poker and the art of song writing

in a recent discussion i stated the following, "i'll be happy when one of these singles hits number one... mmmmmm, charts in the top ten... well, i'd settle for hot one hundred... ok, actually, if i could make enough to eat and pop out another record by the end of the year, that wouldn't just make me happy, that'd be amazing!"

i thought about this process of my settling and decided to flesh it out a little bit.

first, i think for an artist to aspire for riches, fame and the adoration of fans is all well and good, but a little much to ask as far as the issue of satisfaction is concerned. on the other hand, the idea of 'art for art's sake' is a little too far the other way. I mean, if writing a great song automatically means riches beyond measure, wouldn't it be motivating to just write something for no reason other than the monetary value, and further, wouldn't that lead to lower quality throughout the music industry? the answer is yes and yes, and yes, this has already happened.

my brother-in-law once quoted (though he was quoting someone else) regarding PhD candidates, 'a dissertation should be your first great work, not your only'. i'm sure i've messed up the quote a bit but its rather true in the field of songwriting also. i think its fair to call a one hit wonder a one hit wonder, but not necessarily a song writer. in the same way, like the case of mallonee, the lack of a hit does not define the quality of the song writing.

as far as 'art for art's sake', i think it should be restated, 'art for me'. i might write the best songs ever, according to me, but if people can't get down with what i write enough to give me a little something something to survive on, maybe i should return to hobby music and get on with surviving through a different avenue.

i think the aim should sit somewhere in the middle. i would not object to millions of dollars in bonds, stocks, properties and numbered bank accounts, but i do, and have, objected to crawling towards homelessness and starvation in pursuit of my art. i think it best to do as the aforementioned mallonee recommended to van gogh and '...deal your best hand out in the marketplace and let the chips fall'.

this record is my attempt to do just that. i don't want to starve. i don't want to be homeless. i want to live a good life, but i don't need millions of dollars to do that. i would like a roof over my head and food on the table and hope that i can write well enough to do just that. maybe i can't, but i've taken more than a year of dedicated writing to get this thing off the ground and one weekend in early february will be the teller of whether the hand i deal in the market place is good enough to warrant that.

i no longer have the record companies to rely on. i've got me. i've got the internet, but i'm not the only one. its exciting and its humbling but i, for one, am excited to see how this 6/8 off-suit plays out.

a rant against the river

I recently found myself in a discussion about bob dylan on a blog. It made me think a bit... but the fueling fire really limited my ability to respond much more than with some insights about the novelty of the post as opposed to the integrity of the discussion.

I must say, Joe Carter, in a previous post, made a compelling point, 'Because the stakes are so low and passions run so high, music is one of my favorite things to argue about.' To me this is frustrating because it is like playing poker for 'fun' where there is no money on the line. If the stakes are that low no one feels the need to actually defend their chips they just play on luck. In this discussion they just like to take their few moments to rant and interpret however they please. Especially the least credible.

Its not an offense to music, because music doesn't care much for reason, but to reason itself. There are forces in music not to be reckoned with, Mozart, Bach and now the beatles. Its rather embarrassing that the beatles are set upon the plateau with the other two, not because the beatles were not great, but because they were not nearly as great as Mozart or Bach. But all three of the aforementioned entities sit outside the realm of discussion. They are all respected, they are all heralded with a level of genius that cannot be argued with, we no longer have the right to hate them.

Typically there are mediums where this is expected: pitchfork media is my favorite example of 'a bad review makes me want to buy the album'... but also music critics in all too many news syndicates. I was astonished that it appeared on first things but also appreciate the appreciation of art and history and faith in this particular entity. I'm not mad, i'm happy actually! Usually i can appreciate whatever is being said in first things, but rarely feel qualified to offer my insight, however, on a joe carter vs. bob dylan, i had a lot of fun. I don't think ill of any of the participants, i have enjoyed the discussion and also carter's humility. its good to have fun with low stakes, just as long as we keep that fun off the poker table.

new radicals... wha?!?

i'm surprised.

week after week. month after month i sit and listen to the only new radicals record. i'm comfortable with gregg alexander's ability to write great songs and consequent getting them published, however, he writes great songs.

the edge of u2 wishes he wrote get you give... and to me it serves as constant inspiration. maybe it is an awareness of the trials involved in a pursuit through poverty, tours and the new york bar scenes; but regardless, for some reason, 'you've got the music in you' still pushes me to write, record and keep on the path.

