HERMITOLOGY
My name is Riley, and I play drums and write music for a band called Thrice.
This is where I ramble about music, sports, food, books, interwebbery, and whatever else I feel like sharing. I apologize in advance.
In addition to my ramblings here, I write a piece for OC Weekly called "3hree Things" that runs every Tuesday, and I'm also writing over at Flip Collective on occasion.
I'm the co-founder of a baseball-specific twitter feed and blog with my friend Ian, called Productive Outs.
And last, but not least, I have a bandcamp page and a soundcloud page that I'll be posting my own music and remixes on every once in a while.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions presented on this blog are mine, and do not reflect the position or views of the band as a whole.
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7 posts tagged inspiration
Random Start: Lagwagon, “Never Stops”
Joey Cape’s voice is one of my favorites in punk rock, and hearing it takes me straight back to the mid-nineties, commuting to college by day, and trying (and failing) to play along to songs on Trashed and Hoss by night. I always made a point to catch Lagwagon whenever they played locally, and going to those shows was a huge influence on my desire to make music and be in a touring band. They’ll always be one of my favorites.
Buy Blaze here.
Random Start: Cave In, “In The Stream Of Commerce”
Eleven years ago, Cave In’s Jupiter changed the way I listened to, thought about, and wrote and performed music. It’s been a constant course of inspiration ever since. It’s just an absolutely timeless record and total life-changer for me.
If you don’t own this record, PLEASE FIX THAT IMMEDIATELY.
This Steve Jobs commencement speech is awfully inspiring and well worth fifteen minutes of your time. It hits home especially hard for me in the final section about life and death because of what my family went through with my father. I’m embarrassed that this has been floating around the internet for years and it took Jobs’ death for me to actually hear it. The man left an indelible mark on my life with his technology, and sure as hell made the lives of many a musician a whole lot easier both in the studio and on the road.
Random Start: Mogwai, “Local Authority”
Mogwai is so damn good, it’s frustrating. They’ve been a pretty huge influence on the a good deal of the music I’ve written over the past few years, but more specifically I’ve noticed that their influence has been seeping into a lot of the writing I’ve done on my own of late. According to my Last.fm stats (which are admittedly a bit skewed), they’re the band I’ve listened to the most this year, which makes sense I guess.
I’m assuming you own one, some, or all Mogwai’s records.
If you don’t, you need to fix that immediately.
“The Artifact and Living” by Michael Andrews (Original Soundtrack from Donnie Darko)
from Wikipedia (emphasis, mine):
Andrews considers himself primarily a guitar player, but Kelly told him he didn’t want any guitar in the movie. So, Andrews taught himself to play piano. It’s part of the reason that the score is, as Andrews describes, so simple. “The film was pretty low budget so my portion of the money was pretty thin. I couldn’t hire anyone, it was just me. I played everything; piano, mellotron, mini marimba, xylophone, ukulele, organ. I also brought in two female vocalists Sam Shelton and Tori Haberman.” “In a way,” he says, “YOUR FAULTS BECOME YOUR TRADEMARK.”
As someone with little-to-no knowledge of music theory, who’s taken a only a handful of drum lessons, and someone who writes music on a variety of instruments without any formal training on them, the excerpt above not only rings incredibly true, but has been and will continue to be an inspiration.
Andrews’ compositions for this film score have been almost as influential in my writing as any rock band I’ve ever listened to or admired, consciously or subconsciously.
Highly recommended listening.
