That universe where it’s just like here, except everyone’s evil, and Spock has a beard.

Winning the prize today for longest title for a blog entry . . . .

No, I did not fall into some alternate dimension.  It took all summer for the fates to hand me a few duty-free weeks to actually write, compose, practice, perfect, and record music for my third Jamendo album.  I’m making the most of my time.  I’ve ramped the schedule up to a block from 9 am to 9 pm.

I only have 7 days left, and my summer will be over.

Between traveling, dealing with high blood pressure / sleep apnea, and emergency room visits (for both my wife and my mom), I haven’t really had much of a vacation.   And I haven’t even mentioned the trips to the dentist or the eye doctor.

Supposedly one of the benefits of being a teacher is all the free time in the summer.

Pfah!  Game Over.

The name for my third Jamendo album I’d been working with was La vie sous la mer (”Life Under the Sea”).  If you want to know why I chose a French title, well, try saying “Life Under the Sea” to yourself, then try the French phrase — in English you’d say “la-vee-soo-la-merr“.

Apples and Oranges, eh?  It’s all about consonance.

Anyway, after all that I’ve been through, I was thinking of changing the name to The Long, Twilight Struggle (appropriate, considering the sleep apnea problem).

OK, the meaning of my extremely long blog title

I have changed.  The music I’m making now is more mature but . . . wild.  I never know where the music really comes from.  I start playing it, I develop a theme, and then, one day, bam, I hear the whole thing sort of talking to me, guiding me.  I learn what it’s about.  The song becomes a story, and the story practically tells itself.

Well, today, I finally perfected one of my tunes.  I’ve only recorded the bass and an elementary drum track, but it sounds done — I can hear the organ part, the guitar part, the whole thing, without it actually having been played yet.

It’s like nothing I’ve ever played before.  I’m still sort of stunned by it.

Somehow, in my long journey this summer, I advanced in some fundamental way.  Maybe it was all the time I spent in “the Woodshed” this Spring.  Maybe it was learning so much music theory — getting into pitch class sets so much that I even wrote them up as a Python module (pcsets-2.0).

But the funny thing is –

Now, when I listen to my old albums, I hear the songs telling their stories in a different way.

Which brings up an interesting idea.  I’ve never been one for covers, but . . . what if I covered my own songs, the way I hear them now?

Just an idea.  But it ran through my mind all day today while I was playing bass — and yes, that was all day.

Remember that Star Trek episode where the transporter ended up sending Kirk & crew to that other universe, where . . . well, read the title of this entry again.

I thought:  What there was an alternate universe version of my first Jamendo album, evolution.  As in, somehow, this album came to our Earth by transporter accident, traveling through shadows, or a misfiring interociter.

I made up the track list today.  It doesn’t really exist, but, hey — my music is licensed under Creative Commons, so . . . maybe some day, in the fullness of time, someone else could even try to make it real.

Here we go.  The track listing for  the first album from Me-From-Another-Universe:  Natural Selection.  (If you don’t get the obscure references, try reading these articles.)

1. Rough and Ragged
2. Bermuda Triangle
3. All I Ever Was
4. On the Road
5. Sly Dog
6. Science
7. Finding You (Song for Nora)
8. First Class Seat
9. Lucy’s Tune
10. Restaurant and Reservation
11. The Dousing
12. Billie Recounts