Shoutout to Jomboy's Baseball Breakdowns

With all the talk about baseball needing a significant makeover considering that strikeouts and game lengths are up and batting averages, doubles, triples, stolen bases and excitement are down, it’s nice to see that the game can still be made interesting by sheer personality and incredible lip-reading.  Enter Jomboy Media.  Now, I’m not much of a YouTube guy because I like to waste my time in other meaningless ways, but I do have a 19 year-old son who will on occasion lead me to a channel that offers big entertainment value, a phrase not typically associated with Major League Baseball these days.

Jomboy Media has a history, multiple channels, podcasts and a slew of related entities that I don’t understand, and I encourage you to investigate all of them and then tell me in 30 seconds what I should pay attention to, but what I’d like to share with you today are its Baseball Breakdowns hosted by Jimmy O’Brien.  The breakdowns are an inside look of baseball’s intricacies, extraordinary plays, heated arguments between players, managers and umpires, and the best (and worst) of baseball fandom, all done with wit and a genuine appreciation for the game.  And did I mention the lip-reading?  Wow! This guy can tell you exactly what managers Craig Counsell and Tony La Russa are uttering in this incredibly interesting and entertaining breakdown of a challenge that may or may not have taken advantage of a significant loophole in the rulebook. 

For another taste of what O’Brien does best, check out this recent look at a Mariner comeback against the Astros:

Great stuff!  I’m a fan.  I might be as big a fan of Jomboy as I am of baseball itself.  You can also watch the videos and have better search functionality at Jomboy’s website.

Now excuse me while I piss away some more time on YouTube.

A Devil's Baseball Bargain

I’ve proposed the following scenario to a few Milwaukee Brewers fans, but you could just as easily apply it to fans of the Seattle Mariners or Texas Rangers, the Jacksonville Jaguars, Denver Nuggets or Buffalo Sabres, or any other sports team without a championship. 

A person or entity of some kind approaches you, and – knowing your lifetime loyalty to the Milwaukee Brewers (or some other ill-fated sports team) – says, “I can guarantee that the Brewers will win a World Series sometime in the next five years, but here’s the deal: your team will spend the subsequent twenty years in last place.”

You don’t know how or why, but you know this person is telling the truth.  Do you take the bargain?

I’ve offered this question to a couple of friends of mine and have been dumbfounded that each of them quickly and unequivocally said no; they’d rather have a fun, competitive team for many years than to hit the pinnacle for one year and spend two decades in the cellar.

Me?  I would take the deal in a heartbeat.

I wouldn’t have when I was fourteen years-old and the Brewers had just lost the World Series in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals.  After all, they’d surely be back a year later to avenge their disappointing loss, right?  Right???

Nearly forty years later, I realize just how fleeting successes are, and how you can root for a team – even good teams – and never make it to the finish line.  Think the Utah Jazz, the Tampa Rays or the Buffalo Bills.  Or how about the Atlanta Falcons, who let the Super Bowl slip away when it was in the bag?  Brutal stuff.  Tell me a Falcon fan wouldn’t change the outcome of that game for twenty years in the doldrums.

The Packers have won two more Super Bowls than I ever expected them to win when I was following them through the awful 70s and 80s.  But now?  It’s all icing, baby.  They’ve done it.  Twice in my lifetime!  If they spend the next decade in last place, hey, that’s okay.

The Milwaukee Bucks just won their first championship since I was three years old.  I was thrilled.  I traveled up to Milwaukee and hung out with my sister and brother-in-law, walked amongst Bucks fans of all genders, races and sizes, and I loved it.  But I couldn’t express unadulterated jubilation, because I didn’t earn it.  I don’t think much of pro basketball as a sport, and while I was very happy for the city of Milwaukee, the fans who’ve slogged through season after hapless season and the players who seem genuinely grateful for having won a championship in a small-market city, I couldn’t revel in the victory as much as the next guy.  After all, the Bucks game I attended earlier this year was my first NBA game in twenty years.

But I’ve earned my heartache with the Milwaukee Brewers, and I will have earned the euphoria should they ever manage to win a World Series.  They’ve come close to getting there – in 2011 and 2018 – and those were fun rides to be sure, but they were not the finish line.  I want what true Bucks fans got last week.  I want it all.  I want to be in the stands when the Brewers complete a World Series victory.

I’d be willing to spend a lot of awful seasons for that Golden Moment.  Hell, I’ve lived through enough awful seasons without that golden moment.  What’s a few more?

