Sound Triggered Brain

Coheed and Cambria's In keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3. from In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3

This Song is from Coheed and Cambria's second album, it released during the summer of my eighth grade year. I'd been listening to them a lot when the were still sort of unknown.

I remember my friend Derek had bought the CD and he showed me this song one day while we played badmittin. (Don't judge me, it's a sweet game.) It was the most awesome game of badmittin I had ever played. He had two brand new rackets, a black one and a gun metal one. Naturally I chose gun metal. We had been playing Badmittin in gym class for a while so I was used to the feel, but this racket was different, it was lighter but felt more stable all the while, It looked as though it were very well made, It had a brown leather handle which felt good in my hands.

When we started playing to the music the game seemed to have fallowed it. It was very slow at first and quite relaxed but then morphed into a very competitive almost war like game. And much like the song, the game became very intense. Spikes, lofters , side arms, and speeders. The game eventually ended and everything relaxed again. Derek and I spent most of that summer hanging out together. He and I remain best friends to this day. Every time I hear this song I think of Derek, and the times we had that summer.




Tool's Lateralus from Lateralus

I've liked Tool since I can remember, and this song to me is the pinnacle of their glory. Each of their albums embody a different emotion. From Disgusted, Humorous, Pessimistic, Optimistic, and Dogmatic. This is the Optimistic Album.

When I first started listening to Tool this was their most recent album, so this song was probably the first of Tool's work that I had heard, I've always been very big into poetry as well as music since I am a classical musician as well as a contemporary one. When I first started listening to Tool I loved the lyrics, they really spoke to me with meanings that were really pertinent to my life. Particularly the lyric "Over thinking, over analyzing separate the body from the mind." I liked Tool for a long time and then sort of fell away from them. I have revisited them recently and have developed a new love for them in a new way.

Through my musical training In theory and technique I've come to love the way this song lives it's message. it starts as one melody, almost as though a heartbeat, then it begins to mature rapidly through adding different instrumentation and the enhancement of vocal tone. It continues to spiral upward and mature through its climax and then falls out. The lyrics do the same. they go from "black and white are all I see in my infancy, red and yellow then came to be;" to "Spiral out, keep going, spiral out, keep going."

As my skill in music had evolved so had the complexity of the song that embodies evolution. It had evolved into a new song just as I had evolved.



Thursday's Steps Ascending from War All the Time.

Though I'm not a big fan of this type of music I've always loved this band, for as long as I've had a CD player I've listened to their music. I don't know where I first heard them. But they're an "Emo," band from New Jersey. The song is about trying to say goodbye to someone you've lost, particularly to guns.

DISCLAIMER: The event that inspired this writing is true and should not be looked upon with any pity, view it simply as a writing.

April 15th 1997 my father committed suicide by shooting himself through the his left side into his heart. He was an excellent father, attorney, and a hard worker.

I inherited the gun that my father committed suicide with. It's a Ruger KP90, it's aluminum and is mostly coated in polished chrome, it fires a .45 caliber round and has an eight round clip. I'm extremely accurate with it and it's still my favorite gun to shoot, however Ironic, morbid, or strange it may be. (I recognize that that is the case, I just don't think about it.) This gun is the only possession that I have that has a memory tied to my father. Every time I touch It I think of him.

This song, about a boy that was shot has lyrics that really match up with how I feel about my father as well as the gun. "Freeze the frame between the gunshot and the hole it makes, the spinning bullet hangs in the middle. There's no way to stop it, it will surely hit the mark." And the repeated use of the words "out of reach." This song always reminds my of my father, every time I listen to it, as well as the gun that reminds me in turn of my father.

Most of all when I hear this song, or clutch that Ruger, I think of the way that my fathers suicide impacted me positively. I would be a very different person today if he hadn't.

Rest in Peace John Arthur Rodenburg.



Modest Mouse's Bankrupt on Selling from The Lonesome Crowded West.

This Song was the very first song I ever learned how to play on the guitar. Though the message is the same as a lot of songs, which is that being genuine is the way to be happy. thats not why I love the song.