We don't all get the chance at fame. we don't all get the chance to see our dreams realized to the point where we never need to work again... but its nice to find inspiration in such places where we continue to press on with said hopes.

its better to hope.

Thanksgiving and the passion for writers

I'm sitting in midtown about to get my hands soiled by the inner bits of a turkey... i can't say that i'm unimpressed, but i can't say i'm impressed. its sort of on the fence, the thing that startles me is the type of music that pops into my head around this season. They are artists I have a strong affection for, but there is this characteristic quality to them that fits well with the color of the leaves and the scent of the air.

these people are bill mallonee, bob dylan's early love songs, toad the wet sprocket, wilco, etc. they have had a tremendous impact on the direction of this forthcoming record - and that makes me happy.

all that being said, right now i'm getting down to the boatman's call by nick cave. a beautiful record to be experienced only start to finish. Murder ballads also is to be experienced only the same way, but when you're cooking with your lady and the inexperience on both sides is apparent it is well and good to keep both minds as far from murder as possible :)

thanks for dropping in.

Cowboy Junkies? ya... i stole the idea

Its going to be cold, windy and far more snow covered than i have experienced in the last few winters... but only for a few days. In late January or early Feb I'm going to make the trek up to Rochester to meet with some of my favorite musicians and engineers to produce a record similar in format to the Trinity Sessions.

It will be a live tracked recording with a bunch of us standing around staring at one another but we will be using more than just one microphone. Mike Muscarella will be at the helm once again and a few players pulled from one of the best undiscovered talent pools in the nation. So far its slated to be a full record with a staggered release of just a few tracks at a time.

In the meantime, I did a 3 song demo, Kristin, with Mr. Muscarella back in 2007 and its available on itunes, napster, etc. all over the world if you just search tommy hawkins kristin you'll have no trouble finding it. I'll keep you posted in the coming weeks as we prepare for the record.

thanks for checking this site out.

tommy

the art of tension and release

so i did a show last week w/ ready fire aim... it was very intense and we seemed to entertain the crowd very well... we use a lot of electronic devices that take both patience and faith to keep fully operational - between guitar effects cutting out, the computer malfunctions and drum triggers that are intense and necessary to maintain our cutting edge sound, it keeps our hands full.

since the loss of a keyboard player it has been my job to offer the 'weird noise' element to the band live which leaves me mostly on my knees twiddling with knobs to make the perfect concoction... last weeks show was very intense for this reason.

so the show starts, i've got phasers and flangers and vibrato effects going on with no actual note... just this hum building into an intense shriek of noise and almost abrasive sounds that leads up to the burst that starts the first song of the set, 'wannabe your' - and this, is what leads me to my point of a rather short blog entry.

as the sounds spin around, dizzying at times, sage plays this simple line that sets the tone for what is to come on a violin. usually we hope this takes about a minute and a half or two minutes, but we had the electronics malfunction so it took about 5 minutes instead. the suspense was maginficent! there was nothing really happening, just swells of noise perplexing an intrigued audience. at long last, it all came together... an explosion of tone and sound that would frighten most... and at last, we had our release.

check out what we're all about @ www.rfasociety.com

my boys and the transition to living in manhattan

i moved to manhattan on a whim. i mean, seriously, 36 hours before hitting the road for the big apple i had turned to my boy whiggels and said, "dude, i think i'm gonna move to new york". At this moment we're in a tour bus on the way back to Nashville for something of a hiatus after a 5 month tour. He looked back at me and said, "i'm renting a car to go back to philly, you want me to get a bigger one and just roll up with me"? - of course i said yes.

so here go whiggels and i 15 hours of great tunes, great laughter and both teeming with excitement, but both of us for different reasons. Whiggels hadn't seen his wife in a few months, and i'd been itching to get back to new york for a few years. So we roll into philly, my sister is swinging by on her way back from chicago and so she stops and picks me up and runs me to princeton. I hang there for a few days then catch a train to new york to crash with another old boy of mine, dan.