Playing Music without Understanding Theory

My musical ear is decent – not great.  If you play me a complicated jazz tune or a song by King Crimson and the like, I will not be able to play along, but for most rock/folk/blues tunes, I can figure out what’s happening pretty quickly, and my ability to play the song isn’t usually beholden to a particular key.  Like many musicians, I can think of chord changes in terms of Roman numerals, which is hugely helpful when “hearing” changes and playing along.  I’m often made fun of in band practice because I’ll always ask what key a song is in before we start playing.  I can never remember.  Once I know the key, I’m good to go (usually).

What I find amazing is just how many musicians – good one, too – play their instruments without really understanding the language of music, what we often call music theory.  A friend of mine put it this way: it’s like learning a second language by memorizing a lot of sentences.  Yes, it’s impressive to learn so many sentences, and you may be able to utter hundreds of them correctly, like “I’d like my breakfast with two eggs and toast,” but if you instead want to say, “I’d like my lunch with three pickles and coleslaw,” you’ll be in a fix.

This is a great analogy for what some musicians do.  And I’m not knocking them.  I think it’s amazing.  What they do is actually harder than what I do, because they’re memorizing songs.  I’m usually not.  I’m following chord changes that I hear in my head.  I know guitar players who can play crazy difficult solos note for note but who don’t know what a C7#9 chord is.  By contrast, I can’t learn a complicated solo without a great deal of effort;  I can, however, play along to a tune and tell you that the iv minor chord that the band is playing is incorrect – that it’s a flat VII major 9 (as recently happened when my band was learning “Brass in Pocket”).  I’m relatively good at that kind of thing.  Different skill sets, I suppose, and my ear still isn’t what it should be.  A good jazz musician might wonder how I dare to call myself a musician when I don’t know what mode to play over the aforementioned C7#9 chord.  I’ve got a lot to learn, for sure.

But those among us who literally memorize their parts should be revered on some level, because it’s a huge feat to memorize parts and excel in doing so.  The problems arise when you’re trying to communicate with each other.  I’ve had bandmates who don’t know what I’m talking about when I ask them to go to a III major chord, or who can’t change song keys without a lot of preparation.  That can be problematic and, at times, limiting, just as I would be a limiting factor in a jazz combo.

But I think it’s also encouraging that there are multiple ways to approach and enjoy music, and that one can be proficient in some aspect of music but not in others. Ultimately, those differences might even be invaluable to the makeup of a band.

Memories of At-Home Fatherhood

In Meg Wolitzer’s insightful and punctilious portrayal of at-home mothers in New York City, The Ten-Year Nap, she writes of an at-home father:

…his appearance at the school in the afternoon was confusing; it threw off theories about how the world worked.  You were initially pleased by him, but then after a short while you felt slightly annoyed.  He seemed like a loiterer here in the world that the women had formed for themselves.

I read this with a nod of recollection.  It’s now been 24 years since my wife and I made the decision to have me stay at home with our twin daughters while she continued her career in human resources.  As I wrote in my song, “Daddy’s at Home”: 

I remember the time
When I found this wife of mine
Was earning more than I ever would
And as her due date arrived
We needed to decide
Which one of us would stay home for good
I wasn't tied to the workday that took me from nine to five
But now I'm wishing I could just rest my eyes

This song highlights the joys of at-home fatherhood – many of my songs do – and I unequivocally stand by the decision to stay at home and raise the kids.  I wish I could do it all over again.  I loved being a dad to young children.

But there was also a flip side to the journey: being an at-home father was often isolating, particularly on the East Coast where people are less open and tougher nuts to crack in general, but even in the friendlier Midwest.  And while one could theorize about why this was the case, I think Wolitzer offers a plausible explanation: because women were dubious about this interloper, a man entering a world that had been reserved for them.  I wasn’t invited to join their walks, their coffee outings, their phone call chats – and really, I shouldn’t have been.  I see more clearly now than I did then just how presumptuous it was for me to think that I should have been treated as a colleague. 

When I first took my twins to preschool in Illinois, many of the moms viewed me as a novelty, and I was able to establish a rapport with some of the friendlier ones.  Looking back now, I’m grateful for the few mom friends I made, who occasionally took my phone calls to chat about which park district program we were signing up for or to just unload about the trivial trials that parenting includes.  During dark winter days, when parenting could feel like a life sentence, these phone calls were a lifeline for me.  

Over time, some of the relationships I established graduated to in-person gatherings.  I think that what I had going for me more than anything else was a nonthreatening quality, some sort of signal that read, “I am not going to make a move on you.”  In a way, I preferred these relationships to any I could have established with fellow fathers.  Too often, I found dads to be a bore.  If you weren’t talking to them about sports, finances and home improvement, the conversations dried up.  The women I became friends with were more interesting, unafraid to express regret and uncertainly.  They were more self-effacing and more empathetic.  More human.

