I only care about *this much* about the Beatles.  I apologize in advance if an annoyed tone creeps into this post, but for a long time rabid Beatles fans made it very difficult for me to appreciate their output at all.  Now look: the Beatles were great and very talented and wonderfully innovative and all-around very important.  I get all that.  But I’ll also take a second to tell you that I’ve never fallen for them.  No, I haven’t sat down with the entire catalogue, but I’ve spent time with a few of their albums, and while I might remark ‘This is pretty’ (“She’s Leaving Home”) or ‘Yeah, that one fucking rocked’ (“Helter Skelter”), at the end of the day I’ve never felt like, “Oh my god, I need to hear that one Beatles song right now, it’s the only thing that matters in the world.”

Why am I writing all this?  Because look: the Beatles are great, and it’s fine to love them, or even call them your favorite band, although I will mention here that I haven’t had a favorite artist for over ten years; I sort of feel like the gesture is superficial and takes a narrow view.  But a lot people aren’t satisfied just to call the Beatles their favorite; they have to call them ‘the best’, which makes it an objective, factual contention, one that I object to and that I feel truly limits music appreciation and imagination.

For starters, it seems ludicrous to me to name a superlative artist out of the entire legacy of global music history.  Now many will respond with, “Of course we’re not saying that, we’re just saying the Beatles were the best rock band ever”, but two things.  A) If you say someone or something is the best ever (and a lot of people do say it just like that), what that means is it’s the best ever, so if that’s not what you meant you shouldn’t have put it that way, and B) dodging that bullet requires you to partition music off into genres, which leads to a number of other problems.  We don’t pick superlatives for any other genre: even (most) classical buffs won’t pick a definite favorite from Mozart, Beethoven or Bach; jazz enthusiasts won’t declare unequivocally that Trane was better than Bird.  In light of this, it seems to me like picking a best rock band seems to imply that rock and roll is somehow more important than other genres.  And while I’ll say that rock and roll is quite possibly my favorite music, it doesn’t mean whatsoever that it’s the best.

There’s more I want to say about the arguments from popularity and influence and the fallacies therein, but I can’t muster it right now.  What I think you can fairly say about the Beatles’ importance is that they completely changed the game, forever.  No small feat.  But christ, so did a whole ton of other people over just the last century.  Now you could make a lot of qualifying statements like, “Sure, Elvis did a ton to bring black music to mainstream audiences, and Chuck Berry revolutionized electric guitar playing, and Les Paul developed multitrack recording, but it was really the Beatles that brought all those developments together at just the right time to make the ultimate rock and roll experience that will never be topped, not ever,” but golly I hope you can see how silly that is.  If we can acknowledge that the game has changed many times, why pretend that we can keep score?

I didn’t grow up in a particularly musical household or environment whatsoever.  I have no dearth of gratitude to my parents for a multitude of other critical provisions of childhood, but this is something I’m determined to correct with my own offspring, whenever that happens.  This means that I came to music almost entirely on my own.  The only recorded music that I remember existing in my house were disco cassettes like the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, and a little later some musicals, particularly Andrew Lloyd Webber and Miss Saigon.  But the soundtrack that I actually heard the most was what we heard in the car driving around, which was usually either public radio or soft rock stations.  Ironically enough, I far preferred the latter; well into my early adulthood I actually had such associations with boredom and exhaustion from running errands that the sound of an NPR commentator’s voice would make me feel nauseated.  Now of course most soft rock is saccharine, awful stuff; but it was the first music I knew, it was song, and I was moved by it.  If I had grown up in a colorless world, the first shade of baby-shit yellow might have struck me as very pretty.  My first two CDs I ever owned were Bryan Adams’ So Far So Good and Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits I and II.  While I don’t write music quite like this myself, I must confess a certain affinity for the sentimental that I can’t and probably don’t want to shake.

