Today I present the crown jewel of my high school band years: The Spring '89 version of "Run Away." I've previously blogged about this song, which is pretty cheesy, but pleasurable, I think. This version owes a lot to the keyboard programming of the last couple of albums by The Cars (my favorite band at the time). The story of The Backdrop, the band that gave rise to this,  Continue Reading …

My computer no longer boots and is in the shop, which means I'm on my wife's MacBook, which means it's time for more camcorder youtube uploads! Here's a version of "Love Is the Problem:" http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer#p/a/u/0/e0LblloTUnc We (my band New People) recently played a very big show at Madison's Brat Fest, on the "Quench Gum" stage, which I honored by  Continue Reading …

I felt bad enough about posting the previous tune that I spent a bit more time and "polished" up another two old clunkers from the same pile, because mom always told me "If you do something bad, do more of that same thing to make up for it." So, first, a very old (1988) demo called "A Little Feeling." This is a piano tune, which was and is rare for me, inspired, I think, by  Continue Reading …

To apologize for many weeks now of old (i.e. poorly recorded) and (in the case of the "classical pieces") near unlistenable material, I've now newly encoded and posted the entirety of my "Mark Lint and the Fake Johnson Trio" album: http://marklint.com/FJTalbum.html. This is probably my single strongest collection of tunes. The recording quality is decent (i.e. digital  Continue Reading …

Continuing this thread, a multi-movement horn trio: "Ron Visits the Land of Insanity." I think these undoubtedly very talented music school players practiced this once together before coming into my class to try to get through this, and I put them through some mighty indignities including trombone parts written much too low and choreographed coughing. I see I'm going for a  Continue Reading …

Here's another, earlier music composition class piece of weirdness: "Argument Leading to Death." I'm thinking now that my week 19 entry was likely from the early spring of 1993, while this one was from late fall of 1992 in the previous semester's class. I think I decided it would require less effort this time around if for the class performance I just brought in a tape of  Continue Reading …

This week I've dived into digitizing old cassette tapes and waded through a couple of unlistenable options before coming across this thing that you might find interesting. "What happens in music composition class stays in music composition class," goes the old saying, but I'm letting out some of the hell: a song called "Patriotism," composed in (I think) 1992 and performed in  Continue Reading …

...Almost done polishing the turd that is this old demo. Here's a Pink Floyd-y song of mine called "To Valerie," written for a girl by that name in my second month or so of college (fall of '89). I believe it was elicited when I went to knock on her dorm room and a male voice said "Go away!" so I went and recorded a demo of this by myself and delivered the tape to her room  Continue Reading …

This week I give you an entire album from my murky past: "So Chewy" by the MayTricks (no, that movie had not come out when this band existed, so that name isn't as awful as it seems, though it's not so good, I think; any band name you have to spell for people is bad news). It was recorded in the summer of 1993, just after most of us had graduated college. This is that band's  Continue Reading …

Yes, another song not written by me, from the same 1991 demo as the last two weeks' entries: "Wild Flower." However, I did play this 40 million times and wrote the swell bass line and contributed to the somewhat out-of-tune backing vocals. The performance is actually pretty darn good, and the recording was only left off of the eventual album because we preferred to show off the  Continue Reading …

Here's "Wasted Youth," a song by Steve Petrinko, also (like week 14) from the MayTricks 1991 EP, which I'm retroactively calling the "Happy Flowers EP," as "Happy Flowers" was to be the name of the album that we started recording with this lineup shortly after making this demo (at least according to my decision; I don't know that the band had agreed upon this). This is a  Continue Reading …

One of my heretofore unmentioned projects for this blog is digitizing and mixing the original, 1991 5-song demo from my college band The MayTricks, so here's the first tune: "Run Away." I've also posted an mp3 of the eventual 1993 album version of the tune for comparison. I like the demo better, I think, though the album version has its charms. During high school, I  Continue Reading …