So i wind up on a couch in brooklyn, he sells brooklyn to me like a used car salesman and as i look for my own spot i find myself looking exclusively in brooklyn. after a month of searching i finally wind up in williamsburg and then go off on the job hunt to try and support myself living in new york.

To put this in perspective, it was the very beginning of october that i moved to the city, it was the beginning of november i found my spot, and it was at the beginning of december i was afraid i'd have to leave because the job market had dried up. I had lined up this gig with a few of my friends in the city for dec. 4 and was getting ready to load up the truck with junk (another boy of mine, not the term for my gear) when my phone rang and to tell me i'd gotten a job and i start on saturday.

I didn't have to leave new york, but after working tirelessly at this joint for a few months the sensationalism of brooklyn had really worn off and i found myself pining, once again to live in manhattan proper... just with a little more sincerity as to which part of the city.

So after searching and searching i wind up in the east village, a nice spacious apartment with large windows and a wick of a lease remaining, i was settled. Then I thought about things, and talked with my boy billy and my boy jason and we decided to get a spot even closer to the action than where we are living now*.

So one day in the office Billy jumps up to go look at this spot thats a duplex, 3 bedroom 2 bath with a huge outdoor space just off of 4th street and convinces us that it is a winner, jason and i head over at about 6 to look at it, we say we'll take it... we start the paper work and i run out coz' i realize i'm late for a dinner and drinks tour of williamsburg.

So today i write you. in linen pants and a very light shirt to tell you that in ten months i have gone from tour bus to couch to hipsterville to manhattan to two apartments in manhattan for the month of august. is this excessive that if i'm on 14th st i'll only have to walk 3 blocks and also if i'm on houston st. i'll only have to walk to blocks? i suppose so, but i suppose its just a preparation of things to come.

check out my band at rehearsal



http://www.myspace.com/readyfireaimnyc




*we all live on eleventh street in the same building but in different apartments - 10 blocks away from said action.

wild mood swings

when i think of the cure its always the ambient synths, those ever so familiar, yet inexhaustable, single string guitar lines and robert smith's round shaped voice weighed heavy with depressing, yet lovely, lyrics.

so a decade and then some ago i got the then new record which was something of a surprise. canonized in my mind will always be pictures of you, friday i'm in love, etc. as who the cure is, but wild mood swings is a record jam packed with winners. its still got all the characteristics of the old cure, its not an about face as we saw with bush and third eye blind - rather, a continuation to a brighter end. the entire record serves as a booster. instead of the happy songs still seeming to be sad, the sad songs even leave the listener feeling good. the aura of the album is fully radiant.

the lyrics were very well chosen, the placement of songs to keep the record moving forward could not be better and the music is incredibly tasteful.

this record should be a staple in any music lovers collection. so if you haven't heard it, buy it. if you think i'm wrong, i'll take you on.

so i now live in what is best described as a hobbit tree house (hth). its the guest room of the apartment i've been living in for about 5 months. the apartment is rad, the roommates are off the hook and there is this beautiful living room with a ceiling that nearly rivals the tower of babel.

interestingly enough, it doesn't quite reach the heavens. and it seems much higher from the ground level as climbing up the 7 feet into my hth leaves me unable to stand. its spacious and elegant. just not very tall. and by elegant i mean it sort of looks like the mario brothers house with random pipes popping up all over the place. but its pretty cool.

a narrow stairway. a lot of shelves. a futon mattress. a night stand. a lamp. a fan. and a few boxes of cds.

i won't be living up there for long... but it means that i'm not homeless and it seems like a good place for me to hide out and illude all the people trying to steal the coveted ring my grandparents gave me for graduating college.

ipod generation

i've never paid for an ipod. i've owned three of them, but i've never bought one... they're either hand me downs or i find them, but i'm still torn on the whole thing.

there was awhile when i'd walk around the city, sit on the subway and swap cds out of my discman in a very awkward way - with the influx of ipods i continue to recieve i eventually left it on the shelf in my apartment and resigned to the much simpler, more compact, way of enjoying the sweetest tunes of my record collection.