As I entered middle school and gained more musical autonomy (i.e. a Walkman and a boombox in my room), I branched out to the music of my peers: in South St. Louis, this was R&B and alt-rock radio.  Not gonna lie, the former took first–my first concert was Boyz II Men, TLC and Montell Jordan–as it probably related most directly to what I was accustomed to hearing in my mom’s Acura, but by seventh grade I was firmly steeped in alternative rock radio.  This was 1995.  I feel like I missed the birth of grunge and only came to appreciate it more a little later.  I knew that I was falling in love with music, and that despite not having any money I needed to be acquiring the CDs of a thousand different artists.  I also knew that as a lover of music I had to have a favorite artist.  After one comical misstep here–special prize if you can guess which 90s artist got this mantle undeservedly for a short while–I found my first favorite band, Counting Crows.

Let me say a few words about Counting Crows.  Even years before the advent of uber-snobby hipster culture (in which I admit to participating sometimes), I knew that being a Crows fan was not getting me any points for coolness.  But I was utterly taken with Adam Duritz’s lyrics; it was the first time I had heard songs where each line was thoughtfully and poetically composed, and each line required and deserved attention.  I learned all the words to August and Everything After, and I was practically salivating when Recovering The Satellites came out three years later.  I learned for the first time that a band could change–they had added a guitar player, dialed down the 90s folk-pop, cranked up the country–and that once you adjusted you would love them even more for their range.

I’ll get back to my own narrative in a moment, but let me just submit this into the record: Counting Crows’ first three studio albums, the two mentioned above and This Desert Life, are all A plus material, and any songwriter (any music lover, really, but especially songwriters) who avoids them because they’re not cool enough is a damned fool.  The live albums are fantastic as well for hearing how the songs evolve even after they’ve been rendered in the studio.  The two most recent studio albums, Hard Candy and Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings are spotty, but still contain some gems.  And yes, songs like “Accidentally in Love” or their Joni Mitchell cover do make me want to poop, cry and throw up all over myself.

This is getting quite long, so let me just cut to the critical moment: the moment I decided I wanted to play music for the rest of my life.  The birth of the dream.

Summer after eighth grade, my two best friends and I (one of whom was Adam R-H., whom I’ve referenced here before) went to see Counting Crows at Riverport Amphitheater.  You know the kind of venue; huge lawn, reeks of shitty weed and Budweiser.  It was amazing.  Having no other national act on the bill, they played a three-hour set, with many of the songs expanded, updated, improvised upon.  And they played my favorite song, “Anna Begins”.  Adam Duritz was soaked through with sweat–this was August–and maybe it was also sweat dripping down his face but on the Jumbotron monitor it also looked like it could have been tears.  I was profoundly moved by what the song meant to me, even as a middle-schooler I had found a way to relate to the story, but there was another feeling there too.  A feeling that said, “That, what he’s doing up there, I need to do that.  Not for glory, not because it seems fun, but I need to make other people feel the way that I’m feeling now.  More specifically, I need to put my pain into song and then share it with other people so that they know that they’re not alone.”

And that was it.  There’s more about my musical coming-of-age, but this concludes my Book of Genesis.  This is where my story began.

Me and Cyrus started up another blog-off contest, seeing who could keep up regular entries for longer, this time at a more manageable rate of once a week.  Deadline is Sunday night; here’s me making sure I don’t eff the dog right off the bat.

I want to talk a little about how my songwriting process works.  Partly because it’s the aspect of my music that I feel the most confident about, but like the green magician I can’t help but divulge the secret behind the trick; but also because I’m curious how other songwriters’ processes might differ.  For me, most every song has a ‘seed’ lyric; one line around which everything else is built.  Sometimes it’s exactly the line you would expect, like the words ‘married to the sea’ in the song “Married To The Sea”, or ‘Either kick me out, or kiss me back’ in “The State Of The Garden”*.  But a lot of my songs don’t really have a catchy chorus (for a long time I didn’t really know how to write them; not that I really know how now, but catchier ideas pop into my head than before).  What do you suppose the seed lyric was for “Come Closer”?  I’m interested to know what you think it was; take a second, I’ll wait.

