Eyeshow items
Tim Sylvester of Eyeshow (at the time) walked up to me after an early-days Paperbag show, while still packing up the gear. He handed me a CD of ready-made finished songs with no vocals, and asked if I would choose a couple, write some lyrics, and lay down some vocals on them for him. I did. I'll never forget that when I was done, he told me on the phone something to the effect that, "thanks anyway, but we got some other guy to do vocals and we're not gonna use yours". Oh well; that's cool, because we both had things going on. When it was done, I met him in a Murrays parking lot on a rainy day in Brighton (only my second meeting with him) and handed him the CD anyway. I think these two songs are pretty darned cool, and I hope you enjoy them; I really enjoyed the change to contribute to them....
License mp3, lyrics - At the time I was writing these lyrics, I was struggling with the notion of open-source software and how it fit in with the capitalist world (being a staunch capitalist, myself). Believe it or not, working through these lyrics helped me to come to the conclusion that (simplified here for brevity) open-source and other things of a non-proprietary, non-capitalistic nature are *themselves* a competitor in a capitalistic arena. That, and the notion that a person's motivation for contribution to a particular project may or may not be money, self-satisfaction, praise, etc. So the metaphor of a ship represents the conflict of open-source floating in an ocean of consumer markets and the promise and conflict of licensing against the GPL. The idea is that you're like the captain of the ship in the "Rhyme of the Anicient Mariner" ("around my neck i wear the burden...") and you don't realize the water is so shallow you could walk off the ship. So is it an open letter to Richard Stallman? Perhaps. Fun, huh?
Heather mp3, lyrics - I liked this music because it took me about a week to understand the timing. The funny part about that is that after delivering the finished product to Tim, he later told me that he struggled to find the timing of my vocals. Anyway, this is just a love song, based around a sappy image of the standard cliche of a couple running toward each other in slow motion, hugging and spinning, then collapsing together in a somewhat cool, English field of heather. A metaphor for relationships. The whole thing is also cool because the guy from Eyeshow (Tim) told me his girlfriend was named Heather.