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» member profile:
Captain!
» genre:
Pop >
Pop General
» location:
Cameron Bastedo
» label: unsigned
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Retrograde Pop
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During my teens I wrote songs like a madman. In one year, when I was 16, I produced 11 albums worth of material. During the 6 year period between my 16th and 21rst year, I produced approximately 700 songs. I have a hard time believing that figure myself, but at one point in my early twenties I counted them up and it came out to something close to that figure. Since I’ve long since lost all the recordings and most of the written documentation, I can’t go back and check the figures any longer. Now, admittedly, much of the material was terrible. It had to be; I started writing with a guitar in hand before I knew how to play chords! In fact, the first four ‘albums’ were all noise, some of it very interesting noise – at least we thought so. I say ‘we’ because I wasn’t working alone; my best friend Steve MacKay was my partner in musical crime. Our band was called ‘Garbage’ and that pretty much says it all. Man, I knew every nuance of sound on those early tapes intimately well, because I listened to them endlessly. The first track we recorded was called ‘Toilet Symphony.’ It had three principal parts. The first involved these soaring electronic sound effects we had recorded at The Ontario Science Centre; the second part involved sounds and music speeded up four or five times, so that it sounded like flickering tingles on a wind chime. The final portion was a native choral group chanting. You can see why that track -and indeed most of those tracks - are not now reproducible, since the cassettes on which they were recorded are long ago lost. I have thought of trying, but I suspect, you wouldn’t thank me if I DID reproduce them! Yet, somewhere at about the half way mark of that first year, we began producing some very interesting music, primarily because Steve was a good musician and we were both restlessly creative. Soon enough I learned to play rhythm and from that point on the songs came on a nearly daily basis. If I didn’t write at least three or four songs a week I wondered what was wrong with me. I wrote on banjo, ukulele, piano, and guitar – mostly guitar and mostly: I wrote. At the current time, there are a number of the songs from that era already on my other page, at www.soundclick.com/camsevensong Here is the list:
For those of you who know my music, you will recognize that these are some pretty strong tunes, in my opinion. With some of these, I will do re-recordings, since Soundclick won’t let me transfer the tunes and keep their play tally intact, and also since the originals were frequently different. But that’s not the main deal, that’s just a start. The songs I’ve already lifted from that era are only a tiny sampling of what I produced in my teens. In one of my journals, I found a list of hundreds of the song titles from that time period. As I read through the list, about 1 in 4 rang a bell. About 1 in 15 triggered the tune and some of the lyrics. I began to long to record some of those tunes. That’s what this page is about. Recovered treasure – ha! As I’m writing this, I remember that one of our songs – this one Steve’s not mine – was called ‘Gems in the Mud.’ Yeah, among all of the muck of those tunes, there were some real gems. I hope you enjoy them, and I hope you agree. |
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Check out my other musical endeavours Camsevensong (Main page of original music - mostly songs, some instrumentals.) Sonic Salad (Electronic instrumentals) Retrograde Pop (Songs I wrote during my teens) Beatz Me! (Hip hop and techno beats) Gotcha Covered (Cover songs of public domain music I’ve enjoyed) The Blue Gerbils (My pet gerbil's page.) SingtotheLORD (Acoustic praise to the Lord) |