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.

Let It Go is a late night experiment.
I was playing around with my acoustic and wondered what it’d be like to just let it go and not pay attention to rhythm or melody…or really anything at all. I just let my fingers move around as they felt like without any concern or thought of where they were going or what they were doing.
In the end, it sounded a bit tribal mixed with some flamenco feel stuff in there. Then I decided to just do the same thing with my voice. I just started singing and shouting stuff in my basement without studying the song or what was going on with it. To some extent, I was able to watch the sound waves of the guitar track on the screen as I recorded so I was able to have some idea of when the guitar would come in and out.

Afterwards, I started to record a bass line under all of this as well, but decided in the end that it was better to just keep it simple.
The other guys may add to this in the next couple of weeks as well but I thought I’d go ahead and post up what we already had.

Let It Go 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.