Last night I sat down and tried to make a list of everything that I can perform acoustically in the context of a live show. There are, unfortunately, some songs that I wish I could do but simply don’t translate all that well, such as Weapon. There are also a host of songs that I simply can’t remember or that, like Fearless, were penned using an old open tuning capo that I ordered from Nashville years ago that are no longer made. Were I to attempt to tune it properly, it would require me to tune middle strings up so high that they would probably break, so that’s out I’m afraid. I know a lot of people want to hear that song. And even though it’s not one of my favorites, I did try to figure away around the problem. It’s just that it doesn’t sound right to me, so.
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Anyway, here’s the list I compiled…
1. Avalanche
2. Prime Time Deliverance
3. In A World Called Catastrophe
4. Apparitions
5. Strange Days
6. Load Me Up
7. Metal Airplanes
8. 99% Of Us Is Failure
9. Born Losers
10. Odette
11. Black Helicopter
12. The Boy Come Home
13. Moon Over Marin (Dead Kennedys cover)
14. I Am Not Safer Than A Bank
15. I’m A Window
16. She’s in It For The Money
17. True Love Will Find You In The End
18. Girl In The War (Josh Ritter cover)
19. Tripoli
20. Generation X-Wing
21. Advertising On Police Cars
22. Alert Status Red
23. It’s Been A While Since I Was Your Man
24. Fated
25. The Fine Art Of Falling Apart
26. House Of Smoke And Mirrors
27. Sort Of A Protest Song
28. Empty Road
29. Blue Skies Over Bad Lands
30. Champions Of Nothing
31. If I Was A Tidal Wave
32. Can’t Get Shot In The Back If You Don’t Run
33. Ex-Pats Of The Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra
34. Hopeless
35. Buffalo Seven
36. Symbolistic White Walls
37. In Love With A Bad Idea
38. Life Beyond The Minimum Safe Distance
39. The Bright End Of Nowhere
40. Hurt (Nine Inch Nails cover)
41. So Long Mrs. Smith
42. Oh Be Joyful
43. Keira-Anne
44. A Long Way Down
45. Indestructible
46. Born To Kill
Like Carmelina, Truffle Pigs presents a challenge in that it’s drop tuned to a c#, which on an acoustic is very difficult to keep in tune. That would be why, when I started playing Carmelina as a solo artist I changed up the presentation so that drop tuning wouldn’t be required. Truffle Pigs, on the other hand, loses something very important when it isn’t in its original tuning, so I might work on having my Guild set up just for that song alone, which we did for The Fine Art Of Falling Apart last year as it’s in the same tuning, though played in a much more reserved manner and thus tends not to go out of tune so easily (though during last year’s tour it commonly did every night, which is why I rarely bothered attempting Truffle Pigs).
There may also be some new material performed above and beyond the material on Hospital Music as well, it all depends on what I write in the meantime. I have, since being here, already completed a song, and in the months that follow there’s a good chance I’ll write more. Don’t hold me to that, of course, I could spend the next five months sitting on my hands, one can never tell.
Birthday Suit
What is indecency? For those of you that have been fortunate enough to view some of the world’s most renowned art, you’ll know that the human form has been celebrated for millennia, be it through sculpture, paint, or photography.
I have always found it very bizarre that our society has problems with the human form in its natural state. Nudity is often viewed as vulgar, which is strange being that beneath our clothes we’re all pretty much the same.
Lately, because of a few photographs that I was sent and asked to mess around with in photoshop, I have received a fair number of emails from others asking me to do similar processing. I just wanted to say that I’m open to the idea, but I’m not willing to spend time doing it to pictures of your cat, your car, your guitar, or you and your friends partying. If you have something artistic with which I can work, I’m open to working on it. If you’re interested, you can send them to matt@matthewgood.org and I’ll take a look and see if I think something interesting can be created. So far I have primarily been sent modeling shots and asked to obscure them in a way that allows them to be seen as something more than nudity, but rather an expression. I am not limited to doing just that, mind you, but as I said, pictures of your cat don’t really interest me.
