Tales from the DAW: Let's Care Tomorrow

Welcome to another installment of Tales from the DAW, a series where I share a music project from my digital audio workstation. This edition comes with two mini posts: A small essay prompted by the song title and some notes about the tune. If you know someone who might enjoy media like this, please text or email them a link to this post! Thanks for tuning in to Unprocedurally Generated.

I’ve really tried to stay away from politics and current events since the internet and especially since Covid. I used to think that everyone needed to pay attention to the news and current events more. Then the internet took a wrecking ball to the old systems of information distribution like newspapers, magazines, and Dan Rather replacing them with Fox News on crack for all sides of the political spectrum.

When the internet transformed the news into self-righteous opinionated talking head clips, John Q Public went from being a halfway decent neighbor who liked to talk about his son’s little league games to an insufferable conspiracy theorist who needed you to believe that rich guys like Bill Gates were having sex with little girls on some pedophile private island somewhere.

God, how I miss the before times.

Recently, Americans seem to be taking their institutions for granted and are less inclined to preserve and protect them. The Greatest Generation, otherwise known as the adults in the room, are all but gone, the Silent Generation is out of play, and now we have the gerentocratic Baby Boomers who hold on to power even when they show signs of severe cognitive decline. Behind them, we have Generation X who are known for being nothing special, Millennials (my generation) who think they’re super special, and Generation Z who nobody has seen in the real world since high school grad night. We all inherited the farm of post World War II America and, with little to no viable leadership in sight, weeds grow in the fields.

Did I mention that our 79-year old president, whose hand discoloration may or may not be due to taking Alzheimer’s medication, has definitely spent too much time on some pedophile private island somewhere?

God, how I miss the before times.

And don’t even get me started on artificial intelligence. Depending on what flavor of Kool-Aid you drink, and you do drink it because it’s the only thing on the menu, you’ve either been led to believe that AI is becoming a super intelligence that’s going to kill us all before Trump’s third term or that AI is a house of cards who’s pending collapse is about to initiate a game of 52 card pick up with the entire global economy. Say it with me now:

Refrain: God, how I miss the before times.

With such a torrential onslaught of manure falling on us from the sky, compromising roof shingles, shattering windshields, and killing small pets how can we be expected to keep up with it all, let alone focus on personal matters like scheduling that colonoscopy? There’s just too much shit to deal with. The song at the top of this post is about letting it all go and saying “let’s care tomorrow”. Unfortunately, I wrote it yesterday.

“Let’s Care Tomorrow” started as an exploration of chord melody that attempts to emulate Allan Holdsworth’s “Zarabeth” from his record Wardenclyffe Tower. There, I gave it away, I’m a poser, never listen to my music again!

Luckily for me, I’m terrible at sounding like my heroes so the track turned out sounding like a mashup of many of my influences. And dare I say, it kind of sounds like none of them.

Of course, plenty of musicians think they sound original when in fact, they sound like nothing special at all. I’m aware that I’m not uniquely immune to this condition and that “Let’s Care Tomorrow” could be the most unoriginal tune ever written. The truth is, it doesn’t matter either way. What does matter is that it’s really fun to play.

I like to come up with melodies and then organize successive melody notes into chords so that the notes can ring out over each other as if played on a piano with a sustained pedal. It allows the guitar to accompany itself while playing a melody. I like the way that this song does this.

For the solo section I used the chord changes from the melody, which was tough. Sometimes chord progressions can work great for a particular melody while simultaneously being less awesome for soloing through. This was the case here, but I really liked how the solo turned out. The first half of the melody is 10 measures long with the second half being 16 measures long. Fitting ideas into that first 10 measure half was fun and I didn’t even realize it was such an unconventional measure length until I had to figure out something to play over it.

Without a doubt, my favorite part of the tune is the outro. I feel like it lifts off to the sky in a moment of transcendence or blissful ignorance (same thing?). Some of the more flavorful chord colors and shimmer reverb add to that feeling of awe. Then the dream is over and the listener wakes up in the same lo-fi sonic space as the intro to the track.

Hopefully you dig the tune. And if you don’t, there’s always Kid Rock.