american national heartache

pretty much every single thing in my life right now feels like it's in a transitional phase. this isn't necessarily a bad thing (but it's not great either). it's just how things are. there's a lot of things on my mind these days. most of these things are outside the reach of my control.

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More music by my friend David Lenhoff can be found here:
myspace.com/davidlenhoff

western, western

bedroom noise
black, blank
tujunga all around me
wind stumbles outside
never thought i'd let you get this far from me

eight miles away.

ilse lyrics

oh these ghosts that haunt me

they appeared the night you left
must i answer them?

they keep calling out your name
i see them on my ceiling
and i'm hiding underneath my bedsheets

i've been falling apart without you
you are the only girl i will ever love
i am going to die alone

oh these ghosts that haunt me
they will always haunt me
they're never going to leave me
and i'm never going to see you again

i'm never going to see you again

ilse

i'm working on a new tujunga song. i'm going to try to keep the song itself mired in mystery until i unveil it, but here's the gist of how i'm going about the writing process, performance setup, physical release, etc:

it's probably going to be about 10 to 15 minutes in length. i'm really into the who song "a quick one, while he's away" right now and i'd like it to exist in the same universe as that song (mostly in terms of the song structuring, but possibly even the sound a little bit). kind of a medley of parts concerning a series of events that altogether chalk up to one story. basically a miniature rock opera. this project is definitely something of a love song to my teenage admiration and adoration for pete townshend and roger waters. my dad buried that stuff so deep in me. it's always going to be there.
i've had the plotline and some disparate shards of words and melodies and chords slithering around in my head since spring of this year and i think it's time i finally sit myself down and write this thing out. (i initially planned for this be a full album-length work of individual songs back in the spring, but, as of november, it's become very clear to me how daunting that would be. the story is so vague and depressing as it is, no one would want to sit through that for like 40 minutes or whatever. i'll keep it down to a single 10 or 15 minute medley composition.)

right now i'm writing it to be performed with nothing but (electric) guitar and vocals. that's how i plan to do it the first time i showcase it live (that idea really frightens me). maybe the recorded version will feature a band. maybe not. all of that is totally up in the air right now.
(i don't know when i'll do it live either, if at all. i have a tendency to edit songs for a really long time before i'm finally happy with the end product. i'm totally not one of those people who can bash out a song in a day. i wish i was. i'm way too meticulous about every single word and note. everything needs to be perfect before i can show it to anyone.)

this song is probably the closest tujunga will ever get to any sort of 'singer-songwriter' sound. i cringe at terms like that, but i can already kind of see it. anyway...

this song will not be on any tujunga album. it is a stand-alone, one-off piece that exists by itself, having no relation to the art punk stuff that will be on the first album or the big guitar orchestra stuff i'm going to attempt to pull off on the second album. (think of it as tujunga's 'lion king 1 1/2'.)
this poses a problem for me---this one-off status. i thought about just recording it and then posting it for people to download through mediafire or something, but that doesn't work for me. i need it to feel official; real; something you can hold in your hands and stare at. it's also weird for me that it's just a single short work with no relation to anything else. a single 10 to 15 minute song released all by its lonesome. i don't know how to package that or what such a thing would even be called. (i guess it could be considered a single? an EP?) sometimes i wish i could be all bradford cox about music: just record stuff and stick it on the internet. but i can't do that. in my mind, everything is sacred and a part of something else. a song can't just be a song. it needs to be a song on an album of like-minded songs spawned from the same time period and emotions, with physical artwork reflecting that time period and those emotions. i can't separate music from a physical 'album' format. i guess it's partially my way of feeling like it actually exists. even if only 5 people ever hear it/own it. it's ridiculous, i know, but that's the way my mind works.

maybe i can put it out as a split cassette with someone. or burn a bunch of CD-Rs and just have a lot of blank space on them. or put the mp3 on cleverly decorated floppy disks. when it comes to releasing a 10 to 15 minute piece of music in a physical format, the possibilities are at once vast, exhilarating, and frustrating.
(oh, and it will be given away for free, of course. whenever that happens. that could be several months from now.)

sometimes i feel like i spend more time talking about making music than actually making it. oh well.
anyway, in case anyone's interested, stay tuned. maybe you'll hear it within a couple weeks, or a month, or longer.

walk away down the cobblestones
with yr painted-on eyes and yr heart so cold

& you can cut me out of yr life
but no matter where you go
or what you choose to do
my heart will still belong to you

ghosts bleeding out of a stereo
echoes of november

blank demons
ghosts all down yr corridor
i thought you knew

i would be lying if i said there aren't times when i sincerely regret moving back to L.A. i've got some great people in my life down here, and for them i'm eternally grateful, but this just hasn't turned out how i hoped it would.

