Still Alive; New Song, "Rubberized Cigarettes"

So I live in Hawaii now. I don't know why. Well, yeah I do. 'Cause my wife always wanted to live here and it's a good place for her and my son's cold-induced asthma. But to me it's a culture shock moving here. I lived in Japan for 5 years, which obviously took some getting used to, but at least there you'd expect culture shock, so it felt normal, whereas in Hawaii, you don't expect it as much since you're still in America and people still speak English (for the most part).

Anyway, I got a part-time (substitute) gig with the Royal Hawaiian Band, the country's only municipally-funded symphonic band, but full-time work is hard to come by. I'm not highly employable to begin with, and with the economy as bad as it is and having no connections here, it's even worse for me. We'll see how long we can hold out on our savings. Should be a fun ride! I also met some people to play in a reggae/rocksteady/trojan skinhead reggae band or whatever the fuck they call it. It's all basically the same to me--not a whole lot of rhythmic or harmonic variation in the material--,but at least it gives me the chance to get into a rehearsal studio and blow my guts out after being afraid to play loudly here at home 'cause of this douchebag Japanese neighbor who complains when I play. Well, no, let me be more specific: he came over to complain once that I was playing jazz. Oooh! No, not jazz! Never mind the fact that I don't really play jazz in any conventional sense very much (partly 'cause I'm not good at it). I was less concerned that he was complaining about the noise than the fact that he didn't have the musical sophistication to tell that what I was playing at the time, while improvisational, wasn't using any of the complex harmonies that jazz is known for. I was just working with a Spanish phrygian-like scale in sort of an alap, but he came to complain about the "jazz" I was making. I'm still thinking of buying him a set of earplugs and attaching a note that says "Take these out when you get some culture, you jive-ass motherfucker."

Yeah, so I also did a new song. I had it gathering dust in a folder on my hard drive for a while, so I just threw some shit on it and played a bit over it. Nothing too amazing, but it's the first thing I've made since I came to Hawaii, so it's a start. Here it is: