The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

If you’ve heard the aphorism “there is no ‘I’ in ‘team'”, you may be surprised to discover that it’s not true:

I’ve got no argument with the “never be afraid to try” part, but…

• What little evidence there is of Noah’s Ark’s existence is a bit sketchy and not trustworthy, what with it being based on the mistranslated hand-me-down propaganda of biased bronze age “47 percenters” who ended up waging class war on Egypt’s job creators.
• The written account says that Noah built the Ark with help from God. If you’ve ever worked on a group project, you know that there’s always a star player who does 90% of the work. Who better than the guy who engineered the crisis in the first place to design the thing that would get you through it?
• The Titanic’s sinking can partially be blamed on construction (substandard materials), but operator error played a large role.
• If you need folksy-sounding wisdom like this to get motivated, even the most minor of obstacles is likely to discourage you.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Four years ago today — Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 — I was newly-separated, feeling chills, and having difficulty breathing. By that evening, I wound up in the ER of St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto, and in “droplet isolation” in the the ICU by the next day.

My throat had swollen so tightly shut that they hung this sign over my bed:

If you’re stuck trying to think of a name for your band, you might want to consider this.

While I was lying in that ICU bed, I made myself a few promises. I promised myself that I’d not just survive, but go on to meet someone new, and hey, if the situation allowed for it, maybe even relocate.

Four years later, I’m living in Tampa and a little under two months away from getting married. I’m pretty pleased with how things turned out.

Go read My Hospital Week, my story about my time in the ICU. You’ll laugh and you’ll cringe as I talk about bedpan negotiations, foot-long Q-tips and where they end up, accidentally disconnecting my emergency call button, and the reality of being sponge-bathed by a cute nurse.

You can’t tell Kitty what to do:

Musician Gregory Todd noticed the similarities among these six country hits…

• Sure Be Cool If You Did by Blake Shelton (released January 2013)
• Close Your Eyes by Parmalee (released February 2014)
• This is How We Roll by Florida Georgia Line featuring Luke Bryan  (released February 2014)
• Ready Set Roll by Chase Rice (released November 2013)
• Chillin’ It by Cole Swindell (released August 2013)
• Drunk on You by Luke Bryan (released February 2012)

…so he imported them into Pro Tools and mashed them up into a single, pretty cohesive song. If you’re wondering just how cohesive it was, play the video below and hear for yourself:

Yes, he had to speed up or slow down individual songs so they’d all be at the same tempo and pitch-shift them so that they’d be in the same key, but once that was done, he could create a whole new song by simply cutting and pasting. The songs were so similar — all with the same IV – I – V chord pattern — that they might as well have shared guitar solos:

He saves the best for the end of the new mega-song by layering all of their closing choruses over each other, and wow, it works!

In the notes for the video, Todd writes:

I just want to be clear that this Mashup is all in good fun. I am not bashing these songs. I understand and even appreciate why the “formula” continues to dominate the airwaves- not only in country music, but in pop and other genres as well. I simply enjoy mixing and producing on Pro Tools, and when I heard the striking similarities of these particular hits, I thought it would be fun to throw them all in a mix and see what I could come up with. And it looks like people are having fun with it too, so I couldn’t be happier!

He’s right. One of the problems with the music business is that if you’re a songwriter trying to make a living, you’re faced with this paradox:

• People want to hear something new, and
• At the same time, people want to hear something familiar.

And given these incentives, what do songwriters do? As musically-inclined comedian Bo Burnham says: Repeat stuff!

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m getting married in a couple of months. I’ve been chatting with the guy who’s handling the music for our beach ceremony and I’ve already told him that Johann Pachelbel’s Cliche in D is on the “banned” list. Here’s why:

Ever since taking it up, I’ve been letting a lot of people believe that I can play anything on accordion. That’s actually not true. It’s just that there are really only about 7 or 8 pop songs, and once you learn those chord progressions, you’ve got about 80% of all popular music covered.

To borrow a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay: Music, like life, isn’t one thing after another; it’s the same damn thing over and over.