Steve Ogden Music

Pants on the ground
Pants on the ground
Lookin’ like a fool
With your pants on the ground

These are the lyrics which form the basis for a very popular video making the ‘net rounds currently.

Above is the version done by American Idol hopeful Larry Platt. I’m given to understand this is an original song by Mr. Platt, and he certainly had an original delivery of the song, a style all his own.

Next, a version of the song by Neil Young… or rather Jimmy Fallon doing a spot-on impersonation of Mr. Young singing Mr. Platt’s song. Note how different the song is with just a little change in delivery.

For the past few months, I’ve been in training. I’ve been running an increasing amount pretty much every day – inside on the treadmill if it’s too cold or rainy, and increasingly outside if the temperature is over 50. OK, 45. OK, 42.

People see me trudging along and ask me what I’m in training for. Life, I guess. I had fallen out of training for a bit.

I began with a mile.

I used to think that was a long distance, and before you laugh, you should know I was a sprinter in high school. My event was the 100 meter, and I was pretty fast. So, I have considered myself a sprinter, not a marathoner, for a long time. However, as these things usually go, I was fooling myself. In actuality, I had become neither a sprinter nor a marathoner, because high school was a very long time ago indeed. What I had become was, of course, was a lazy fat slob.

So, I’d run a mile and be completely out of breath. I’d cough if I breathed in too deeply. As a singer, this is a bad, bad thing. If you can’t breathe properly, you can’t sing well either.

I am currently running three and a half miles a day. This now seems long to me, but remember how I used to think a mile was long? This too shall pass.

I’m not an entirely fat slob anymore, and I can breathe a lot better. And it’s been very good for my singing, which is nice.

Most of all, if feels good to be in training.

I’ve had a few people asking about the lyrics on “Whole“. They are here for your reading convenience:

“Whole”
Music and orchestration by James Fahy
Lyrics and vocals by Steve Ogden

In the darkness
Of the endless winter night
The world is cold and still
And praying for the light

Like seven hundred and thirty days gone past
I was star-lit and broken
But like the sun
You rose and I could say at last

I am whole
Once again whole

I am whole
Once again whole

Though you’re one hundred and fifty miles away
On the world’s biggest setee
I can feel you out there
Can’t wait til you come home

And I am whole

I am whole
Once again

All right. Still getting my studio sorted out, but was able to kickstart my musical output a bit by collaborating with a composer in the UK. I’m happy to be able to announce now, this is none other than James Fahy, an artist who goes by the moniker Ambienteer. This is a song we worked on together called “Whole”:

For those of you who enjoy a story behind a song, this one started out as a piece of ambient music James put up at his site on his two year anniversary with his beloved Nixnoo. Fittingly enough, he called it “Two Years“.

I like a lot of his songs, but this one was extraordinary. I downloaded it onto my ipod and listened to it on the way home a bunch of times and began to hear something in it. I wrote him a note back in October asking if he minded me adding some lyrics and vocals to it, and he gave his permission.

The lyrics are a mix of feelings I got while listening to the song, and bits and pieces cribbed from Fahy’s blog and Twitter feed. On the night of his anniversary, sadly Nixnoo was 15o miles away, but at least James knew she was out there, safe and snug “in the world’s biggest couch”. Anyway, such are the details that go into lyrics.

You can hear an almost endless stream of ambient music as James’ website, and you may enjoy following him as I do on Twitter.

James is amazingly prolific. You’ll find he works at odd hours of the night, when normal humans might be sleeping – I can relate to that. And he even records when he’s down sick. That is dedication. Or maybe obsession. Or maybe dedicated obsession. But any way you slice it, it’s impressive.

My goal was to get this one in before the end of the year, and bang, we did it… just barely. But it still counts.

Happy New Year, everyone! Enjoy the music.

Almost have everything I need to record the kind of music I want to record. The HP DV-7 was a nice early Christmas present for me. Has a nice, big screen so I can see what I’m doing, it’s portable enough that I can record in any room I want to, and it’s got a ton of memory and a nice, fast processor. I hope to be recording over the Christmas break.

It’s nice to be pleasantly surprised occasionally. I came across this trailer for a new independent film called Love the other day. I have to say that although I don’t understand it just based on the trailer, the film looks promising. But then I learned it’s a film by Angels and Airwaves. In case you don’t know, Angels and Airwaves is a band fronted by Blink-182 frontman Tom Delonge. The band also includes guitarist David Kennedy, notably from Over My Dead Body, drummer Adam Willard from The Offspring and former 30 Seconds to Mars bassist Matt Wachter. They’ve come together from these different bands, and they make a really interesting blend of music.

Sure, it’s occasionally a bit fist-pumpingly stadium-rocky for my taste, but it is also quite frequently in turns high-octane and beautiful, and always well-constructed and well produced. At times it reminds me of Blink-182 or Fallout Boy, sometimes Carbon Leaf, and sometimes Coldplay. As I said, it is an interesting blend.

The really interesting news is that the band is releasing not only the movie, but also a companion-piece album appropriately enough on St. Valentine’s Day, Feb 14, 2009 – for FREE. That’s right! Evidently, thanks to corporate underwriting from social network fansite upstart Modlife, the movie and album are both on their way for free. It definitely has my curiousity piqued.

This song is like an auditory Rorschauch ink blot test – you see what you want to see. Some have seen Billy Joel in this, others have seen Fiona Apple. For once, I wasn’t thinking about any specific influence on my musical life on this song, I was just writing from the heart. Judging from the song’s success, I should do that more often.

I wrote this song for a specific, horrific episode in my life, as a source of comfort. But surprisingly, this song has touched the hearts of more people than any other song I’ve ever done, which tells me there’s a whole lot of horrific out there.

I’m no piano player, but even so, I’m proud of this performance. It has heart. I wish I’d recorded it with a real piano instead of the synth pretending to be a piano. The synth robs it of reality, and that hurts the song. One day I’ll re-record this one on a real piano. I still have trouble playing the song live without breaking down.

Meanwhile, you are welcome to listen to it:

If you identify with the song as so many have, I hope it gives you some comfort.

Another baby step along the way toward getting some more music up. Today I installed Sonar 8 Producer. It’s a very sexy program for making music with. And so I shall. And so I have.

I’ll be working on “Whole” tonight as well as guide vocal tracks for Michel Jordan’s new versions of “Fugue” and “Fountain”. More as events warrant.

“Can’t Fool Me” is one of those strange little love songs I like to write. Far more interesting to me to have someone pining after somebody who doesn’t even know he exists, than to have a happy love song about flowers, rainbows and butterflies where everything’s just peachy.

In this case, the main character has convinced himself – rightly or wrongly, we don’t know – that the object of his desire is ignoring him because she herself is trying to avoid facing up to her true feelings for him. In that way, there could be two people fooling themselves here, and I find that humorous.

Can't Fool MeDenial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

Although this song is a bit slow to get started, I hope you’ll stick with it and give it a proper listen. It went to #4 on MP3.com’s Alternative charts in 2001, and I am quite proud of it.

One day, I had hit bottom. I was having problems of my own causing, and they got worse and worse until I was out of money and out of options. If I have any comfort for having done this to myself, it is that I wound up there by sticking to my own principles. When it was darkest, I regretted the decisions that brought me to this place, but with the benefit of hindsight, I know I did the right thing. Still, making it through this period was very difficult, and just as things were darkest, a glimmer of hope appeared in the form of a phone call that changed my life. I hung up, and immediately recorded this song.

FountainA song about perseverance.

As for the main imagery in the song, someone told me once that one way to get water in the desert is to wrap some rocks in a cloth and wait til morning. The rocks will condense moisture during the cold desert night and you can wring out the cloth in the morning and get a little bit of water out of it. I’m not sure that it’s true, and I’m even less sure it would do much to save your life, but I thought it was an interesting notion, and it seemed to speak to what I was going through, basically living on little drops of hope in a hopeless desert until I could drag myself to an oasis.