This is a fun upbeat one and I did all the non-drum recording in Sonar 7, which I’m learning lately. The drums were recorded with one SM58 set up in front of the drum kit. They sound pretty nice for the extremely simple setup.

We’ll be doing more songs under the name Marshmallow Mission (which is my friend Dan Bernard on drums and me doing everything else), using the same quick ‘n’ dirty drum recording technique.

Also, perhaps of interest is that this song is kind of a rework of That’s What People Say, from my earlier work, Songs of the Month 2005.

People Say

…since I’ve made anything I thought was worthwhile to put up here! But I have some plans… Gonna get together with Dan this weekend (I hope) and figure out (and hopefully record) some drums on a couple new songs I’ve got. Also… still working on my upcoming well-recorded EP How Does It Know?. It’s been slow going, because I’m working hard on all the parts and with various people with various schedules… Maybe that’ll be ready in 6 months? I have no idea. It’s going well, though. There will be saxophone.

So, anyway, yeah, I guess expect some new songs here in a few weeks, under the name Marshmallow Mission (my new moniker for music of the kind you will hear in a few weeks). Thanks for continuing to listen!

See that big orange “iLike this artist” over in the right hand column? The one that looks like this?

Well, if you’re an iLike user, you should totally click on it if you like the stuff I’m doing here at this site. I’d like that. Thanks!
-Sunil

Ok guys, new category: [SONG]… Just single songs not as part of a “Release”. These won’t be shown on the Releases page, but perhaps someday in the future I’ll package a bunch of [SONG]s together to make a [PTSXXX]. edit: who cares? they’re all up there now. these are the kinds of decisions you have to make when you have a fake record label. -ss

Anyway, this one is called Hold It Till It’s Gold and came to me while on a bike ride. It gave me an opportunity to mess around with the Alesis ControlPad I got a little while ago.

Hold It Till It’s Gold

Hey there everyone… Just a quick note to mention that Part Time Songs has a presence on Facebook now. A Facebook “page”, if you will. If you’re on Facebook, you should join up, and get future updates in a Facebook-generation friendly way.

This is the result of reworking a couple songs I had for my old band, The Low Hello. They sound totally different this time around, due to all instruments being played by me. I always liked these two songs a lot, and it was fun to record them, despite having a cold and having to sing.

ZIP file of all songs

01 Check Your Pockets
02 File Under Sole

I had a band from about October 2005 till around July 2007. It started off slowly. Just some songs I’d written for Songs of the Month and my friend Dan, who recorded drums on Tenille with me.

We did some shows together as a two-piece, and those went off well. I posted an ad on Craigslist for a bassist, and we found Robb, who came out and saw us and subsequently joined us very easily. Adam saw this three piece perform and stopped me after the show to tell us a) he liked my voice, it reminded him of Television, b) he liked my hair, and c) that I should sit down and chat for a while. We eventually opened for his band, Murder Mystery, and when it came time to find a lead guitarist, he filled the spot nicely.

And so that’s where this EP came from, recorded in Robb’s basement. Burned CD-R copies were given away at our shows and it got reviewed in a couple blogs. I still like it, but wish a little that we could’ve done a little more in the way of instrumentation.

The players:
Sunil Sawani: songwriting, rhythm guitar, singing
Dan Bernard: drums
Robb Zimmerman: bass, backup vocals (live)
Adam LeRoy: lead guitar, keyboard, clapping (live)

ZIP file of all songs

01 Nostalgia Makes Confusion
02 Recess
03 Lying Down
04 New Kind of Stress
05 Down Side

Here are some YouTube videos of the Low Hello performing live:

Lying Down
Down Side
Recess
Check Your Pockets
Nostalgia Makes Confusion

I had started working on a set of songs as I was finishing college; I didn’t have a band, though, and after the fun I had recording with other people on the Square Miles EP, I decided I wanted to do another full band recording. Luckily, a couple of my friends were in a band called Tenley, and they were amenable to helping me out with my songs. I piggybacked on their practices — as soon as they were finished, Keith (their singer) would step aside, and I’d jump in and we’d work on my songs for a bit. This worked pretty well, and we eventually booked some time at an acquaintance’s basement studio to record.

When they were done, I sat on the songs for a long time (over a year), and then I decided to take the step of actually releasing Tenille as a for-sale product. That was OK in the beginning, as friends and family purchased copies. After that though, the sales dried up, despite the fact that I had it up for sale on iTunes and CDBaby. I am just not the promotion machine one needs to be to make a record really sell and gain buzz… And I’m not really interested in that aspect of things.

This year, I shifted gears and decided to put all the songs up here for free… The “hits” on this one are probably Big Arm and Hard to Be, but I like the EP as a whole, and at that point, I was convinced it was the best thing I’d done. Thanks to Keith, Jason, Dan, Billy and Steve for all your help in making this happen and being my band for a short while.

ZIP file of all songs

01 Hard To Be
02 Fragments
03 Big Arm
04 Waiting For Machines
05 The Lions Tame

Bonus song
This song isn’t actually part of the EP, but my friend and local hip hop artist Big Now decided he liked the music for Waiting for Machines enough to lay down a few rhymes on top of it at the end of the song. The result is great, and obviously very different than anything I can do. Have a listen:

Waiting For Machines, featuring Big Now

Songs of the Month was a project I did in 2005 (obviously, from the title). It was mainly an exercise for me to keep me writing songs constantly. It worked out pretty well. I only really dropped the ball in two months (which I suppose IS 1/6 of the year), and made up for one of them in January 2006. Anyhow, a few of these songs (Nostalgia Makes Confusion, Lying Down, Recess, The Down Side) ended up being used as material for the band I put together later on, The Low Hello. So the exercise proved fruitful. It’s interesting (to me at least) to compare and contrast these Song of the Month versions with what we did in The Low Hello.

ZIP file of all songs

01 Jan05 Nostalgia Makes Confusion
02 Feb05 Lying Down
03 Mar05 That’s What People Say
04 Apr05 42 Up
05 Jun05 World Will See
06 Jul05 Park Our Heads
07 Aug05 The Down Side
08 Sep05 Let Go The Resource
09 Nov05 Recess
10 Dec05 Strong Leader
11 Jan06 They Call It Sunshine

Somehow, my friend Rob and I got enough people together to have a band for a long enough time to record this EP. We had talked about it and played together for a while, jamming in my apartment or at his house on songs that I had written. I worked at Whole Foods, and he worked at Harmonie Park Studio, a place where the likes of Aretha Franklin have recorded. I met a bass player named John at a New Year’s Eve party, and in turn, he knew a drummer named Terry. We started practicing in the middle of the night at Harmonie Park, thanks to Rob’s boss being a good guy. We eventually recorded this EP there. And then, when a name for the band couldn’t be agreed upon (the Square Miles was really just MY name for the band… everyone else had their own ideas — I didn’t care that much, to be honest, as long as we played), we promptly broke up. Which is perhaps the stupidest reason for breaking up. Oh, there were other issues, like Terry not exactly liking the band, and me losing my Whole Foods job, and John being homeless. Anyway, all probably for the best. My favorite of this batch is Alibi.

ZIP file of all songs

01 Alibi
02 The Joneses
03 Reconstructive Surgery
04 Figured Out