i've been trying so hard to make things happen. so hard. i've been pouring myself into all of this. and i've been met with enough apathy and negative experiences to make me question whether it's worth it to continue with any of it. there are a few people in particular who are making it really difficult for me to see why i should put so much of myself into things that they apparently couldn't care less about.

i'm not looking forward to any of this. maybe things will change. maybe not.

most of my L.A. friends don't even live in L.A. anymore. and the majority of the people i still know down here seem like they couldn't really care one way or another that i'm living in the same city as them again. i don't know what i was thinking. maybe i came back here because it felt like the safe thing to do. i always end up retreating sooner or later.
i had an amazing life in olympia. and i lost it. i moved to L.A. and lost touch with a lot of wonderful people and now i feel terrible. i lost it. and it's not something i'm going to get back.
i came back down here with one hope. and i'm not sure it was worth it.

future show plans

in the future (i.e. for the next couple shows) i think i'm going to renovate tujunga into a duo = drums + guitar/vocals. before i transition tujunga into a guitar orchestra in early 2010 and go back to pretending to be mick jagger.

i'm also planning on debuting a lot of new (to other people) songs at the december 11th mountair show. "pisces," "i want to be yr boyfriend," "sing sad surf songs," "the fall of a foxhole romance," etc. i've had these songs kicking around for so long. i have no idea why i haven't performed them before.

i'm so drained. i'm very happy, but i'm terribly drained.
i feel like my veins have been ripped from my body.

please keep existing.

'baptized a catholic, always a catholic.'

i don't know why
i put faith in you

lyrical subject matter of the second tujunga album:

plattsburgh, st. bonaventure university, coney island avenue, catholic guilt, brooklyn, driving to quebec, rock 'n' roll, giving up, the shipyards of virginia, war, faith, prussia, elizabeth taylor + richard burton, stolen cars, teenage kicks, lillian gish vs. dorothy gish, 1952, 1966, existence.

tujunga word of the day:

wastrel

November

you are not who i thought you were.

tujunga did some recording today. all is well in my world right now.

9 years.

i keep saying i'm going to give up, but i can't.

i've had a crush on you
for far too long

lovers for gallows

&
gallows for lovers

shows/guitar/i don't know

lately i've been thinking about the future of tujunga. i mean, is it basically going to be this thing where i write songs, play them in my garage for like 7 people maybe every month or two, record them as a little CD-R album (which only gets heard by those same 7 people), then repeat the process? it just sounds kind of sad. i'm not saying i want to be famous. but isn't there a compromise between no one knowing you exist and being U2? there just seems to be a certain futility at tujunga's very core. like it's doomed to be this thing that essentially exists only in my own head. an imaginary rock band that performs in my garage once in a while. i'd like other people to somehow know tujunga (the band) exists, but i don't even know how i'd go about doing that. this sort of brings me to my next thing...

i'm really torn up about dalloway vs. tujunga regarding shows. i'd like it if tujunga wasn't exclusively based out of mountair, but i don't really know how to do that. dalloway always comes first for me. if some venue were to give me the opportunity to book a band with them (which is rare enough as it is), i would much rather tell them "put my name is dalloway on the bill" than try to have tujunga play the show (again, because it's so ridiculously hard to get shows at most venues in this city). if i ever did seek out a venue to get tujunga a show, i just feel like it would be sort of disingenuous to my name is dalloway---like that would be a show wasted on a lesser musical project. it's far more important to me that my name is dalloway gets out there and plays shows than tujunga. but i would still like tujunga to play shows as well now and then. and i don't know how to settle that, other than to simply forfeit and say, "all shows i have the opportunity to book, i'll tell the venue to book my name is dalloway. and tujunga will be based exclusively out of mountair (unless some weird, rare circumstance comes along)." i guess that's what i'm going to do. oh well.

i played my guitar for several hours last nite/this morning (whatever. nights and mornings kind of blur together for me these days. i can't keep track anymore). anyway, it dawned on me just how much i suck at guitar (i've always known that, but it somehow became ultra apparent then). there's all sorts of things i wish i could do with that instrument that i just can't. i've got these sounds in my head and i'm so awful at using my guitar as a vessel for them. lately i've been feeling like those sounds always either end up coming out diluted or entirely wrong.
sometimes i genuinely hate the way i play guitar.

oddly enough, i might try playing guitar at some future tujunga performances. maybe not right away. i'm not sure. i never really imagined tujunga as something that i would ever play an instrument in. i always wanted to leave that up to other people who are better at any given instrument than me.

tujunga is on the bill for the mountair show on dec 11th. i have no idea what i'm doing.

everything changes.
tujunga has always been envisioned as the place in which i could get all my art punk/mick jagger nonsense out of my system. i don't know. we'll see.

i'm just pouring ideas out of my head. nothing is permanent. within a week's time---why, even by tomorrow---i may have already changed my mind about every single thing i've written here.
everything changes.

pisces.

i won't wait
for this heart to break