The answer: “But all the things we used to do, you said you never could again / Well, that’s okay, we don’t have to, though we were pretty good at them.”  If you thought it was something different, you should write it in the comments!  Let’s do a different one.  “World’s Oldest Profession” was actually a whole different song (still a breakup song, but much less angry) that got scrapped, and two lyrics that came from the original should properly be considered its seeds.  And those are 1) the first four lines of the second verse (“Dear, you were an artist”) and 2) “You don’t bring your face so near /unless it’s to threaten my life”.

Then sometimes there are songs that grow out of a general concept, like “Red Balloon”, where I first had the idea of simply portraying a series of moments where one is experiencing one event in reality and mentally reliving another.  I actually made a list of situations I wanted to juxtapose that contrasted sharply but yet seemed to have some shred of a common theme, e.g. not being able to pay one’s bills and being outmanuevered in a fistfight, or the adrenaline rush felt in both lovemaking and being in a car accident.  The theme of loss only began to emerge as I wrote more and more verses, and the red balloon device came at the end of the lyrical process; I think the first and last verse were the last two I penned.

Obviously this is all about the lyrical process; there’s lots more I could say about how it’s set to music, probably for another post.  I’ll just say now that usually the seed lyric has a melodic line or at least a melodic ‘shape’, although it could change later; I actually never like to write any chords until all the words are done, for fear that I might write shitty filler to fit the preconceived phrase.  Anyway, I’m interested to know how other people approach their nascent song ideas.  Comment, goddamnit!  Thank you.

Love, Shareef

*If you’re thinking about joking that the ‘balls deep’ lyric was the ‘seed’, don’t bother.  I already thought of that and determined that it wasn’t fit to print.

Dear all,

What an amazing year this has been.  It would not be a stretch to call it the best year of my life.  Here and here are my list of accomplishments for 2009 and goals for 2010 respectively, and I’m delighted to declare that, for the most part, both were bested this year.  Check check it:

In 2009, I wrote eight songs, my record at the time, and set a lofty goal of twenty for 2010.  I finished twelve, which, at a rate of one per month, and 50% more than last year, is more than enough to satisfy me.  Plus, I hold that my writing is as good as or better than it’s ever been.  Here they are:

1. Married To The Sea
2. Message I’ve Been Trying To Send
3. This Heart Is Not A Home
4. You’re A Fox
5. My Weakness
6. I Still Like You
7. If My Love
8. Holy Rock & Roll
9. New Song, Old Love
10. Chicken Bone
11. Sunken Treasure (Working title here; sort of forgot about that Wilco song with the same name, which may have even been some of the inspiration for my own song.  Not that you’d even notice it, unless, you know, the song had the exact same fucking title.)
12. River Beggar Summer Killer

Of these, one is already recorded (#1), four more are already in the band’s repertoire and will probably be on our next album (#s 3, 4, 7 and 8), and at least four are going to be on an upcoming solo album (#s 2, 5, 6 and 9).  The last three are still being figured out a bit, but they’re definitely not throwaways.

Shows: last year, it was ten at seven different venues, and I set a goal of at least one in each month of 2010.  This is the goal that I’m thrilled to say was completely blown away: this year I played (either with the band or solo) a total of 42 shows, plus 26 new venues!  And honestly there wasn’t a single one I didn’t want to play or enjoy.  I don’t feel the need to exceed this next year, though I would love it, especially if it means more touring.

What else, besides these metrics?

• Added two terrific members to the Radical Folksonomy: bassist Alex Stein and drummer Kenny Leftin.  This is as large a group as I’ve ever lead or want to lead, and it’s tremendously thrilling to have such a talented crew dedicate themselves to fleshing out the musical vision.
• Booked, promoted and executed a one-week Pacific Northwest tour: seven shows in seven days!  Had a ton of fun with the band, and have not stopped thinking since about how to do this for a longer span of time…
• Recorded a six-song EP with the band, which as I said before may be the first recorded work of mine that I think I’ll continue to be proud of for the rest of my life.  After all, I’ve lived with this album for the past six months, listened to it a lot, and still think it’s a near perfect rendering of the songs.
• Got that there EP reviewed in a few places!
• Moved into an awesome West Oakland house, the Oakland Chainsaw Massacre, where we’ve thrown four shows so far, including our first dinner show last month!
• Not least of all, paid down over $2500 in credit card debt.  Once I’m out of this hole, I know it will be much easier to focus more entirely on music.

