koven j. smith dot com

Aww, yeah.  I kinda got some mp3s mostly uploaded, somehow.  I hope that they work out well for you and don’t, you know, crap out right in the middle or anything.  Anyway, as I said in my last post, I have recently received word that Matt Chandler, the bass player for Saraswati, a fine band I was in once, will soon be joining us here in New York City.  I realized at that point, of course, that nary an mp3 of this great band exists on this site, and that that situation could not possibly be allowed to stand.  So with this post, Mr. Gorbachev, I am tearing down this wall.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had as much fun playing in a band as I had playing in Saraswati. It was the most truly collaborative band I’ve ever been in–every song we put together sounded nothing like what any one of the four of us would have written individually.  Listening back to these mp3s from our farewell concert, I was astonished at how scary, and at the same time effortless, much of it sounds.  Listen to “A Name In German.”  We played like this all of the time, usually cracking up because Andrew would try to work “Tighten Up” into almost every song and Todd and Matt would try to out-Henry Rollins each other with frequent shouts of “Yeah!”  “No!” and “Oh, yeah!!!” while we were in the middle of a sensitive Aaron Neville-style ballad.  Actually, that’s not true.  Or rather, the Henry Rollins part is true.  Not the Aaron Neville part.  The closest I guess we ever came to a sweet love ballad was “Thousands of Insects,” which lacks Mr. Neville’s sweet falsetto but does have a freak-out feedback section at the end.

I am not usually prone to patting myself on the back here at kovenjsmith.com (quite the opposite, in fact), but I am quite proud of what we did in this band, and I hope that y’all (that is to say, my loyal four or five readers) don’t mind indulging me for these few minutes.  These are precious days, ladies and gentlemen.  Precious, precious days.

Um, I don’t know what any of that meant there, at the end of that last paragraph.  Anyway, here’s one more song, called “Say, You’re Beautiful In Your Wrath,” which is, of course what Genghis Khan (as played by John Wayne) says to the Tartar princess Bortai who resists his swagger-y advances.

Further reading at Indianapolismusic.net.

Koven Bands

So I was in something of a nostalgic mood today, based on the fact that my old bass-playing friend Matt Chandler has informed me that he will be shortly moving to New York. We once played in an amazing band called Saraswati. I was planning on posting some mp3s of that, but I seem to be having some uploadin’ difficulties. So no Saraswati mp3s tonight. In fact, I don’t even really feel like doing a post anymore. So here, instead, is an amazing video by Brad Neely, the genius (and I do not use that word lightly) behind “Wizard People, Dear Reader.” This is a short animated film about George Washington (the first president of the United States). The film is called, appropriately enough, “#038;search=washington%20neely%20cox">Washington.” He’s twelve stories tall, and made of radiation. He’ll kick you apart. Oooh!

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