but here's the problem. first of all the sound discrepancy - not only are mp4s compressed in such a way that the low and high end frequencies are crushed but then when played through an ipod they are re-crushed to the point of distortion at any volume level. i can't tell you how much i hate that. probably as much as brandon hated dylan when he started going out with kelly.

second, i have like 700+ cds. the latest ipod only has 7 gigs on it and my computer is loaded up with files from a record i did that takes up over half of the hard drive. the problem here is that i 1, don't have the time to load 700 cds onto my computer 2, my computer doesn't have the room 3, the ipod doesn't either. some people would think to just load their favorites... that would require about 500 of them. so i'm walking around listening to a song or record, thinking of what would be perfect next - and 90% of the time that perfect selection is on a cd spindle or in a travel case in my apartment. devastating.

lastly, the problem with free ipods are the incidental damages. so the first one the battery was about shot, the second, the battery was about shot and the headphone jack stopped working, the third, yep the backlight went out. awesome. so i stumble awkwardly trying to get the right angle of the sun or lamp post continually walking at an exceptionally fast rate - because stopping would be all too convenient.

boo-urns, ipod, boo-urns

on the theme of mississippi

writing a song with a single line turn around is hard. because its easy for the song to sit stagnant, go on too long or sound campy. dylan somehow twists them so everytime the turn around comes around there is a different spin on it, though the lyrics and melody remain the same. the brilliance is in the set up.

the problem with the album love & theft is that mississippi is such a good song that the album couldn't possibly stand up to it. its like drops of jupiter on that train album* - one song almost sours the whole disc because it goes somewhere that the rest of the album can't keep up with. i'm not comparing drops of jupiter to mississippi as songs, just as what they did to their respective albums. dylan v. monahan? krinsky will probably say monahan because of his melodies, but seriously, thats like your highschool gym team teacher trying to keep pace with jordan in a 1 on 1 basketball game.



anyways, this is mississippi. if you don't love it on first listen, keep listening.

* it was really chuck levell playing on that song that made all the difference.

irish boys with mississippi soul

there is a band from the eighties called the hothouse flowers. today i listened through two of their records. the honest and raw, People, and the masterpiece, songs from the rain.

people is this interesting sort of stream of consciousness writing that seldom works well - and in this case, almost does and almost doesn't. its a bit rambly, but it is soooooo honest. and so often in music that is the very quality that is missing, and on account that they are far more gospel than they are celtic, the honesty is particularily comforting - and less rambly than a lot of stream of conciousness rants i've experienced in gospel settings. it is definitely worth the listen, and the moments of brilliance on this record are frequent and appropriately described as such.

songs from the rain is perfect. pulsing at the steady hand of jerry fehily* lays a canvas for Liam O'Maonlai to carry on as he does where he sings and plays with a sort of careless gracefulness that is not unlike jeff buckley's same quality. this is not to say that he sounds like or should be compared to buckley in any way, other than they both seem to possess a certain freedom and dominion over their musical expressions that is far beyond what any training can do.

*seriously, one of the best drummers i've ever heard... ever.

art

i've never understood letting someone you love suffer for their own benefit. or, i should say, i've never understood how in loving someone we are capable to endure observing their suffering whether for their benefit or not.

that being said, and rather contradictorily, i'm a firm believer that love and art are all about contrasts. unless there is a darkness to contrast the light, or a light to contrast the darkness, how can we know how beautiful something - or someone - is?

there have been artists, songwriters and poets that have seemingly mastered this - however, all fall terribly short of the standard set by this coming weekend. Christ crucified paired with his subsequent Resurrection is not only love in its truest form, but also the most magnificent work of art the world will ever know.

its another monday evening....

i suppose that the most interesting thing about this monday is that it is the first monday after a night of horrible nightmares that i can remember for the last 15 years or so. this makes it a day of great learning for me. for years, and to this day, when i'm asleep, truly asleep, there is nothing that can waken me. the truck in the metallica video hitting the bed in the middle of the highway? nope. the 1989 san fransisco earthquake? nope*. yet last night i learned that i have the ability to wake myself up in the middle of dream. i kept doing it, i don't know why i was having these nightmares, and i also don't know why i was laughing so hard at them, but regardless, it was funny, and wholly obscure.