Clearly, this was a year of dues-paying, and I expect next year to be as well.  But it was also a year of serious friendship-forming with other musicians and music-lovers in the scene.  All told I couldn’t ask for more.  There are of course too many to thank so let me just mention: my partner Claire, my amazing band, my peers in the scene for whom I could not have deeper admiration, and of course those without any personal stake who have shared in the music simply for the sheer pleasure of it.  Thank you all so very much.

With love,

Shareef Ali

UPDATE: Christ, did I forget the resolutions/goals section?  Here’s some hasty pudding for you:

1. Write at least twelve songs in 2011; yes, I think that’s a good amount.  Though if I reach it with time to spare I have to try to get to last year’s goal of twenty.
2. Play at least two shows in each month of the year, AND
3. Play at least twenty shows outside of my immediate geographic SF/Oakland/Berkeley scene.  This year’s number was eight, seven in the Northwest and one in St. Louis, so it can be either on tour or a one-off deal.
4. Record a full-length with the Folksonomy (we’ve already got seven songs in our repertoire that aren’t on The Once & Future Boyfriend).
5. Record a full-length solo album, tentatively titled Cat Pictures.

Okay, there!

Ah, the paradox of documentation. We seek to record that which carries great importance to us, and yet that very process often interferes with actually doing important things and being completely present in the lived moment, thus diminishing rather than amplifying the richness of the experience. Or so it seems/is used as an excuse for not having written a blog post in forever okay I effed up I’m sorry.

Let me start with the news up front, if you haven’t heard yet: Shareef Ali & The Radical Folksonomy have recorded our debut release! It’s a six-song, 25-minute EP titled “The Once & Future Boyfriend”. All of it was recorded and mixed in June to get ready in time for our Pacific Northwest tour that happened from July 5-11. So yes, it’s true that about two or three dozen of our friends in Washington and Oregon already have it. It’s also been made available to about the same number of blogs/radio stations/etc., though I don’t know if being kept in a wastebasket or spam folder really qualifies as ‘having’ the record. (Jay kay bloggers et al! We love you! Review the record please!)

BUT, for the rest of you, the album is going to be released on Wednesday, September 1st at San Francisco’s Hotel Utah Saloon! I couldn’t be more excited for this show. A) of all, the Hotel Utah Monday night open mic has been my home for the past year; it’s the place where I’ve made nearly all of my meaningful musical connections in this scene, full of dear friends and artists whom I deeply admire and respect. B) of all, the bill for the evening is just terrific. Let me try to make this sound as non-boilerplate as possible. Opening up are Wolf & Crow, a minimalist neo-folk outfit led by my friend Zach. Zach’s songs are very beautiful and tender, and his voice has this exquisite balance of grace and roughness to it. This is a band who really knows what it means to ‘serve the song’, with deft light touches of color. My band and I will play second: the ‘main course’ of the evening, if you will. The rock and fuckin’ roll dessert of the evening is Mark Matos & Os Beaches, who are simply an absolute powerhouse of a four-piece. Mark starts with these simple, honest ballads a la Neil Young, which are perfectly supported by his band with solid, steady grooves. Then sometimes they take it way out improvisationally, and it gets really truly ecstatic, nearly religious (this coming from an atheist, as you know); but it never ever ever sounds wanky. That’s how you know it’s artful.

Anyway, hey, you can buy advance tickets for the show here and RSVP to the Facebook event here.

Okay, now let me blather on about the record for a little bit. Like I said, six songs, 25-minutes. Now maybe what I’m about to say is biased, but I’m feeling lately like this is the perfect length for an album. There’s just no room for filler, and let me tell you that even a lot of great classics have filler. (The Bends? Does anybody really give a damn about that song “Bones”?) Plus I think of two of my all time favorites, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Both clock in at under half an hour, and yet are quite the complete musical experience.

