Serenity Gardens (08.13.18)

Rocking Serenity is the best thing that can happen on a Monday night. Photo by Thea Dee.

It was Friday night of last week, just after I'd wrapped up the work week, when Bunny pinged me on our secret They Stole My Crayon hotline. Here's what he wrote.

"Would you homies be interested in doing some ICS-like musical expulsion activities on an upcoming weekend or two, from the comforts of our respective home studios? I feel like I could use an ICS kick-in-the-pants lately."

This requires some explanation. "ICS" stands for Immersion Composition Society. It's something that Bunny was involved with for years and years, and it's a brilliant idea that started up in Northern California. Take a group of songwriters and have them force themselves to write a big batch of songs in a short time frame. Frankly, I'm not very good at it; as soon as I stumble onto some kind of musical idea, it's very hard for me not to want to fully flesh it out. The entire point of an ICS exercise is the opposite of that... to knock out a ton of brand new tunes without a bunch of editing. The actual goal is 20 songs in a 12-hour period per the original ICS idea, but there are really no specific rules.

Back to the present. I had a few boring plans for the weekend involving household chores, but those could be pushed back. I agreed to jump in and do some ICS-style writing the following day. Bunny and I agreed to shoot for 10 songs in a roughly 6-hour period. One of the aspects of an ICS exercise is to not have any preconceived ideas, so while I have other musical themes I'd been working on, I didn't turn to any of them, and just dove in fresh on Saturday morning. Spending a day creating music is a rare luxury for me, and I found I was really enjoying the process. Did I get to 10 songs? Nope. Due to the aforementioned habit of getting sucked too deeply into each song to move on to the next, I did exactly half that... but I did manage to do five songs over the course of a half day, which is pretty great. Bunny, in his usual insanely creative way, did do 10, and several of his have the potential to be really great tunes that will likely end up as TSMC songs. I should note that a few songs off our last album did originate from Bunny's ICS sessions. These writing activities are totally worthwhile.

What I Wrote
Out of my five songs, one of them might end up being good stuff for The Crayon. But there were two of them that I felt were worthy of performance at my show on Monday night at Serenity Gardens in Second Life. They were simple and acoustic based, but apart from those similarities are as different as could be. The first is called "Washed Away", and is about the somewhat depressing but realistic idea that long after the current GOP administration is gone, the actions they took will leave their mark on the world and will be hard to erase in some cases. Listen to the rough demo below.



The second song, "Pickles", is probably the fastest song I ever created in my life, and is about the cat who lives next door. It's pretty self-explanatory and very silly. The entire song, from conception to creating the music and lyrics to the recording you hear below, happened in about 20 minutes.



In case you want to hear Bunny's impressive output of ten songs -- and probably the better way to take advantage of the ICS concept -- here they are.



Please keep in mind that at least in the case of my tunes, these are just demos; very little work went into making them sound particularly good. As music creators, just capturing the idea is the most important aspect at this stage. All the refinements will happen later, if and when a song is recorded "for real".

More from the Show
Up until last night, for my bi-weekly Monday night shows at Serenity, I had been the opening act of the evening for over a year. It was rather nice last night to see that Ilsa had changed up the schedule and I had a singer named Bill473 playing before me at the 5PM slot. Seems like a good guy, and it was cool having a built-in crowd at the venue from the start.

In addition to debuting "Washed Away" and "Pickles" at the show, I also finally covered a Nick Drake song that I'd been meaning to do for a long time. I dedicated "One of These Things First" to my friend and Zakster fan Aurelie Chenaux, since she became a huge ND fan after I introduced her to his music. Since Kat was still at work, several of my Zaksters filled in by sending me some great photos that you see here on this blog, so extra thanks to them.

Playing live music while the sun sets in the virtual world and the real one. Photo by Aurelie Chenaux.

Probably playing "Pickles". Photo by Diana Renoir.

"Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow." Photo by Thea Dee.

I can honestly say I've never had a bad show at Serenity Gardens. Photo by Thea Dee.

Sun's going down, happiness level is going up. Win-win. Photo by Tyche Szondi.

Serenity Gardens set list...
Free Man in Paris (Joni Mitchell)
Six Underground (Sneaker Pimps)
*Pickles (Zak Claxton)
Mother (Pink Floyd)
*One of These Things First (Nick Drake)
On A Plain (Nirvana)
Low (Cracker)
The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie)
*Washed Away (Zak Claxton)
Thanks Anyway (Zak Claxton)
Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)
A Day in the Life (Beatles)
Serenity End of Show Improv (Zak Claxton)

*Indicates the first time I've performed this song in SL.

Giant thanks to all who came out to the show, and extra special thanks to the following who helped support it!
dls Falconer, Tyche Szondi, Asimia Heron, go2smoky Resident, Aurelie Chenaux, TwizidxxKitty Resident, Diana Renoir, my excellent manager Maali Beck, and the fabulous team at Serenity Gardens, Tilly Rose and Ilsa Wilde.