New Song - Bastrop

My brother added another song of mine to the sound page. It's called "Bastrop." For want of a better name. I also wrote this one a while back. I'd been meaning to buy a mandolin for a few years, and finally scraped up some money for a cheap one.

On Day 1 of having my mandolin, I worked out most of the chords. Mandolin strings, like violin strings, are essentially the top 4 strings on a guitar flipped upside down: G D A E (and doubled for a total of 8 strings). So if you are good at guitar, you can figure your way around a mandolin.

On Day 2 of the mandolin, I learned Led Zeppelin's "Battle of Evermore" which was a hell of a lot easier than I imagined it would be. But it still sounds awesome.

On Day 5, I decided to write a song. The first step was to get a guitar rythmn. I already had written this particular rythmn for my 12-string accoustic several months before, and it was kind of like a little orphan. I thought it would be a good fit for a tune featuring my new mandolin, so I recorded it on my four track and then switched to the mandolin to figure out a lead. I started out by writing out the pentatonic scale in G (again, figured out manually, since I have no mandolin books). Then I just kind of screwed around for a couple of hours until I came up with this.

I had a few early working names for it, but then was listening to it in my car one day after hiking at Bastrop State Park in Texas. I was driving 60 mph in my favorite stretch of road in Texas, a six-mile stretch along Highway 21 where the road literally vanishes beneath a canopy of pine trees, which stretch out on either side and meet up over your head. The cool, etherial beauty of the trees, the speed, and the primitive, raw setting seemed appropriate for this song.

A mandolin is psychologically a mystical, primative instrument. Guitar may have been that way, but it's become infused with other concepts and meanings over the years. When you think of guitar, you think of a host of forms of music, from Carlos Montoya to ZZ Top to Robin Trower. Even accoustic guitars have been washed clean of any historic associations through the hippy faux folk music of the late 60s. Somehow a mandolin has remained much more pure. No one's ever done an electric, distorted mandolin. Even the rock songs where it appears fall in limited categories, specifically, the mystical, almost medieval songs and the neo-country/folk sound. A good example of the former would be Evermore, and a good version of the latter would be "Maggie May" by Rod Stewart. A somewhat more difficult to classify song would be the Beatle's "Here Comes the Sun" which I also learned and which is my favorite mandolin song.

It's much more common in country music, and also common, at least historically, in Italian folk music and Mexican - particularly Norteno - music. But what all these genres have in common is a traditional authenticity. A purity which rock music has all but washed out of the guitar.

That's why I like the Mandolin. Of course, I'm still basically a beginner, but with 20 years experience on guitar, even a beginner can do some pretty cool stuff. That's what I was experimenting with in "Bastrop." So here you go. Have a listen:


http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=795352&content=music
(To play the song, click the arrow next to the title)





P.S. Around the time I was typing in the paragraph that starts with "Day 5" the sirens went off and the recorded voice blared, "incoming...incoming..." There were four people in the room here at the MWR, three Tongans and me. We all looked around at each other and shrugged. I went back to typing. They went back to their web surfing. I guess if we had heard booms, we could have gotten under the table, but most of the times the alarm goes off these days, it's a false alarm.

Sure enough, before I was through with the next paragraph, another sound rang out, followed by the words, "This is the command post...all clear...all clear...personnel should return to their units and conduct personal acountability. I repeat, "all clear...all clear..."