Say, if you’re interested in hearing the actual music, instead of just reading my words about it, you can go to shareefali.bandcamp.com and make that happen for yourself.  That’s also where the album will be digitally released the same day.  Okay, back to it.

Simply put: this is the best recording I’ve ever done.  Maybe the first that I’ll be proud to stand by for the rest of my life (that’s a bit hard to tell at this moment, obviously).  But these are the best songs I’ve ever written, played by the best band I’ve ever had, and recorded in the best way possible.  Which was remarkable in its simplicity, actually.  We tracked all the instruments except acoustic guitar live, over the course of about four hours.  I went back for another three hour session to do the acoustic, then Jay and I recorded vocals over the course of another three hours.  Mixing was done in two evenings.  All told, probably twenty hours were spent on the production of the album.  It’s just a very good document of what we really sound like at our best.  I couldn’t be more proud of it.

Gosh, there’s so much more to tell about the past eight months, about how I’ve played more shows this year than at any other point in my life, about how incredible and fun the tour was, about how this might turn out to be the best year of my life.  But I can’t right now.  I’ve got to go back to work, and I want to work on a song before my lunch break ends.

Thank you to all who have helped this happen for me.

Love,

Shareef Ali

I already did a retrospective of this last year about a week ago, but since I’ve been seeing so many end-of-decade lists I thought it might be a good time for me to reflect on the second decade I’ve lived through in its entirety, and maybe make some resolutions. For me it seems like the themes were work, self-determination and the first several geographic relocations of my life.

So, to recap major events/transformations of the Zeroes (my preferred title):

• 2000: End of junior year of high school, beginning of senior year. Clockwork, my high school band, is starting to get ‘serious’, becoming the ‘house band’ at the Tin Ceiling. I’m in the process of ending my first serious relationship (no scare quotes on this one), and lose my virginity New Year’s Eve of this year (if this strikes you as Too Much Information, you clearly haven’t been listening to my song lyrics very closely, or are kidding yourself about their autobiographical nature). I also accept that I won’t simply skip college and play in a band, and get pretty psyched about applying to Oberlin, to which I am admitted in December.
• 2001: Clockwork records our first album (and our second album, and our third album). I graduate high school, feel sad about Clockwork breaking up, drive to Ohio for college on my birthday. September 11 happens two weeks into freshman year, making the change in my life and surroundings seem all the more immense. I meet Claire, my romantic partner of the past eight years, and we hook up casually for a few months before officially becoming boyfriend and girlfriend two days before winter break.
• 2002: I decide I want to be in the Oberlin’s composition program, put together my first portfolio, and get rejected. I work like hell all summer (probably the first time I’ve really worked hard for something I cared deeply about in my life) revising all the pieces plus writing a few new ones, and in the fall I’m allowed to be in the program on a provisional basis for the semester. My first several assignments come back covered in red ink and bearing such criticism as “major problems” or “this isn’t a melody – no idea here” or “You lack a basic understanding of Western tonality”. I revise every single one of them and hand them back in for more abuse. Gradually, it tapers off and I’m allowed to stay in the program. I get my mind blown with challenges to my notions of what music is and should be, where it’s going, whether writing ‘pop’ music (read: anything that’s not wanky academic chamber music) is worth a damn (I conclude years later that it is). I have my first college band, The Plan, which was some befuddled marriage of punk rock, experimental electronic and jamband (my bud Derek, the drummer, gives a shout-out to these glory days in the sweet birthday song he wrote for me this year). Over the summer, I also play in a jazz combo led by my good friend and Clockwork bassist, Nick.
• 2003: I start recording my first solo album of original songs, which isn’t finished till the next year. I also get involved in doing anti-oppression education and have several major revelations about power and privilege in our society.
• 2004: After many moons and many missteps, I finish my album What The Hat Meant, with hilariously backwards production decisions like dubbing drums after guitar and guitar after vocals. I spend the summer shedding on guitar: scales, jazz standards, classical pieces.
• 2005: Clearly not having learned the lesson from my solo album, I bite off way more than I can chew for my senior recital: string quartet, fusion combo, horn section, guitar duo. But it all comes together okay. I graduate, spend five weeks in Spain and Italy with Claire, then return home to St. Louis for six months to work, save money, and figure out that I’m going to move to California to make music with Sebastian. Also, somewhere in there I write the script to a graphic novel, which I have yet to do anything with.

