Live at The Country Cow.

I'm playing a show at The Country Cow in Campton NH tonight at 7pm. The show will be watchable online (provided the internet there is cooperating). Visit the 'video' page for the live stream.

I've got shows through the weekend, and with luck I'll be able to webcast those as well.

Song Spotlight: Elegy For Industry

Track 3 on Onward To Yesterday is a pretty straight-forward treatment of a Song Fight title. It started as an attempt to write something I could perform solo with a loop pedal, and build up parts as the song went along. This album arrangement doesn't do that, and I haven't really worked out the live strategy yet either. Oh well.

I have some ideas for a low-budget video for this song. Gotta get on that.


Elegy For Industry

Chorus: Come down to the city with me
We'll poke around in what used to be
We'll go sailing on the blacktop sea
To the bones of the industry
We'll get drunk and we can break a few things
Don't you worry 'bout the trouble it brings
Nobody cares about you or me
Or what's left of the industry

They came in back in '73
All smiles and opportunity
And promises they knew they would not keep
We knew it too but we were in too deep
We swallowed hard and we closed our eyes
Any port's home in a storm this size
We let them build on a hnadful of lies
So what I got to show you shouldn't be a surprise but...

Chorus

They took the hopes and the dreams of this town
They drove them right straight into the ground
And once the benefit couldn't be found
You knew that they wouldn't be sticking around
They slithered off like a well-fed snake
When there was no more money to make
And who am I to say it was a mistake
Because maybe we all need something to break

Chorus


This song (and all the others on the new album) can be heard on the mp3 page of this site.

Song Spotlight: Just To Be Difficult

This song was also inspired by a title challenge at Song Fight (www.songfight.org). When composing, I was of a mind to try and leave space in the arrangement, and to be more deliberate about how the instruments did their jobs together. The result is this workmanlike, sardonic number.


Just To Be Difficult

You got the medicine
But you don't want to take it
You just can't live with something someone was right about
You're learning to depend
On all the things you hated
Can't stop until you made it something to fight about

It makes no sense to me
That you'd go looking for it
Should just ignore it but you've got to be difficult
Why do you choose to be
So full of pain and malice
Contention uber alles - just to be difficult

You got what you want
You got your proud position
You got your fool to listen to you while you prattle about
All the things you don't
Believe you got to live with
Well it's another thing I think I can live without

(chorus) (solo) (Chorus)


This song, like all the others from Onward To Yesterday, can be heard on the mp3 page on this web site.

Bike Week 2010 schedule.

Here's my updated schedule for Bike Week 2010. This is probably the final schedule, as I don't really have room to take on any more work.

Thursday, June 10 - Weirs Beach Lobster Pound, Weirs Beach NH. My first time at this venue. It's a weather-dependent show, as I'll be out on the deck from 7-10pm.

Friday, June 11 - Shooter's Tavern and Pizzaria, Belmont NH. No Limitz is doing the classic rock thing at 8:30pm.

Saturday, June 12 - Stix Entertainment Center, Meredith NH. A classic rock gig with No Limitz. In a bowling alley! Badass.



Sunday, June 13 - Sunset Grill, Campton NH. I'm hosting open mic night, so come out and play! It starts at 7pm.

Monday, June 14 - Laconia Harley-Davidson, Meredith NH. Another show with No Limitz, starting at 6pm.



Thursday, June 17 - The Country Cow, Campton NH. I've played a Bike Week show at the Cow for the last couple years, and it's always a good time up there.



Friday, June 18 - The Red Blazer, Concord NH. A solo show down in the big city.



Saturday, June 19 - The Black Cat, Laconia NH. When No Limitz plays the Black Cat, it's usually a pretty rowdy time. This gig should be especially so.

Sunday, June 20 - Sunset Grill, Campton NH. Another open mic night (7pm start).


Then I get a few days off, and it's right back into it on Thursday night. :)

Weekend recap.

That was a busy weekend. And that's the way they're going to be until, let's see... Columbus Day, or thereabouts. I was at Giuseppe's on Thursday, where I played an entire show on piano. Nice to get back to that. It made me miss the Dueling Pianos shows in Burlington this past winter. Then it was off to Tony's in Thornton for a rowdy Friday night set. I headed up to Whitefield to the Spalding Inn for my Saturday show, and down to Laconia to play The Broken Spoke for the first time on Sunday afternoon. Here's a song from the Broken Spoke show.

Jim Tyrrell - American Pie (The Broken Spoke, June 6 2010)

It was nice to have so many folks watching online (I was able to broadcast all four shows). The live feed will be up whenever wifi is available at the venue. This Thursday it all starts again, and I'll go over the schedule in detail in tomorrow's post. Cheers!

Song Spotlight: Hey Ruth

Over the next couple weeks, I'll be spotlighting songs from the Onward To Yesterday CD. Today's track is the opener on the album.