Not music, this time, but music commentary (sort of), a philosophy of music, if you will: "On Music Appreciation." One of the tasks of this weekly routine is to digitize old cassettes, and this is a bit of "Mark's Diary" from 1978-79, so I believe I was in 3rd grade at the time. I've edited it so as to keep it from being totally unbearable. Here I lament the current  Continue Reading …

Another for the same album: "Not Too Late." I added the vocals, acoustic, bass, percussion, and the big distorted background guitar all in the last couple of days, after not working on this since 2000. Written in late '98 as my time in philosophy grad school was ending. Even as I entered grad school, I had a fatalistic "Nothing is going to come of this, and I'm just living  Continue Reading …

Another tune destined for the Mark Lint & the Simulacra album: "Night Before the End." If you've listened to the podcast ep. 16, you've heard that Seth thinks that it's boring when musicians interpret songs for you, so I won't to that, and leave you merely to wonder what it would mean to be "bold enough to bend" and "cold enough to mend" or whether these are just rhyming  Continue Reading …

This week I mixed a demo from a failed 2000 collaboration: "Mush." One of the first musicians I met in Madison upon arriving in 2000 was Ken Labarre. "Mush" was a song he wrote for his previous band, and it rips on people who bare their feelings on daytime talk shows (not the kind of topic I typically write about, but if it's good enough for Peter Gabriel, it should be OK  Continue Reading …

The first newly completed song from the "Madison Lint" album: "Cold." I've been singing this a lot to myself as I walk around this horribly frozen wasteland that is Wisconsin and thinking about when I wrote the words to this while wandering around the building of my crappy office job back in early 2001, when both the job and the city were new to me after leaving  Continue Reading …

Here's another new recording: "Ann(e)." It's a pretty old song, written I think late in 1991, back when I was in a psychedlic band called The MayTricks, and though the recording is entirely new (OK, I started the click track and the acoustic guitar back in 2000, i.e. this is another tune destined for the "Cheese Stands Alone" album), the ethic and even the recording  Continue Reading …

More video this week: http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer#p/a/u/1/u3nNXdV8tbQ. The linked song is one of two I've just put up there from a 1997 gig by The Fake Johnson Trio. This was the very last gig for that band, and one of the few played as an actual trio: I switched to bass for a couple of shows for that incarnation. The song is "Retrogress," a cheery tune with  Continue Reading …

As January draws to a close, I made good on my determination to upload some more gig video, with a couple of songs from 1/16/10 New People show from the Alchemy Cafe. The song of the two by me currently visible (though I hope to have more up shortly) is at http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer#p/a/u/1/_-9pPUESKN4, and from that URL you should be able to see the other I just  Continue Reading …

This week's entry is an entirely new recording: "Came Round." On one or two days in the summer of '99 I wrote and recorded maybe five song fragments with nonsense lyrics that featured dual-vocals throughout the whole thing a la the Byrds. I was contemplating starting a folk duo that would feature collaborative songwriting and wanted to have some material that was purposely  Continue Reading …

This week I've finished another tune from the same project as "Write Me Off," namely "Once in a Great While," which was originally called "Therapy Song #141." The song is one of several I've written about inspiration and its masochistic character. What I want from moment to moment is a feeling of warmth, of involvement. When I finish a great movie or book or come back from a  Continue Reading …

This week's newly finished recording is "Write Me Off." This is part of the "Sinking and the Aftermath" project; the story of my utter irresponsibility in not finishing these songs (from 1999-2000) earlier is told here. This is one of my favorite songs of those I've written, and it's gone around my head quite regularly in the 10 years since I wrote and partially recorded  Continue Reading …

Listen to "Space" by Mark Lint. This song was written in 1997 or 1998 smack in the heart of my Texas grad school tenure. That's what the reference to "Every day I get up about three hours late" is about; I tended to sleep until 11am in those days. This is a song that seemed too sappy, simple, and uncool to do with any of my subsequent bands, and it in fact was the  Continue Reading …