I’ll be a little briefer here with these next few years, as I’ve already gone in depth about them previously on this blog.

• 2006: Moved to Los Angeles. Started Safe Patrol with Seb and Art Paz. Sebastian and I share songwriting duties, he does almost all the singing. We play one excellent show and promptly go on hiatus. I start working long hours at an awesome nonprofit and decide to put down music for a while.
• 2007: I move to the Bay Area for my job, work harder than I ever have in my life, have an incredible number of personal trials through the course of it, and by the end of it know that I’m not a child anymore.
• 2008: I leave my job, despite a great deal of time and emotional energy invested, because I want to get back to music. I take a less crazy nonprofit job. I write a small handful of songs, and I’m relieved that I haven’t lost the ability to do so; in fact, I’m pretty sure they’re the best songs I’ve ever written. I record my solo acoustic demo, Music From And Inspired By Our Doomed Love Affair, and begin to play open mics.

And of course I just summarized 2009 in depth a little while ago. Now: some resolutions for the year. Hopefully making these public will help me to be faithful to them.

1. To write twenty songs this year.
2. To play shows in every month of the year.
3. To do my first mini-tour.
4. To record an album with the Radical Folksonomy.
5. To improve as a musician; especially to learn how to sing harmonies real nice.
6. Most importantly: only to deepen my dedication to creating and sharing my music.

So there it is. Happy New Year, everyone. Happy New Decade. There was some bullshit going on in the world, to be sure, but for me it also paints a clear picture of increasingly pushing towards what I need to be doing. May this be the best fucking year of my and your life/lives.

I’ve been an atheist for almost all my life. At least since fourth grade I have positively disbelieved in any god, and I can’t recall any time when I’ve positively believed in one. My reasons for my beliefs can be summarized no more eloquently than by Greta Christina, whose terrific blog I’ve gotten lost on for hours, crying my secular electronic amen. There’s definitely more than one post I could write on this topic; we’ll see how far I get today. I don’t particularly want to spark a debate here about god or atheism, because in truth I’m pretty over it (though I suppose if you really just feel like you have to, and you were kind enough to read my blog in the first place, then do what you feel).

I suppose I should begin by relating my notions, in brief:

1. Religion’s explanations for why the universe is the way it is are completely unsatisfactory to me.
2. Human motives for inventing religion seem all too clear.
3. Religion’s own evidence for its own veracity is dubious (to put it charitably) and only seems to reinforce point #2.
4. There are indeed inexplicable phenomena in our world and our human experience that seem to hint at something supernatural or divine, but
   • We don’t need to invent explanations for what we don’t yet and might never understand; wonder and inquisitiveness are adequate and satisfying responses;
   • also, see point #1;
   • these phenomena are often documented only through intense, and highly subjective, personal experience. This does not invalidate the account outright, but many equally credible individuals can have mutually contradictory personal experiences. Thus, I contend that personal experiences, however intense, can only reveal personal truth, not universal truth. To contend that one’s own revelation is more profound than someone else’s is downright solipsistic.
5. Most importantly, I believe (as Adam once put it in conversation) that religion has had, and continues to have, a net negative effect on the world.

There are also a number of ways in which I stray from a sort of atheist orthodoxy that exists. For one thing, I do see my atheism as a belief and therefore fallible. This isn’t me wavering, it’s me being intellectual humble, recognizing the limits of my own reason and senses but still feeling quite comfortable drawing a rational conclusion. For another, I do not join in the cry for “the end of faith”, which strikes me as foolishly absolute. A majority of the world’s population continues to believe in some sort of god, even after five hundred years of scientific thought. While I believe this has led more people to embrace atheism bravely, and hope this will continue, I’m not about to rely on winning over believers to solve all our problems stemming from religion, any more than I would advocate abstinence-only sex ed for teens, or ‘defeating evil‘ as a foreign policy.

