Warning! The following notes are just stream-of-consciousness ramblings about the composition of the songs jotted down at the time that they were recorded. They are in chronological order beginning with "We Didn't Start Inquiry."
Composition notes: I converted the MIDIs (on this page) into .wav files (in some cases editing them), loaded the .wavs into a multitrack audio editor, and sang along, then converting the results into MP3 format. In defense of the occasional slight off key note, please understand that I usually did the recording in just one take, and did not use editing to put "best efforts" together to manufacture a single track (well, that was true in the beginning. . .now (post-millennial Al) I take full responsibility for your cringing) . I am particularly marveled that "We Didn't Start Inquiry" was done in only two takes (and after an especially flavorful bottle of merlot!). And, yes, if you think you hear me singing about element 51 in "Antinomy" a time or two, I admit I seem to hear that as well (though I tried like heck to avoid it--oh well, I'm in good company; a recent Oxford University Press anthology made the same mistake in print!). If it sounds like I'm opposing Tyler Burge (I sincerely hope he pronounces it as I do) to Hilary Putnam--or even to his own position!-- in "Twater", I didn't mean to do so--it is simply that the soundness of rhyme-scheme is not supervenient on soundness of meaning! "Ergo Sum" is my first attempt at overdubbing to get an approximate parody of Brian Wilson's exquisite sound (emphasize "parody" over its accompanying adjective). Still done in only one take each of its voice tracks, it took many hours to complete, and gave me a taste of the work that real musicians face. But, as many of you no doubt have already concluded from my recordings, I'm in no danger of quitting my day job! Still, I admit that I enjoyed doing "Ergo Sum," and as a result I have overdubbed "Twater" and "Today" as well (though perhaps not "as well"). I practiced "Supererogationisticextraobligation!" twice before the actual take recorded here--but once again, done in just that one take (quickly followed by a glass of champagne--gasp!). I tried to capture the flavor of that old love standard in "The Hook's a Bust," but it seems that all I have in common with Dusty Springfield is that my "vocal chords" sound dusty and my high notes have the subtlety of a Springfield rifle. . . And then I had to hear Terry Stafford's wonderful "Suspicion" on an oldies station--and my Whitehead reflexes kicked in, forcing me to think "Prehension" almost immediately. Forgive me, for I almost don't know what I do. . . OK, I did go back and listen to some of my older songs, and decided that many did need re-recording. On the other hand I don't have the time now--so, I split the difference and time-compressed some of them. A by-product is a little smaller file size. By the way, if you have a recent version of Quicktime as your default plug-in for hearing the MP3s, I've discovered that right-clicking the fast forward button varies the speed of playback. Try it--my songs actually are improved by the resulting "chipmunk" effect! (Note: along with the latest addition of Mens John I'll be including additional downloads that are "pre-chipmunked", as it were.) I worked on Jim Cheney's song for months, but couldn't get past the first stanza. Then, suddenly, in one day it was finished and recorded in just one take! I hope you can see Jim embodied in a really beautiful tune (that is, until I got hold of it!). "Paradoxes" came about as a tribute to Ron Barnette and his delightful Zeno's Coffeehouse. Don't, however, blame Ron for the fact that along with McTaggart, Zeno, Russell, and Epimenides, the song has precious little of Old Blue Eyes' musical influence! 28 separate audio clips and 15 hours later, and all I have to show for it is this rough-edged tribute to Brian Wilson, "Good Inductions". Ok, ok, YOU try to hit those falsettos when you're 50! So, I'm writing this email thanking Laurence Goldstein for including mention of "Mens John" in the issue of The Monist he's editing and just wryly quipped that I needed to write a song for him "Goldstein's Writings" based on "Kung Fu Fighting". . .and damn if I couldn't get that tune out of my head for the next month!! So I finished finals, wrote the song in less than an hour, and proceeded to hack it to pieces for the next dozen hours with my still-straining voice (see previous remark about 50ish falsetto). I scrapped that version, sucked it up and started from scratch--and within a 1/2 hour, got this somewhat improved version (emphasis on "somewhat"). But honestly, if my song just gets one more person to read Goldstein's marvelous stuff, it will have been worth it! It was while reading a paper by Brian Weatherson in which he used a wonderful term--recherché--that jogged a memory of Jeremy Butterfield using that term repeatedly in a old piece on philosophy of time (what sticks with us, huh?). . .and