SubscribeStar Saturday: International Relations

19 March 202219 March 2022 The Portly Politico2 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive. To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more. For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Continuing somewhat on last Saturday’s post, I’ve been thinking more about the war in Ukraine this week, specifically pondering how surreal it all seems. Obviously, it’s quite real for the people in the Ukraine and Russia, as well as the various volunteers from around the globe who have enlisted to fight on behalf of the Ukraine.

But part of the surrealism—at least for those of us, like yours portly, who are swaddled in luxurious comfort here in the United States—is that we didn’t have to worry about international relations and foreign policy in any immediate way for at least four years. At any rate, during the Trump administration, foreign policy largely receded from the national consciousness as a major concern.

Sure, there was the constant banging-on about “Russian collusion” and interfering in the Ukraine, and early hysterical rumors of nuclear war with North Korea. But President Trump silenced the Norks, the Russkies, and even, to some extent, the ChiComs. I was dismayed, initially, by the rocket launch in Syria early in Trump’s administration, but in retrospect it seems like that was a convincing show of force to the Russians (who have all sorts of interests in Syria).

After that—and after dropping some big ol’ bombs in Afghanistan, etc.—foreign policy seemed like an afterthought. For years that had dominated headlines and—given my own interest in the topic—my mental conception of America’s role in the world.

Perhaps one of the great overlooked achievements of the Trump administration is that it achieved—however fleetingly—a semblance of global order and peace, so much that we didn’t have to think about foreign policy and international relations in any deep, consistent way for a few years. I have no doubt that a second Trump term would not have seen the current escalation in the Ukraine.

A bold claim, but I think it’s accurate. Regardless, the focus of this post is on that brief moment when the woes of the rest of the world seemed distant, and the United States could focus instead on its own domestic woes (of which there are many). Now that that moment—gauzy and illusory as it turned out to be—has passed, we may be facing some profoundly existential questions about the future of the global order.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: War Pigs

12 March 202215 March 2022 The Portly Politico2 Comments

My music students have been attempting to learn Black Sabbath’s classic anti-war song “War Pigs.” To be clear, this isn’t an example of a radical teacher attempting to indoctrinate his students with anti-war propaganda—it’s just a really rockin’ song (and features a killer, groovy introduction in 6/8 time, before transitioning to a brisk, sludgy 4/4). We were working on the tune before Russia invaded the Ukraine, and before there were really even murmurs that this quixotic invasion might happen.

Also, I am not reflexively anti-war. My instincts are to abhor war (which would have been news to my teenaged self, who still believed war was a glorious test of courage and mettle—it can be, but it’s much more complicated than that two-dimensional, chivalric notion I harbored as a doughy teen), but war is inevitable. The Bible prophesies about “wars and rumors of war,” and not all war is inherently bad.

It’s not all inherently good, either—sometimes war is just that—war.

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Yet Another Delayed SubscribeStar Saturday

12 March 202212 March 2022 The Portly Politico9 Comments

My sincerest apologies to subscribers: yet again, I am running late with posting today’s edition of SubscribeStar Saturday. My excuse, as always, is general busyness. Indeed, I am currently proctoring the SAT to a roomful of thirty-seven sleepy, slightly soggy teenagers (we had heavy rains this morning).

That said, I’ll be returning to more serious fare with today’s post, which will probably go up this afternoon. I’m going to talk about the war in the Ukraine. I’ll be honest: I don’t know much about it, at least not nearly as much as I should. But I do think there’s far more nuance to the situation than the knee-jerk media portrays.

Here’s the short preview: we should stay out of it.

More coming soon!

—TPP

SubscribeStar Saturday: Rapid-Fire Recording

5 March 20225 March 2022 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Yesterday I released my collection of short miniatures, Péchés d’âge moyen. It’s been getting a lot of plays on Bandcamp thanks to support from The Dragon Common Room and The Sandwhich Press, both chats/channels that I follow and participate in on Telegram (if you use Telegram, you should join/follow both; here are links: DCR; TSP).

I’d hoped that in the few weeks I had between announcing the project and releasing it I’d be able to set up a more sophisticated recording rig. Instead, I recorded the twelve tracks in a white heat, using my iPhone SE’s voice memo app, and placing the phone on the old Baldwin Acrosonic piano in my school’s Music Room.

These made for less-than-ideal recording conditions, but in listening back to the album, it worked better than I thought.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Péchés d’âge moyen Sneak Peak

26 February 202226 February 2022 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

This weekend’s edition of SubscribeStar Saturday will be a bit of a video and document dump, as I’m giving subscribers a sneak peek of my collection of piano miniatures, Péchés d’âge moyen. I’m hoping to have the whole collection available by this Friday, 4 March 2022 on Bandcamp, but there are some technical considerations I need to work out first—namely, how to get a good quality recording of each piece, rather than videos taken on my phone at school while kids shoot hoops outside of the Music Room (which, sadly, opens onto the gym).

Of course, I may just end up extracting the audio from the attached MP4s and call it a day—ha!

Regardless, today I’m uploading every video I’ve recorded so far, as well as every manuscript of the pieces I’ve put together so far. I’ll also briefly discuss my composing method, and how it’s changed slightly over the course of the project.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Recording Contest Winner EP

19 February 202218 February 2022 The Portly Politico5 Comments

For the past six weeks, I’ve been writing about the six tracks from my 2015 release Contest Winner EP, the only recording of my original songs I’ve ever released. I’ve released several other albums and singles, but I’ve written a lot of other songs that I have not recorded. Indeed, I plan on doing some simple cellphone videos of some of those unreleased tunes for subscribers in the coming weeks.

