Feel the noise

Thanks youze guyz for all the nice comments and suggestions on how to kick Gupta the hell outta my innards. I think that for the most part he's gone (he?) . At any rate, I've been sleeping through the night and eating solid food.

Mmm. Chicken.

In less disgusting news...early next month I'm going to take a trip to Ohio for Brian and Beth's wedding. As much as I'm stoked to go (I'm one of Brian's groomsmen and am humbled by the honor), I'm just as thrilled to extend my trip a week. Now, you may be thinking, "Gosh, a week in Ohio doesn't sound all that amazing, Eth." But it will be. I'll be staying in Athens, OH with my lifelong friend and creative partner, Dan Dreifort. He and I have been making music together for (oy, I feel like such a blarghy old bastard) like twenty years. I mean, I think we started toying around with music in our early teens and now we're in our early thirties so there ya have it: nearly two decades of inexcusably lame, low-tech, low-brow noise making with all the accompanying posing, posturing and, uh, partying.

These days we're working on a project called Indelible Beancurd, which is for all intents and purposes our virtual band. That sounds mega-fancy, but all it really means is that Dan and I swap musical ideas and lyrical doodads through the "POWER OF THE INTERNET" and then meet up periodically to lay down tracks in either rented studio space or in our home studios. The result so far? About half a dozen songs that I'm not going to link here because we haven't yet decided how we're going to release them. I'd like to commercialize them somehow (please, no complaints! I've given away my music for free on ethanrand.com for years now and will continue to do so) but haven't thought it through yet exactly how.

My dream? That we get a tune into a reasonably successful film/commercial/whatever and get paid enough to buy some real studio time.

Anyway, in preparation for the trip and because I just felt inspired by the song's intrinsic beauty, I recorded a cover of Quiet Riot's "Cum On Feel the Noise." As I drove home from work last week and it struck me (as the tune came on the radio during a random station scan) that it would sound all purty and stuff as an acoustic balad. In waltz time. Seriously. So here is a simple live recording made with just a single mic in my living room just to whet your whistle and give an idea of the arrangement. I'm working on version that's a little more elaborate now (wrote a bass line etc last night) and will post that as soon as I'm done with it. You can hear in this recording that I'm still figuring out how to sing it, but I hope you'll get the idea where I'm headed with it.