it wasn't long after that, twenty minutes to be precise, that I'd written a song to one of my old faves, "Yesterday". Please do note that the song itself adheres to the quality of its title! Perusing Weatherson's page again, I found a link to a review article by William Lycan on the Gettier problem, and damn if that is not the best such piece on that problem that I've had the pleasure to read! Minutes after putting it down, Marty Robbin's "El Paso" came to mind--and "De Facto" was born! And please note that I sang all four and a half minutes straight through to get this version--there was no way I was going to cut and paste a hacked-up version of a song that is such a CW classic! (Though it may well send you screaming back to good ole Marty's brilliant ballad. . .) So I'm driving down South to see my mom when the first few lines of "Appraising Stace" hit me. After hearing this admittedly flawed a cappella version, you may well wish that something else had hit me instead! But once again I tried to do it in one uninterrupted take, and this is the result. Sorry! For no particular reason I loaded many of my songs into my MP3 player last night, and really only cringed a little--until I started listening to my "Poppycock" blues version. It's actually much worse than I remembered! So I fired up my trusty Acer pentium II (yes--a 1999 machine that I hope to replace this year), put down a track on one take, echoed it a bit since it had no accompaniment, and here it is. To think I subjected you to that these past years. . .Yeeks! I am leaving the chipmunked version of my previous caterwauling on the page, however. I was reading Eddy Nahmias's review of a recent anthology on free will when he aptly used the McGinnish term "mysterian" to describe where Peter van Inwagen seems to sit on the problem of free will these days, and somehow that connected to the Bee Gees singing "and let me live again" in their famous song. . .and two hours later I had the song; three more and the MP3 was done (in one take in my upstairs bathroom after my dog Burt wouldn't stop barking at me trying to sing like the Gibbs!). I know, I know--the song doesn't make it sound like van Inwagen revised Beta (which he did--though that made it less useful for constructing a sweepingly knockdown Consequent Argument in my estimation), and the "or" of "or be mysterian" obviously is inclusive to reflect something like his real position. But you know me--sounding right sometimes trumps perfect exposition here! I was walking Burt after having looked at David Chalmers' most recent (and exceedingly thorough!) work on his two-dimensional semantics when I suddenly started humming Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now". (Aside: actually it was Judy Collins singing in my little Leibnizian theater; I suppose that's a distinction no zombie could appreciate!) A couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon for the lyrics; later that evening after watching "Sideways" on HBO (with a glass of Australian pinot for double the inspiration), I tried to get a satisfactory mix with accompaniment but with miserable results. (There was not a good MIDI available for sing-along in this case.) So I gave up and laid down a one-take a cappella. (Later I did an accompanied version as well--though maybe not as well!) All it took was hearing Johnny Cash singing "Ring of Fire" and "A. N. Prior" jumped into my head. Tough song for me because I'm not a bass--even if my songs are base. But a chance to pay tribute to a great pair of philosophers--Prior and Oaklander, the latter a good friend--though they are not what you'd call on the same page philosophically. (And I side with Oaklander by the by on that one.) Question: can you find the really, really, really bad word-play in this one? Why do I keep losing terrific colleagues to retirement?? Oh well, I hope Helene will try to forgive me doing a song dedicated to her that almost everyone agrees is THE paradigm lounge-lizard ballad. . .but maybe she should consider that I almost did a Meat Loaf tune--"I could have anything for lunch--but I won't eat that--no I won't eat that!" I was driving down to Tennessee yet again (40 + times over my career at UW--Manitowoc--see references above about having inspiration during a 12-hour drive) and heard Nickelback's "Rock Star" and heard in my perverted mind "Phi Star"--and after coming back and reading some really, really excellent applications for a tenure-track position in our department that some institutions that would never, ever want to send their graduates to, I wrote "Phi Star" over a couple of days. Appropriate also that I read in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel today that irony is making a huge comeback! Terrible task lauding a great colleague like Roger--I'll miss him!! But at least the strains of this song will haunt him throughout retirement!! Warning students--"Crappy" was inspired by your loose lips!!
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