What strikes me as more realistic, civil and generally more effective is to forge natural alliances with progressive voices in communities of faith, so that they might be empowered to transform their institutions into ones that are less oppressive, divisive, exclusionary and/or destructive. My progressive Christian friend Tom Ryberg argued quite persuasively that he didn’t feel that his ilk should concede the entirety of Christian tradition and legacy to its ugliest elements, which I found very valid; I felt similarly about this country when Bush was in office.

Just as Point #5 above is the most important guiding principle in my own search for truth, it’s also critical to my politics in regards to believers and other atheists. I am an opponent of religion because of the harm it’s caused, which I believe (not without sadness) outweighs the positive effects (while still being grateful for those cases). But aside from preventing or relieving suffering and serving justice, I really couldn’t care less what you believe about the universe. This will come back when I write about the intersection of atheism activism and anti-Muslim/anti-Arab racism and oppression.

But I think I’m about done for the day. Eventually I’m going to write something about the role of god and religion in songwriting (tying this whole discourse into this blog’s theme a little better); how and why I still enjoy religious art and music; the false dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural; and the intersection of atheism activism and anti-Muslim/anti-Arab racism and oppression.

My first non-music related blog post! That was kind of fun.

I’ve put this post off long enough. My dear sweet friend Erica sent out a lovely retrospective of her year in creative and personal milestones and I’ve been inspired to do the same. As I’ve written previously, this has been a really important year for me creatively. While I might never be quite satisfied just where I’m at, I think it’s worth looking back at what was accomplished in 2009, if only to thank properly those who supported me in my pursuits.

1. Established myself as a regular on the open mic circuit at the Hotel Utah, the Starry Plough, Bazaar Cafe, Beckett’s and others.
2. Played my first show in nearly three years at Bazaar Cafe in April.
3. Played ten shows at seven different venues in the Bay Area.
4. Authored eight songs, an average of one every month and a half; decent, but I’m sure I can crank out even more if I make the time for it. I’ve also got two songs very nearly done, one of which I’m determined to finish before the year is through.
5. Made connections to so many awesome other songwriter performers, including but certainly not limited to Erica, Adam Balbo, Scotch and Bones, Mr. Andrew and lots of others. I am thrilled and humbled to have you guys as my peers.
6. Random songwriting milestones: my first country song, my first song with timed obsolescence (a la “1999” and “Disco 2000”).
7. Against all sounder logic, left my awesome nonprofit job to make time and emotional space for music.
8. Did a lot of trial and error with trying to form a band with random folks, then
9. Finally managed to put together a freaking fantastic band, The Radical Folksonomy. So worth the wait.

And the great thing is, as wonderful as this year was, I know that 2010 is going to blow it away. Here’s what I think we can reasonably look forward to:

1. Me and the Radical Folksonomy FEATURING at the Hotel Utah open mic on January 4. What a way to kick off the year!
2. TONS of performances. Already four shows scheduled for January!
3. The Radical Folksonomy and I just getting better and better, awesomer and awesomer,
4. then probably recording an awesome full-length album,
5. and then PROBABLY doing a mini-tour of the Northwest this summer. Shhh, it’s not official yet. But we’re trying to make this shit happen.

So, to everyone who’s helped me push forward this year, especially my partner, other friends (including one person whom I’m not talking to right now but who nonetheless gave me a lot of support and deserves credit), all the awesome heads on the Bay Area scene: thank you. I can’t wait to share this next year with you all.

