess but from like last year) Mountain Station tracks lately and enjoying our sound. And it is just getting better -- our new "St. James Infirmary" is a different, more organized and complex song than our first recording of it.
Also -- bought a pickup for the fiddle, I decided to get a saxophone pickup that will clip onto the bell. This will help with amplification when we play at Studio 12 in Montclair next Friday.
The Studio 12 open mic at Tapastry restaurant in Montclair is a great scene -- based on my and John's experience there tonight it is one of the few open mics I've ever been to that I would invite non-musician friends to... A really friendly crowd and a lot of good-to-great music. We played a 15-minute set, a pretty satisfying length of time to be on stage -- our set list:
Running to Stand Still, medley into Arms of Love
Meet Me in the Morning
Drowsy Maggie, medley into Dancing Barefoot
It sounded from on stage like we were doing very well. John taped it on his Zoom, so we'll see how that comes out -- maybe we'll post some clips.
John came over tonight and we had some fun playing songs we did not know... It was a change from our practice routine because John had left our songbook in Andrea's car, so we did not have words and music written out, so we just jammed on a bunch of songs that we have not played before. Highlights included "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" (which I find incredibly fun to sing but do not have much of a fiddle part to), "Harvest Moon" (which turns out to be really easy to come up with a fiddle part for), "When the Ship Comes In" (fast, with lots of instrumentals -- not sure what song the instrumentals were from but they seemed to fit ok), "Banks of the Ohio" (dedicated to Martha -- again, a lot of fun to sing, not sure what I should do instrumentally), "Rolling in my Sweet Baby's Arms," "Frankie and Johnny." Also, "Long Black Veil," and a medley of "Odds and Ends" into "Johnny 99."
The fixed fiddle sounded all right. It was going out of tune more than usual, which I put down to the new strings; the tone is clear and even and the volume is there. An irritating buzz I had noticed in recent weeks is gone -- not sure if that had anything to do with the bridge.
posted evening of October second, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
Many thanks to Holly Hughes for introducing me to The Kinks' song "Lost and Found" -- I had never heard it before today, and boy is it a beautiful song. So John came over this afternoon and of course we had to try and work out a cover version of it... It is as John says "a little too perfect" for today.
How did we do? Well... I am by no means any Ray Davies. But I think what we came up with after a couple of takes is starting to sound pretty good. See what you think:
Notes: I need to sing it a step lower I think, or something. It was very happy-making, successfully to modulate to a new key at the end of the song though -- I don't think we've ever actually done that before.
posted evening of August 27th, 2011: 1 response ➳ More posts about The Kinks
Me and John played our first show this afternoon! We were one of the featured groups at Michael Locker's Songwriters' Circle, at the Crossroads in Garwood -- there were five acts playing rotating sets of three songs apiece, we were on stage three times for a total of about 40 minutes of music -- way more than we've played before for an audience. (Sparse to be sure, but still.) Our set list:
"Red Red Overalls" by Jeremy -- this song gets a little better and a little faster every time we play it.
"Japanese Radio" by John and Jeremy -- we were extremely loose on this song and having a great time. We had never really worked out the arrangement with any precision and ended up not being sure, at a lot of points, whether we were going to go into a verse or a chorus or an instrumental -- but somehow it worked really well.
John and I have been tossing around Don Dixon's "Praying Mantis," playing it now and then for most of the time we've been jamming together. We're thinking of it now as one of the songs to play at the next open mic we play -- here's a version of it we recorded tonight:
Well out of a year and a bit of jamming together, John and I have put together something worth listening to (IMO obviously). You can download our demo tape from box.net if you'd like to check it out. (Click the "Download Folder" button to get the tape as one big .zip file.) Streaming here:
Track list
"Highway 61 Revisited" by Bob Dylan (with a bit of fooling around with the lyrics from yours truly)
"NJ Transit" by Jeremy
"Dancing Barefoot" by Patti Smith
"Revelator" by Gillian Welch
"Shady Grove," traditional
"California Stars" by Woody Guthrie and Wilco
"St. James Infirmary," traditional
Mountain Station is John Hicks on guitar and vocals, Jeremy Osner on Stroh fiddle and vocals. Follow us on Facebook to see new songs when we record them, and works in progress...
Update -- I am thinking with this post I'll be taking a brief hiatus, a couple of weeks. Thanks for reading, those of you who stop by regularly -- I'll be back, just want a little time off.
Please help us find our audience! If you are reading this post and you like the music, I would greatly appreciate links back, from your blog or your rss reader or Facebook, whatever. Help get the word out...
posted evening of April second, 2011: 4 responses ➳ More posts about Sylvia
John and I have our first track playing on the radio! Tune in to Henry Musikar's always-great music rotation at KCUF and you will (every so often) hear our cover of Gillian Welch's "Revelator." Here is the track if you don't want to wait:
Roy Edroso's novel is out! Morgue for Whores "is a neo-noir set in Brooklyn, and has lots of violence, sex, and hard-boiled palaver as only Roy Edroso, semi-known internet buffoon, can deliver."
fiddle I have been thinking that a wooden block shoulder rest would work better than the contraption the maker provided, to attach a standard violin shoulder rest. Fate forced my hand a few weeks ago by ordaining that I should lose the said contraption... (come to think of it, I've been playing with no shoulder rest for a few weeks, and have been making some interesting music that way too... Mountain Station recorded a fun take on 
