Ok, so what is Tim Hall Music? Well, basically, it's music that I've written since the demise of my band, or if you want, solo music. I've arranged my projects into little cohesive units, given them titles, and then made them tangible by duping them onto first cassettes, and then CDs. None of this music has been released on any label, just hand distributed by yours truly over the course of time to my friends and family, and as a sort of demo/calling card. There are very few copies of each "album" in existence. They are listed below, in chronological order. The thumbnails can be clicked for a larger view.
"Crevices"- 1994
I made this demo in 4
days, using a 4 track recorder and a drum machine. It was right after my band
"Shed" had broken up, and I had ideas laying around. Needless to say, it wasn't
a recording milestone or anything, but the songs do have a certain character to
them, and the guitar sound, a Yamaha SBG 200 through
a fuzz box and a jive blaster for an amp, is surprisingly good, albeit primitive
in style. There were some pretty heavy leanings towards "Grunge" on this. The
cartoon pic of me was drawn by my buddy Phil Deckard, who was the bass player in
Cry Wolf.
The
lyrics on the inside of the J-flap are in my handwriting. I printed them at
Kinko's, duped cassettes on my machine, and gave them away to friends.
"Imperfection"-1997
To say that I was in a dark place when I did this would be grossly understated. Nonetheless, to this day I am proud of it because I feel that it had a statement to it, and that it was artistic. I had purchased one of those "Studio in a Box" digital contraptions, which as limited as it now is, I still use, and I got way into playing my guitar. I spent a long time on this, I wanted to leave my mark and tell the world something (don't we all?). The style is more of a "classic rock" kind of thing, and the guitar in the picture is Godiva, now known as Chiquita (see the Guitar page). I used it through a Fender Pro Junior, along with a Digitech RP6 for the entire thing, except for "Fields", the last song (acoustic).
I spent a few duckets getting some of these manufactured. Can you guess what the Catalog number RIP CW stands for? Like I said, I was bummin'. One of the songs, "Hey", was originally demo'd by Shed, a later incarnation of Cry Wolf. The song was originally my idea, having about 75% of it or greater already mapped out, but I collaborated with Steve on it to make it a "band" thing. Later, when I did this project, I went back and redid the song the way I originally heard it in my head, with my chorus idea, and changed the solo sections and breakdowns to my own style of guitar, and the song was reborn. "Mouthful of Mud" was a symphony-type idea that I had, and I used my guitar through a pitch shifter with a lot of distortion to simulate a cello, and it came out great. "Obvious Oblivious" was a sort of psychedelic R:&B thing, almost like something off of U2's Achtung Baby CD, and "Rubberneck" was indicative of a style I was to get into more in the future: Country guitar.
"Tumble"-2001
So after I got all that stuff out of my system, I wanted to do something a bit
different. I had been watching the TV. show
"Austin City Limits"
a bit, and I
kind of liked what I saw going on. American music. Kind of an amalgamation of
Blues, Country and Rock
was what I had in mind. I wanted it to have a distinct
mix of electric and acoustic guitar sounds, ala the Beatles and Creedence
Clearwater Revival, my two childhood favorites. I wanted to retort to the last
thing I had done, so the first song was "Tumble", which was about getting back
to that place of being un-jaded. The first lyric was "I wanna be in love again,
I'm so tired of being in hate"- and that was the only statement I wanted
to make. The rest was pure escapism, fantasy stuff that I made up, such as
"Belinda Rae"- a song about a bank robber's girl who tips off the police to his
whereabouts, and then takes his gun and car and picks up where he left off, and
in the process becomes America's Sweetheart. And "Sure as Hell Can't Drive", a
"Beverly Hillbillies" kind of thing that takes a poke at a girl who's great on
the eyes but murder behind the wheel. One of my favorites was "Ghost Town
Saloon", kind of a Chris Isaak/Twin Peaks (I loved that show) thing.
"Walkin' to the Greyhound" was a hard driving "cowboy" song, that to me would
sound good done by either Johnny Cash, or Metallica. "Jack Rabbit" is the
closest thing I've ever written to a children's song, although like Mother
Goose, some of the verse is not for the virgin ear. For the most part, the
guitar sounds on this project were way cleaner, and I experimented with
singing in a lower voice, something I've never been very good at.