anyways, here's the really interesting thing, the last dream i had, the only one i can remember, was me in some rather helpless position with a man holding a gun towards me and half way through pulling the trigger when i said to myself, "wake up, you're in your bed". i woke up. the good thing about this is that today i learned that its bad to die in your dreams.**

ok, so thats actually not the really interesting thing, but something that made the whole thing weirder was my receiving a text at noon from one of my best friends with a text that read, "dude, i totally had a dream that you died last night". I laughed pretty hard. then i thought to text another of my friends who has a good sense of humor and tell her the two parts i just told you in under 145 characters. she did think it was funny, but mostly because she had a dream she'd been robbed and shot, but lived, then escaped but while escaping had to fight laquisha.

i feel like tom cruise is about to pop out and tie the whole thing together.

* to be fair this was on tv at the time.
** tommy finds it difficult to imagine how you could have a conclusive study of that.

culture club

i'm listening to dylan, think about kate bush, drinking a guiness and digging on some havarti - it seemed like the perfect time for blogging.

dylan is great, but 'time out of mind' is off the hook. kate bush is great, but she does have some vanity issues as she has the greatest female, rock/prog-rock voice of all time, guiness is always welcome, and havarti is made better with triscuits. but lets see if i can tackle a few of these one at a time:

time out of mind: its a perfectly constructed record, perhaps the most accessible writer of the last 50 years paired with lanois production makes for one of the best records i've ever heard.

kate bush: its unfair that one could have such complete control of her voice to communicate the emotion of the songs so perfectly - but one pass through 'the red shoes' or 'hounds of love' seems to remedy the discrepancy.

guiness: dude, its guiness... vitamins + flavor = awesome

havarti: a staple to any diet, and seldom declined by the most strong willed of people.

thank you for indulging my insights into culture.


*pardon me for not actually referencing the band by the same name as the subject line, but i think you're grateful for my not.

Poems off the top of my head 2.0

the time, as we discovered,
held nothing for nothing more.
the change has come
but not won the war.

lyrics requests

some people have mentioned that i slur a bit when i sing, anyways... for the three songs i've put up on itunes a request for lyrics was submitted to all of us here at tomtastic enterprizes... so i'm gonna post them up and you can enjoy them at your convenience.

i've started a list of them. i didn't put any grammar into them because i'm above that, or beneath that, i can't remember which.

i'm listening to vigilantes of love right now, a welcome supplement to most meals. enjoy

eddie harsche

i've, for some time, been a fan of the man eddie harsh. he might spell his name a number of different ways, and you may never known who he was, but this is partly why my blog matters.

eddie hawrsche is the ex-keys player from the black crowes. i'll acknowledge that chuck levell took his place on the most recognizable crowes discs, but that doesn't denounce my boy from his due credit.

most keys players fault on either playing too much or too little... an overly notey jazz player will tell you that you can never play too few notes, but they are wrong. eddie is to organ and rhodes and piano like what SRV was to the guitar.

the only compareable keys player is norah jones who sides on too little but tastefully plays those notes flawlessly. but harsche can rip on the keys, and oh how he does. so what i'm saying is this... if you don't buy my songs on itunes... and you don't buy black crowes records between shake your moneymaker and warpaint, at least illegally download the tweeners. i'm not an advocate of the illegal downloads, but if it gets eddie the respect he deserves then i'll make some concessions.

i'm on itunes

didn't know the day would ever come... but here i am, on itunes.

its pretty sweet, you can listen to snips and clips of the three songs loaded.

then you can buy them. :)

will write more soon. but the excitement has paralyzed my fingers, and trying to type with my tongue has left me with a cramp.

that was weird.

tommy

My Narnia experience

i remember narnia, i remember a certain half beast half man character saying, "excuse me, are you what they call a daughter of eve?".

today i had a similar experience. i saw a guy come out of a hardware store with a few painting supplies... he got on an old rusted bike* and had a rocket ship taped to the front of it. he had a leather coat, shaggy hair, a half beard and pretty tight pants that seemed tapered. anyways, the only question that popped into my mind was, "excuse me, are you what they call a hipster?"

i mean, i listen to the pogues, i own a cardigan, i haven't combed my hair in a number of months, i play folk music, i play in an electronic rock band like depeche mode, i live in williamsburg and all my jeans have holes in them, but friends, with people floating around like the character mentioned above i'm confident i'm not a hipster... i'm just awesome.