My brother is the spitting image of my father he begins to look more and more like him each year. He's about 22 now, an athletically built ectomorph with big lips and a smile just like mine. He's got unmatched dexterity, and is incredibly logical and intelligent. Though he's a sad fellow, because he lacks emotional connection. He and I have been great friends, rivals, and even enemies since we've been around. It sort of fluctuates between the three. After my father had died I looked up to Zach as well as other older males in my life as sorts of father figures as children often do. He played this song all the time, I never got tired of hearing it. I hadn't even heard the real song, only my brother play/singing it. I thought he wrote it.

I had him teach me this song one day and now I play it all the time, I even wrote a harmony part to it so that we can sing/play it at the same time (and we have at a few public occasions.) I have no idea what it means to him. But to me this song is all about him. Intelligently written, rough around the edges and melancholy as hell.



Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees from The Bends.

Radiohead has been one of my favorite artists since I was in seventh grade. This song was the very first song I ever performed at a coffee house in my hometown of Council Bluffs Iowa. I can still remember how clammy and cold my hands were clutching my John Lennon 1965 Casino Epiphone. It wasn't actually my guitar, but my uncle Aaron's guitar that he had let me barrow long term to learn how to play. It had a very sweet sound, it resonated very well, almost as well as any acoustic guitar. Though it did have an amp outlet, which I jacked into and played often.

Playing this song is really coincidental at this time because being that this song is about falling in love with an inanimate object or something unreal. In this case I created music that I love, and subsequently developed feelings for making music, and therefor my guitar.



The Mars Volta's Inertiatic ESP off of De-Loused in the Comatorium

I heard this song at first at the beginning of my Junior year I always thought that this song seemed to bring about confusion almost as a by product of listening to it.

This song bombards your senses with synth, bass, guitar, drums, and enhanced voice. Each bombarding or destroying your senses to the point where you can no longer dissect the music. The synth both plays re-enforcing chords, as well as creating another guitar part at times. The bass, plays a steady chord re-enforcement to the beat of the drums. The Drums go nuts during this song whenever the crazy chorus is raging the drums accent and accompany the insanity through use of time in 3, and syncopated patterns. The guitar manages to create an incredibly confusing counter melody to the warped vocal line that suggests confusion through it's lyrics. "Now I'm lo-host, now I'm lo-ha-ha-ha-host."

Many things in my life during the time I listened to this song were confusing, school, relationships, time, job, and especially home. This song is meant to be confusing and resembles quite well all of the different aspects of confusion that a person can experience just through audio perception. This mirrors quite well all of the forms of confusion a person can experience about any given subject, or multiple subjects.



Deftones' My Own Summer off of Around the Fur

This Song by the Deftones was the closing song for the band I was a part of my senior year of high school. I had been a fan of the Deftones for a short time before we played it, since then I've grown to really love them.

This song suggests a lot of power and confidence. A dethroning of an oppressive power. The words "Cloud come shove the sun aside," suggests a sort of desire to combat the oppression of whatever the sun represents, all the while the main riff has been emboldened from single notes into chords. Then during the bridge the song seems to evolve into a serene or glass-like surface, as though all is right.

Once I performed this song I felt as though power had been transfered to me from some other place I became supremely confident in my abilities as well as who I was every time I sang it. And with startling speed, developed a reputation as being confident, and calculated. I had destroyed the socially inept me and created one that had a reputation to precede it in that setting.



Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek off of Speak for Yourself.

This song was first shown to me by my girlfriend whom I've been with for four and a half years. She's a huge fan of European music, and Imogen Heap is a European superstar.

My girlfriend's name is Kristin, and like this song she's a very subtle person. She's very short and petite. She has a more round face with green eyes, mahogany hair and very pale skin. She manages to bring out the best in me always. Whenever I need to make a decision and I go against what she suggests it always turns out to bite me, when I listen to her things turn out right.

This song always reminds me of Kristin in that, like her it suggests a deeper understanding of things in life. This song refers to unveiling lies and other misleading things. It's harmonies are very tight and smooth in their progression, while building to a point of release which resembles a sudden clarity and understanding. All in all it resembles Kristin very much.