An amendment to the Secret Notebook Story

Hello all. I was sitting here doing stuff when it hit me why I made the Secret Notebook album. I thought I'd take a little break and fill you in.

It happened that back in May, 2008, I got a message from some organization who was going to give Kevin Sampsell an award for something (being such a stand-up guy, I suppose). The organization wanted a 30 second sound clip from a bunch of Kevin's friends. So I took his book A Common Pornography from my bathroom reading basket and flipped through it. I happened upon the story Vibrator, which was only a paragraph long, and thought, "That would make a nice little song." So my challenge was to turn one paragraph of prose into a complete musical statement. So I rewrote the paragraph as a four line bit of verse, and then started singing a melody. It took me a whole afternoon to get a melody that felt complete, with a beginning, a climax, and an end. It had to have shape.

Anyway, I recorded it in Garage Band with lots of little kid noises and a big dental drill sound (which is supposed to be a vibrator), put some harmonies on, and voila! A 30 second song. Well, the people who honored Kevin liked it a lot. They even synced it to a little film they made in Kevin's honor. So I thought it would be a nice challenge to take all the songs in the book and make an album of short songs. In the end I wrote and recorded 25 songs between May or so 2008 and February 2009. Kevin came over and approved of 20 of them, and I finished the album.

So that's the story. Back to work. I hope you're all well! More later.