As my kids grew older, I saw other fathers walking their kids to and from school.  Most were working in some capacity, either out of the home or on odd shifts, but there were a few of us full-time stay-at-home dads roaming about.  It became less of a thing.  Less novel.  More accepted.  A quarter of a century later, I like to think that I helped them along in some small way.

New Album ready for Streaming

The Human Form Divine is ready for streaming! A long 15 months after I started recording demos, this pandemic-produced album (really more of an EP at 23 minutes) is complete! A snappy, stark album with prog-rock leanings and recurring musical themes, it’s the best-sounding album I’ve ever produced, with stellar guitar, bass and drums leading the way thanks to Griffin Cobb, Julian Wrobel and Sam Heinz.

Listen to The Human Form Divine on:

• Spotify

• Apple Music

• YouTube

• This website

Here’s a bit of background on the project:

On June 19, 2018, a few months after completing my album The Great Divide, I wrote down the song order for what was to be my next album. I thought I was all set. I took some time to pursue a few other activities, including scoring my daughter Sarah’s brilliant animated short, and by the fall of 2019 I was ready to tackle a new project, but when it came time to start laying down basic tracks, I found myself uninspired. Bored. Unexcited. I needed to scrap my plan and start over.

Around that time, I purchased a harpejji, an amazing stringed instrument I’ve written about before, and started messing around with a few musical motifs, including some chromatic odd-timed stuff, and I wondered about doing a sort of prog-rock type project. I went back to a bunch of song snippets I’d recorded on my phone over the years, and one that grabbed my attention was a little tune I’d hastily written in April of 2014 while taking a walk around the neighborhood. I called it “Bunker Song,” and it provided me the jumping off point that I needed to proceed with a thematic album.

I composed the Phrygian mode melody from the title track while attending High Holiday services in the early 2000s, when a reading captured my attention, taken directly from Reform Judaism’s Gates of Repentance prayer book: “Disfigured lies the human form divine, estranged from its center.” I love that line! I even half-thought about doing an album of Jewish-themed content at that time, but instead set the melody and lyric aside, only to find over a decade later that they would work wonderfully in the context of my new project.

Additional important propellants were the compositions my son Sam created in his high school music production course. He had a half a dozen instrumental recordings, and between these and several half-formed compositions that I’d jotted down over the years, I was gradually able to whittle things down to several musical motifs that I used to flesh out a number of songs, most notably the title track and “Sea Song,” which comes from a piece of music Sam wrote called “C Song” because it was – you guessed it – in the key of C. I wrote the intro of what would become “Sea Song” in January of 2015, the instrumental intro to “Obfuscation” in August of 2016, the chordal theme from “The Human Form Divine” later that December, and most of the music for “Race to the Bottom” in May of 2017. Sam composed the suspended themes from the title track and “Sea Song” in the spring of 2017 and the brilliant chord sequence of “Unsettled” in December of 2018. I added a melody and B section for that song, but tossed out the B section for this recording. I’d like to do another version of this song as a bossa nova with a jazz band for my next project.

From there, songs came together quickly. As always happens, a few pieces were written contemporaneously. The vocal section of “Why Not” was written on December 26 of 2019, and a few weeks later “Obfuscation” started to come together, as well as the completion of “Bunker Song” and the lyrics to “Race to the Bottom.” I decided to keep the project short and snappy at 23 minutes, and in hindsight this was plenty to keep me busy.

I completed song demos in March of 2020 and then the pandemic hit. Sam and his bassist buddy Julian Wrobel (from The Great Divide) rehearsed the songs on their own, eventually getting together during the buildup to a late-July socially-distanced recording session at Kiwi Audio in Batavia, Illinois, engineered by Brad Showalter and Mark Walker. As was the case for the previous album, both Sam and Julian created parts for the songs rather than just winging it, and the results are gratifying. Check out Julian’s bass riff during the title track or Sam’s drum break in “Obfuscation” – those are parts I could never compose, much less execute!

My daughter Jessica may not have participated directly in this recording, but she came through in a big way by recommending her friend Griffin Cobb to add guitar tracks remotely from Louisville. What a godsend! Throughout August and September Griffin tirelessly recorded scores of guitar tracks, transforming what I heard in my head into real-life performances. How gratifying! And we were never even in the same room!

Meanwhile, my daughter Sarah completed the album cover in short order after sharing a few rough sketches with Sam and me for our approval. She captured the struggle of being human perfectly. The album cover was completed a good six months before the album was.

I added keyboards and vocals in September and October, and then – as I always do – struggled mightily with the mixing process. I shelved the task for a few months over the holidays, and then began in earnest in January, finally completing the mixes in March with the help of a few of my friends. I sent the mixes to Collin Jordan of The Boiler Room, and viola! The album was finished! All it took was 16 months of hard work. I gotta find an easier way to do this next time.