* probably 20 years old

dave matthews band live on wall street?

i saw this flyer in a train the other day, i've decided it needed some attention. in this discussion there are a few points that need to be addressed.

1. national march on wallstreet
2. we demand jobs: bail out the people not banks
3. bring ALL the troops home now
4. April 3&4 1pm
5. mlk jr.

1. this seems interesting enough, but not interesting enough for me to say more than, i hope you bring blankets to catch the jumpers.
2. i think it not unreasonable to see how the people are kind of being bailed out by the bail out. i'm not going to say, "BAM", because i'm not sure its a perfect solution, but i'm confident that if the government split up 700 billion (or whatever it is) among the population, we'd all be super rich for a few days and then that mysterious inflation would set in, causing prices to skyrocket, and the perpetual taxation would repay the loan, and then... actually i'm kind of making a case for my 2 million.
3. bringing all the troops back? really, now? oh wait then i could get even more money because we could split up the remaining trillions again and i'd be even super richer.
4. ok, i think i can hold out my criticism on this one, why do we have two marches for the same cause? then i pause - because its national and soooo many people will be there that we won't be able to all fit. this makes sense too....
5. mlk jr. well if he endorses this posthumously i guess i don't have a choice but to rally behind him.

this might be the greatest march in history... other than that dave matthews band song about ants. it actually makes sense that this is the real reason people will bring their blankets and why its two days in a row... its all coming together.

Poems off the top of my head 1.0 - i didn't say they were good but they're quicker than my long blogs for you AND me. grade me like i'm in 10th grade

He didn't know her but she loved him
Its safer this way
If he knew, and if she loved
She would lose herself

Not for him.

She will lose herself

i've been hearing sooooo much about this girl adele...

...i suppose its not that i've been hearing about her as much as it is actually hearing her that has finally gotten to me.

i love bob dylan. i love his time out of mind record more than any of his other records. i love the song to make you feel my love when he sings it better than when anyone else does - kind of in the nick cave/shane macgowan singing its a wonderful world sort of way - and adele covered it, but i'll forgive her for that - however, there is something i cannot forgive her for, and that is the song chasing pavements.

i heard it once and i thought it was catchy. i don't think the lyrics are magnificent, but i don't think they are terrible. but then, this adele character is taking down all these grammy awards and is on the tip of every tongue in manhattan - also on every xm radio station, every website, every open window in the lower east side, and its getting a bit excessive.

after hearing it once, as i said, i thought it was catchy, then i kept hearing it and there was something about it that i just couldn't stand so i did my research and i put it all together and i realized the problem - adele, i know you're not sure if you should give up or if you should just keep chasing pavements, but every believable ounce, all the weight of each of the words and everything catchy and melodic about line is completely lost when you repeat it 15 times in a 3 minute song. thats once every 12 seconds.

now as i mentioned before, i love bob dylan but part of that love is that his lyrics carry so much weight by both the placement and sparse nature of his great lines. so, in like a rolling stone when he sings, "when you ain't got nothing you got nothing to lose", this great line is said only once in the middle of an already great song. i could argue that the entire song is based around that line, but then if you counter argued we could at least likely settle that the line is perfectly set up through the entire song and when he sings it only once... it's perfect.

dylan also has these songs where he repeats a certain line at the end of each turn around - a great example would be the song to make you feel my love that was already mentioned here. in that tune he keeps saying, "to make you feel my love", but when he does this in songs, and he does it a lot, (listen to love and theft - or more specifically this song - ) every time whatever the line is drops it seems to get heavier and heavier. selah.

i don't love adele, i'm not going to lie. and its not that i hate her, but if i buy a copy of this record its likely for a christian cd burning (not to be mistaken for a christian cd burning*) but she's doing a good thing, and i think aspiring to be bob dylan is too lofty for nearly all songwriters, so maybe she should just do an investigation of why angels by robbie williams is sooooooooooooooo good.