One reason I have not written another album is because I hit a songwriting drought somewhere around 2015. Sitting down and writing songs is difficult and time-consuming, and while I love it, my schedule grew increasingly hectic around that time. I began teaching very late nights at a local technical college (I could only keep it up for a year—even I can’t work that much), and the Artsville Songwriting Competition, which gave me the incentive to write regularly, folded.

Still, I have managed to write a few more tunes in the intervening years—maybe not enough for a proper album, but certainly enough for another EP. But that leads to the other reason I have not released a second album: the recording process is tedious and expensive.

It is also super fun, despite the long hours and late nights in the studio.

Today, I’m going to give a brief overview of the recording process, way back in 2014 (yep, it took me over a year before I finally released the album).

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Contest Winner

12 February 20229 February 2022 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Well, here we are—the final installment of Behind the Songs. I’m wrapping up this extended, self-indulgent walk through my debut EP, Contest Winner EP with the final and title track, “Contest Winner.”

“Contest Winner” is probably the first track I wrote for the EP, long before I ever conceived of releasing an album or EP of my own. If I’m not mistaken, it dates back to 2012, so it’s ten-years old this year.

I wrote the song for my very first songwriting contest, figuring that I might as well as be confident.

It did not win the contest, but it did win the People’s Choice Award. And it spawned an era of artistic inspiration—and a lot of songs.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Behind the Songs: Funeral Pyre

5 February 20225 February 2022 The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Apologies to readers for the slight delay with today’s post. It was a grueling but productive week, and after teaching eighteen lessons in five days to seventeen students (and it would have been twenty lessons and nineteen students, were it not for The Virus), I fell asleep a little before 8 PM last night, and slept until around 7 AM this morning.

Today’s post is the penultimate in my Behind the Songs miniseries. I’ve been going through the stories behind each of the six songs on my debut EP, Contest Winner EP. With “Funeral Pyre,” the fifth track, we’re nearly through the entire release!

I often conceive of “Funeral Pyre” as a companion piece to “Ghostly,” which I covered in detail last week. Both are unusual songs, and it’s pretty easy to link ghosts and funerals thematically.

I thought I’d written “Funeral Pyre” last among all the songs on the EP, but it appears that I wrote it roughly three weeks before “Ghostly.” Both tunes date to January 2014—6 January 2014 for “Funeral Pyre,” and 30 January 2014 for “Ghostly,” according to the original lead sheets.

Regardless, the two songs share some similarities. Besides the thematic similarity, both are fairly dark in tone compared to the other songs on the EP. They also were late additions: originally, I think I was just going to record “Hipster Girl Next Door,” “Greek Fair,” “By the Light of the Laptop Screen,” and “Contest Winner,” and release a single.

But a gnarly ice storm meant that my recording session was delayed, and I wrote “Funeral Pyre” while sitting at home in my tiny apartment in Florence, South Carolina, while the world was covered in ice. I was supposed to go that night to start recording the record, but the foul weather meant a postponement, which allowed time to write the song and, it seems, “Ghostly.”

One other similarity: “Funeral Pyre” and “Ghostly” are the songs from the record I play live the least. “Ghostly” does enjoy a lot of playtime during the spooky season, but for many years, I neglected “Funeral Pyre” in my live sets.

As we’ll see, I now think that was a mistake.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Behind the Songs: Ghostly

29 January 202228 January 2022 The Portly Politico6 Comments

Today marks the fourth installment of the six-part Behind the Songs miniseries for SubscribeStar Saturday. In this series, I’m going to reveal the stories behind each of the six songs on my debut EP, Contest Winner EP. I’ll go track-by-track, in order, detailing the inspirations behind these songs.

This week’s tune, “Ghostly,” is perhaps the most unusual track on the record. That’s by design. I wanted to write a song in 3/4 time with a kind of creepy carnival feel. I also wanted to write it in C minor, as I was not very familiar with the key, but it was similar enough to C major that I could shift into familiar territory (as I learned just this week, classical composers considered C minor to be particularly unstable and tumultuous, and Beethoven reserved it for his stormiest, most emotional works; I wish I could claim I knew that at the time, but it’s fitting for this song).

Needless to say, “Ghostly” remains the weirdest song I’ve ever written. For that reason and others, I love it.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Behind the Songs: By the Light of the Laptop Screen

22 January 202221 January 2022 The Portly Politico4 Comments

Rest in Peace to Marvin Lee Aday, better known as Meat Loaf, who passed away Friday at the age of 74. I’ll be writing a full obituary about Loaf next week, but I wanted to take a moment to remember his legacy here. Few musicians have had a greater impact on my vocal and composition than Meat Loaf and his frequent collaborator, songwriter Jim Steinman. In a series about songwriting, it seemed fitting to acknowledge his influence. Indeed, today’s song, “By the Light of the Laptop Screen,” owes much to the rock ‘n’ roll-meets-Broadway style of Loaf/Steinman.

Today marks the third installment of the six-part Behind the Songs miniseries for SubscribeStar Saturday. In this series, I’m going to reveal the stories behind each of the six songs on my debut EP, Contest Winner EP. I’ll go track-by-track, in order, detailing the inspirations behind these songs.

This week’s tune, “By the Light of the Laptop Screen,” is something of a companion to “Hipster Girl Next Door.” The two songs are part of what I call my “two-part coffee shop trilogy” (I wrote another song, “Sweet Little Ukulele Player,” that was something of a third part, but I seldom play it, and I don’t think it rises to the level of the other two tunes).

Like “Hipster Girl Next Door” and “Greek Fair,” “By the Light of the Laptop Screen” has becoming something of a fan favorite. A graduating senior used it (to my delight and, given the lyrics, my chagrin) to accompany his graduation slideshow—while receiving his high school diploma!

There’s also been rich speculation about who this song is about. Today, I reveal all.

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The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

Category: SubscribeStar Saturday

Yet Another Delayed SubscribeStar Saturday