Brian M Weidemann
Self-produced, acoustic and electric, guitar-driven alternative/rock/folk/pop music with sharp, witty, and grammatically sound lyrics.
1
top 50
5
songs
360
plays
Blow Me, Wendy Blow Me, Wendy
Don't worry, there are no bad words in this song. It's just filled with many blatant puns of a certain nature. Guaranteed to get a smirk out of you!
Posterity Posterity
Rockin' guitar track in the style of Boston that makes a bold statement about not caring that the world hasn't heard it yet. Or something like that.
An Amateur's Lament An Amateur's Lament
An amateur songwriter laments his abilities to write a decent song about the girl who left him, in an ironically eloquent and stylistic song, acoustic guitar and a few harmonies.
Filler Track Filler Track
The self-referential lead single from my fifth album, Hand Gestures & Sarcasm, this song rocks!
Moved On Moved On
Featuring my signature lyrical stylings accompanied by acoustic guitar with a Les Paul in the mix for flavor, this piece is a strong, intelligent, introspective break-up song.
Self-produced, acoustic and electric, guitar-driven alternative/rock/folk/pop music with sharp, witty, and grammatically sound lyrics. Love songs and philosophical dissertations often merge into a single piece. Puns galore and metaphors too taut for their own good, it's all here!Band/artist history
You'd be best not caring about the history, but if you do, Ill be brief. I started writing songs way back in high school. This is early 90s era were talking about. And they were all Songs About Girls. Really, they were. I taught myself guitar on my dads old nylon string acoustic and soon I was hounding him to get me an electric. So I got onenot so much because Im good at hounding, or even that my parents just bought me things when I ask for them; for these things werent true. I think I got it because of my dads aspirations that his son might grow up and be the next Ian Hunter, or perhaps a lesser mortal rock-god, which still aint bad. (Dont worry Dad, Im workin on it!) I got an overly-priced Fender Squire Strat. I loved it.
From this point, I got really good at mimicking Van Halenisms and battering out Nirvana tunes and, basically, being an obnoxious high school kid with an electric guitar. And an amp. And a distortion pedal. And daydreams of stardom. And a highly developed air-guitar technique, which translated very poorly into actual-guitar technique. But I got better. I did. Trust me.
It was also around this time, Junior and Senior years of high school, that I discovered MIDI. Now, keep in mind, this is MIDI as it was in, like I said, the early 90s and consisted solely of little beeps, popping noises, shallow-sounding drums, and piano patches indistinguishable from bass guitar patches. But I learned all my rudimentary arranging, sequencing, and orchestrating skills from playing around on my dads 286 IBM compatible PC, and a cheapo Casio MIDI keyboard (which I still have, and even use listen for the strings in the PWC recording of That One Song). I sequenced Nirvana songs. I know Smells Like Teen Spirit inside and out. (As a side note, I'd like to point out how cool I felt when, after years of actual music education, I pointed out that the fading distorted F chord at the end of that song is a Picardi Third, since the feedback comes in pitched at A, the major third in the F minor key the song is played in. Picardi Thirds, just to be clear, are not often found in pop music. Its the classical composers who put major triads in the cadence of a minor-key piece, not grunge bands with unintelligible, screaming front men. This actually contributed to my admiration for Kurt Cobain and his music, whether or not the Picardi thing was intentional. Great tunes, great tunes. Anyway, where was I?)
And I wrote songs. And I wrote bad high school poetry. Which became songs. And I fell for this girl or that. Infatuation. Crush. Admiration from afar. But then I realized I hadnt a chance (with the girls), and so the cycle begun anew and, in the nature of cycles, continued quite cyclically. Years passed. Galaxies collided. Stars were born. Reality television still didnt exist at this point, but that has nothing to do with the story anyway, so ignore that bit, please.
I entered college with a Music Composition major and attended for two-and-a-half years. I learned a whole bunch of stuff about theory and progressions and Dominant Seventh chords and Neopolitan Sixth chords and how brilliant Bach was, and so on and so forth. I composed many things, for many different kinds of instruments, but I always went home and jammed on my guitar, applying what I learned to the songs I wrote. Now, Im not saying the the songs I write are all brilliant manifestations of a superior music education (only you can be the judge of that), but I do try to incorporate my knowledge of theory as much as I can. And Im always willing to learn more.
My lyrical abilities improved by, if from nothing else, just writing tons of stuff, followed by more tons of stuff, interspersed with megatons of crap. Im told that the turning point in my lyrical (as well as musical) ingenuity was when I wrote Just Friends, an only slightly bitter divulgence of feelings about the first girl I ever went on a date with. The silence drives me crazy 'cause all I hear are my own thoughts. Like bullets, they shoot through my head. A memory is a million shots. Those were the first lines I wrote. Those became the opening lines to the song. (I still dont get why she agreed to a date date, which was what it was, when she had no intentions whatsoever of anything more than being [guys, prepare to cringe] just friends!) From there, I wrote more and more. I grasped the concept of crafty writing, wry turns of phrase, alliteration, perfect meter and rhyme schemes, and I still, to this day, try my damnedest to write lyrics to the best of my poetic abilities.
Actually, I stopped writing Songs About Girls several years ago. Id like to think that I have matured, in fact, Im pretty sure that thats the case. I also have a girlfriend. Which is good. (And, interestingly enough, Ive never written a song for or about her. [editors note: Please mentally append an "ex" in front of the aforementioned "girlfriend" and, perhaps, revise the never-written-a-song part with the phrase and now please listen to a clip from my song Soliloquy if you would be so kind.] ) If you look at the lyrics of some of my classics youll find such jewels as Dearest Yvette, why didnt I ever get the chance to sing those words to you? and the ever-catchy Sonya, hadnt I known ya, I wouldnt think Id write another rhyme. Sonya, when Im alone, ya fill the vivid images in my mind. And the funny thing is, both these songs got recorded and released on albums, long after they were written and shunned.
June 2000 saw the beginning of an era. I signed up with mp3.com, just at the tail end of the epoch in which they as a company actually cared about independent artists. Soon thereafter, the charts featured the likes of Madonna and Blink 182 and we little guys were shunned. However, they still provided a service which allowed me to make alb ums available. So since I gathered a series of Tascam 4-track recordings and some Digital Orchestrator projects, made them mp3 files, and uploaded them, I figured I could put them in some semblance of order and have instant albums. It worked.
Nobody bought any of them, but they were still what I would call albums.
One by one, I would endeavor to make a better album than the last. Old songs got rehashed and rewritten. New songs emerged, many with the sole purpose in life to fill up the next album. But additionally, my songwriting abilities improved as well my home-recording experiences. Slowly my habits refined. Slowly my recordings got better. Slowly my equipment collection expanded, as did my guitars!
And to this date, the number of albums I've sold can be counted on a couple fingers.
Long live Rock!!!Have you performed in front of an audience?Yes; because when I'm dead I will be unable, unfortunately, to perform any of my music.
Your musical influences
There are definitely elements in my music that I would say sound like some things done by these artists: Spinal Tap, Boston, Barenaked Ladies, They Might Be Giants, Elliott Smith, Rush, Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, Collective Soul, Guster, John Mayer, Lisa Loeb, Sarah McLachlan, Ben Folds, Kristin Hersh, and Fountains Of Wayne; among others, Im sure!What equipment do you use?
is a complete run-down of my entire home-studio workstation.
Costa Mesa, CA
USA
ID
249948
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