* arrested development forever.

what i'm working my way out of....

so if you have combed over every inch of this blog, as i'm sure you have, you'll notice my job is listed as, "musician guy that clark kent's as a handyman". if not, just take my word for it. anyways, i think this is a pretty simple thing to understand, so if you don't get what it means, then comment, and i'll comment back - or one of my loyal followers will beat me to the punch.

anyways, little of this is relevant except for a very interesting conversation i had yesterday. but it all starts at the beginning when i was hired, as a handyman, at a certain dollar amount per hour at the beginning of december, we will call this number X. on new years day, after landing back in new york, my boss informed me that my new wage was going to be X(2/3). i was a little shocked, but fortunately he gave me an additional 20 hours so i made the same dollar amount, i just had to work a lot more hours for it.

so word comes down the line that this certain boss of our is on his way out, and that there is another owner taking over - so i make certain to have a conversation to try and get myself back up to X. He'd said that i'd get back up there, but gave no specifics, with him leaving i thought it'd be good to readjust before hand so i didn't have to drag up old income statements as evidence. he agrees, to a point, he puts me up to X(2/3)+ X(1/5).

so here i am below my rate after receiving this so-called "raise". but i'd never thought of it as such, i just thought of it as a james bond-like falling off the side of a building, and climbing back up. but then that also perhaps fits from all of my ventures in the past few years.

anyways, when i asked about returning simply to X i was informed that my last "raise" was indeed a raise, and so i'd have to wait at least a few months longer for another raise, that is actually a "raise". i objected logically with, "well, you see, by the definition of the word, raise, i think..."

anyways, it got me nowhere. and with all this in mind only one thing remains at the forefront of my mind... with the advent of cellphones finding a phone booth to change in is really difficult, and thats really jamming me up.

doop doop doop

i've been spitting out songs like a baseball player in left field with a mouthful of that "black gum". i'm not saying that they're all great, but i actually laughed at myself over the whole matter as i found myself with 18 windows open in microsoft word yesterday and writing parts of lines to each one and then jumping back with another part line... and they somehow they seemed to make sense. i can honestly say that this is the first instance in my life where multitasking was even mildly successful. anyways, they're not finished, but a long two days of writing was summarized yesterday by writing a tune between 11:30pm and 12:30am, lyrics, melody and changes. it was weird. i actually did some sketches of a guitar solo, but thought it a little tasteless to mention until i remembered that i had this picture



anyways, the reason i'm telling you all of this is not to impress you, the reason i'm telling you all of this is so that i can offer some good reasons for why this might happen.

1. i've been listening to nick cave, chris isaak, bob dylan and the cure non-stop*
2. i wrote a song** asking someone to be my muse, and i think they took the job
3. i've been working out in the gym lifting weights for 3 days straight and found it to be a fountain of inspiration.
4. dianne warren challenged me to a write-off***
5. dale commented on my blog. the flood of great memories washed over me like the red sea over the egyptians, but in a good way - not a death way.

*while i do love chris isaac he hardly belongs in this list.
** title of the track is would you mind - pardon the self promotion... but maybe get used to it?
***not a tax season reference

norah song.

Tommy Hawkins

well, i'm back.

so, friends... i decided that it was time to get back into blogging. i'd taken a rather nice long vacation... and in retrospect i think it was the worst time to stop blogging - i mean, i move out of canada, fall out of contact with a lot of my friends and am trying to keep myself popular with todays young and hip ones, and so i walked away - leaving you all in absolute confusion as to where i might of gone. well, i'm not going to get into that now, all you need to know is that i'm here, i'm back, and i'm ready to rock.

the stats you need to know:

i live in brooklyn - south williamsburg to be exact for the williamsburg snobs, but williamsburg to the rest of the world.

my grammar is still bad, and you should not look for capital letters or a shortage of elipses on this page.

i sing songs and play guitar - you can hear some of it here www.myspace.com/tomtasticenterprizes

i recently tested myself and have an iq of 174. its amazing i haven't figured out grammar yet with a score like that.