A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I watched Jeff Tweedy’s DVD, Sunken Treasure. I marveled at Tweedy’s ability to play songs that felt concise and complete with a great deal of open space and loose structures. He also has a great penchant for writing songs that explore interesting subjects but feel very relaxed at the same time.
After watching the DVD, I started playing around with some song ideas to work on something more relaxed in feel as well. Open House was the result of this little solo jamming session.

i live in a brick house
i keep the door open
let the breeze sweep through
once in awhile
sun waves through the windows
forcing the corners to take their leave
stay awhile

Open House by Chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

Summer is here and we wanted to kick it off with some dub reggae.

Dub and reggae music has always been a strong influence on me personally. Most particularly it’s influenced my bass playing. I learned the importance of laying down a solid groove line from dub music. Additionally, when I produce I often work with a layered approach and like to use dub-style delays regularly.

Lyrically, Your Island focuses on the need to occasionally step back and take a look at your life to see if you are living in a way that satisfies you. To me, it’s an incredibly important thing to make sure I’m living my life in a way that both makes me happy and that I’m living in a way that helps the people around me. Thankfully, right now, I feel that my life fulfills these requirements and I hope to keep it that way.

I hope everyone enjoys this one as much as we enjoyed writing it.

It’s never too late
to think about what heaven means
What’s it like on your island?
How do the trees grow
and the animal chatter?

What’s it like on your island?
What do you want to do?

Your Island by chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

We’re sorry about the late posting today. There was a flood in downtown Baltimore this morning and it totally changed the day around.

Here’s this week’s song, Dave Jones. A couple weekends ago, Dave Jones came down to jam with us. He’s been up several times to play music in the past but I’m not sure that we’ve had workable recordings of those sessions. On this particular piece, Dave played saxophone and created a haunting mood with it. Often, it sounds as if the sax is crying out from some unseen location off in the distance. It’s easily one of my favorites in feel and texture.
Primarily, you’ll hear the interplay here between Jeremy’s keys and Dave’s sax work.
Sedate in mood and with a bit of fog covering everything, this song feels so cinematic in nature.
It reminds me of some of my favorite film soundtracks.

Dave Jones by chilljam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://chilljam.com.

Here’s one that I pieced together during multiple lunch breaks at work.  

It’s hard to find time to make music these days, so I try to take full advantage of my lunch by recording little parts here and there.  

Most of the music was made with the Garageband preset beats and sounds, but I also layered some stuff with my Synth.  

My little girl loves to dance to this one.

Digital Storm by chilljam.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at chilljam.com.

I think we hit a milestone with this one.  The time signature in this beat is unlike anything we’ve done before.  The extra added storm effects in the end go right along with the lyrics and thundering drums.

Lazy Sun Melts is a trippy, shimmery work. There’s no real direction. There’s no purpose. It’s like a sonic representation of lazy.

This is a short mellow piece featuring saxaphone. The sax gradually takes the music into an abstract composition that dissolves in the end.

Here’s my first experiment with GarageBand.  I added some distortion to the rhodes and some nice chorus to the guitar.  The drum effects also added some crispness to the snare and some fullness to the kick drum. Then, I added several synth pads over top of everything to even out the sound.

I always loved the Grateful Dead while growing up. Jerry’s lines often dawdled about in brilliant ways always feeling unattached yet somehow connected on an organic way.
Obviously, the Dead had their hits. However, they had quite a few songs that were under the pop radar. Looks Like Rain is one of those. It was often played brilliantly in concert yet often seemed to be one of those chill-out songs that people often went to the vendors when it was playing.
Our version of the song is pretty chilled out, much like the original. Jeremy’s keys glide through the song alongside Neil’s quietly intense drum line.

Note about last week’s song, Red Rain. I have to apologize for the mixdown of Red Rain last week. I remixed the song properly this week and reposted it in the same place. Please give it another listen to hear the difference.