Much love,

Shareef Ali

Hello folks,

I’m back after a few weeks absence. I had an excuse: first a trip up to Portland (my first) to visit Cyrus (as per our challenge, which I handily lost), then to Mexico to spend Thanksgiving with the fam. A good time to evaluate what my goals are with this blog. I think the original charter to do deep analyses of magic moments in songs or songwriting phenomena was a nice idea, and something I’d like to still do from time to time, but it got to be a little challenging to generate an entire entry’s worth of commentary on a few seconds of song. What might make more sense for me is to treat this blog as sort of a diary/memoir. I think I’m at a unique point in my musical life that I’ll be glad for a chronicle of years later (however my ambitions fare), and having it be public provides a definite incentive to stick with it the way I’ve seldom been able to with journals. Maybe it sounds a tad pretentious to label this a memoir. But whatever meager morsels of wisdom I have are hard-won, and by sharing I hope to get as much bang for the buck out of them as possible. And, even though I have a pretty acute memory, I don’t trust that I’ll be able to tell my story as well or accurately at an older age.

Anyway, I guess that’s it for now, but I’ll let you know some of my upcoming post topics include the roles of war and religion in songwriting, as well as a chronological history of my major songwriting influences.

Thanks to all of you for reading this. It’s a privilege for me.

Shareef

The sore throat/lost voice I developed immediately after the show Wednesday has yet to abate, so I’ve been taking it easy, drinking lots of throat coat tea and peeing clear. I had the thought that I might try to finish a song I’d been sitting on for a few weeks, then record and post it here–it would be nice if I could harness the compulsory writing schedule here to increase my artistic output–but found it hard to write without singing the parts aloud. So instead I decided to work on my website, which right now is kind of a mess (enough that I don’t really feel the need to link to it here, though of course it can be found). See, I have this urge do-it-myself with a lot of artistic things, sometimes gaining a greater sense of control but sacrificing overall quality, such as my determination to record my own album in 2004.

Setting aside my reasons for coding my own website by hand, there’s one major element in my work that I’ve long wrestled with whether I should do it myself or outsource it to someone with more ability and stick to what I’m best at. I’m talking about my singing, which since at least middle school is something I’ve always done really loudly and exuberantly. I figured out pretty quick that my voice was not naturally strong or particularly pleasant, and though I was always driven to sing for the joy of it, I often felt that I needed to belt in an deliberately obnoxious manner so that it would fit with my general spazzy adolescent persona (which, for those of you who didn’t know me then, was just on a whole ‘nother level from the way I act now) and so that I could somewhat own my bad singing and feel less embarrassed that I was rubbish at something I enjoyed so much.

I sang a wimpy lead in my high school band Clockwork, and bless their hearts, they literally and figuratively stood behind me. Things started to get better once I stopped trying to sing like Thom Yorke, which was simply never going to happen. But even after having obtained a degree in music, singing well is still a challenge for me, especially in terms of pitch accuracy; I sometimes feel like a sharpshooter with decent eyesight but shaky hands.

As a life philosophy, I believe, as Amanda Palmer does, that everyone who can speak should also sing, for themselves and for the world. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that I should be the performer, the principal vehicle for my songs and my words to reach the people who might need to hear them. Certainly there are those who have gotten away with singing their own material, even if they weren’t the best man for the job–Bob Dylan and Conor Oberst spring immediately to mind–and there are also those who find it impossible to listen to these unimpeachable songwriters for that very reason. Bringing us to the far larger dilemma of how much an artist should alter their work to reach a greater audience, and at what point do they stop being true to themselves.

I’ve made the decision to continue singing my own songs, for the time being at least, for a few reasons. Firstly, I haven’t found anyone I would rather handle them. I’ve learned through my experiments over the last year with different musicians that simply because someone may be technically gifted doesn’t mean that they’re the right person to execute your work, and even if I feel like I owe it to my art to find the best people to present it, I also owe it to myself to not give it over to the wrong person. Much of my work is also deeply personal, whether by calling out six people I’ve been romantically linked to by name, or by relating to Barack Obama because of our shared experience of having lost our immigrant father at a young age. I also just have to follow my gut instinct about what I appreciate as a listener. On Conor Oberst (to whom I get compared a lot, for better or worse) and the Mystic Valley Band’s record Outer South, nearly half the songs are penned and sung by other members of the band, and I don’t think there’s really a question as to who’s the least competent vocalist in the group; it’s clearly Conor himself. Yet for the life of me I wouldn’t want to hear any of those other dudes singing his songs.