Hey Ruth was originally written for Song Fight!, an online songwriting competition. They provide the title, you provide the song (with a 7-10 day deadline). This was one of those wide-open titles; I'm not sure what led me in this particular direction, but the first draft of the song was written more or less front-to back, almost stream-of-consciousness style. A little structural tidying, and the result is a poppy number that seemed destined for the Permanent Record album. I wasn't happy enough with the recording to include it though, so it sat until the Onward To Yesterday sessions in late '09. Things went better this time around, and the song made for a good first track on the album.


Hey Ruth

Hey Ruth, I know you probably didn’t want me to wake you,
But I wasn’t really sure if you were sleeping or dead
Hey Ruth, ‘cause when you sit there barely breathing, what the
Hell am I supposed to do, you got me going out of my head
Hey Ruth, well do you think the boss’ll notice that you’re
Sleeping in your cubicle alone there at the end of the hall
Hey Ruth, with all the meetings and the quotas, do you ever
Stop to think about the reason that you do it at all

I remember when you started back in ‘93
I saw you filing and I knew you were the one for me
I asked you out but you were married to the industry
You traded what you had for what you thought you ought to be

Hey Ruth, if anybody could have seen you twenty years ago
They never would have guessed that you would end up this way
Hey Ruth, They’d probably wonder where the fire went that
Used to light your eyes before you signed up for your permanent stay
Hey Ruth - I’m only trying to survive and I can tell you that
It makes it better just to know that you’ve got a friend
Hey Ruth - I don’t know what it is that drives you but
What good is it to get there just to find yourself alone in the end

You worked your way through all the corporate insanity
To get promoted just to satisfy your vanity
Now you’re the president in charge of all calamities
They moved your desk right underneath the sword of Damocles

I remember when you started back in ‘93
I saw you filing and I knew you were the one for me
I asked you out but you were married to the industry
You traded what you had for what you thought you ought to be

Hey Ruth, I know you probably didn’t want me to wake you,
But I wasn’t really sure if you were sleeping or dead
Hey Ruth, ‘cause when you sit there barely breathing, what the
Hell am I supposed to do, you got me going out of my head
Hey Ruth, I know you probably didn’t want me to wake you,
But I wasn’t really sure if you were sleeping or dead
Hey Ruth, ‘cause when you sit there barely breathing, what the
Hell am I supposed to do, you got me going out of my head

This song (and the rest of Onward To Yesterday) can be heard on the 'MP3' page on this web site.

2 Kings Pub.

In Whitefield NH, there's a place called the Spalding Inn. Apparently it's owned by the two dudes from that Ghost Hunters show on SyFy. Anyway, I will be there tonight (Saturday), playing a solo show in the 2 Kings Pub.

This pub is just the right setting for my drinking songs, so I expect that'll be a large part of the set. And there has been a good wifi signal every time I've been there, so I am planning on webcasting the show. So come on up and check the place out, or watch online!

Downloads.

The Onward To Yesterday album is available for digital download. Individual tracks can be downloaded for 99 cents, or you can grab the whole album for $8.99. Here's where it all happens.

Onward To Yesterday - Digital Download

I'll integrate this into the web site more elegantly when I get a chance. :)

Of course, physical copies of the CD are still available too, along with my drinking songs CD (Time For Another Round - Gold Edition). The 2007 album Permanent Record is currently out of stock, but more are on the way, and mp3 downloads should be available soon on this one as well.

Tony's.

This Friday I'm playing at Tony's in Thornton, NH. The best thing about this show (for me, anyway) is that Tony is a great supporter of original music. My trio played a St. Patrick's Day show there earlier this year, and it was a blast to play my drinking songs for the temporarily Irish crowd. I'll be working a lot of originals into the set this Friday as well (drinking and non-drinking songs included). The show starts at 6:30pm, and it will be watchable online as well.

Giuseppe's.

Tomorrow (Thursday) I'm returning to Giuseppe's in Meredith NH for a solo show. I like this room a lot, as I'm sure I've said before. The PA system is a little tricky to get used to, but the grand piano is a real treat.

I usually go in there intending to play a very piano-heavy set, but the guitar stuff (in particular, the Citizen Cope covers) got the most enthusiastic response last time. So, we'll see. Occasionally I'll get a crowd in there that is interested in the original material, and that's always good.

The show starts at 6pm. I'm going to try to put up a live video feed, so check the web site if you can't make it out to Meredith. :)

Web site update.

The long-overdue update of jimtyrrell.net is finally up! I'll be tweaking it here and there over the next few days, but this is the general idea anyway. A vast improvement over the site's previous iterations, for sure. Big thanks to Stacey Lucas for the Dreamweaver instruction.

In other news, my bass-playing blisters are healing up nicely. They'll get tested on Thursday, when I play piano and guitar at Giuseppe's in Meredith. I don't have another bass gig until a wedding on the 26th, and that'll be a pretty short set.