Month: August 2003

You know, if I weren’t a logical person, I would think it’s time to stop chewing gum.

I’ve had three teeth now that have had various problems.

1. I broke this one in half crunching down on a popcorn kernel. The half that broke off was irreperably shattered when I masticated the next bite.
2. Another tooth simply fell apart while chewing gum.
3. And the third tooth, several weeks ago, felt like the middle just dropped out of it while chewing gum. Suddenly, just like tooth two, I had some extra ‘crunchies’ in my gum out of nowhere, and gum kept sticking to that tooth due to the large hole that just opened up in it.

Downright weird! In the last two cases, I’d had a clean bill of health from the dentist on prior examination, but the decay was either disguised by an existing filling, or in the case of tooth 3, it was at an angle that was difficult to discern in standard X-rays.

Anyway, I got it repaired yesterday. I’m not normally nervous at the dentist, but for some reason yesterday I was nearly terrified. It was a very uncomfortable feeling, but after a lot of pain for several hours yesterday, the tooth today doesn’t hurt anymore and just feels a little sensitive to cold. And it’s nice that I can go back to my gum-chewing with no pain and no gum sticking into a hole.

But I still worry that I’ll end up like many of my relatives, with massive dental problems by the time I’m forty. And I brush twice a day and floss once a day! Then again, I didn’t get into that habit until I was twenty-five and began worrying more about my health. I guess twenty-five years of poor dental hygeine are just catching up with me…

This has been an interesting week on the religion side. By and large, I’ve simply preferred to avoid discussing religion due to my somewhat… *ahem*… non-standard beliefs in this predominantly LDS town. However, this week I’ve had a couple chances to yak with people about it, and while it’s been slightly tense and stressful from time to time, overall it’s been very positive.

There have been four specific incidents; click “read more” below if you’re interested.

The Sunstone Episode

Anyway, out of the blue an acquaintance who lives in my neighborhood, Dan Wotherspoon, leaves me a note in a thick, large envelope filled with three “Sunstone” magazines. I won’t reprint the whole thing here, but the gist was that he’d noticed I haven’t been to church in many months, and his wife had heard that I’d read some things and had some doubts about the church.

Not quite on the mark, there. I consider myself largely agnostic (although lately I’ve begun referring to myself as a “Bright“), but I’d read precisely zero anti-mormon literature before the day I decided I could not find sufficient evidence for the existence of God to continue purporting to believe. Unfortunately, I was still Sunday School teacher for several months after that and it’s pretty tough to try to teach one thing and think another. Oh, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, I popped by his house to ask about his motivations. I’d heard about this Sunstone thing before, but only in the context of some General Authorities getting really upset about people considering themselves liberal, intellectual, or homosexual Mormons and putting together a commitee to watch them and eventually kick them out of the church for their non-faith-promoting activities.

Sunstone wasn’t at all what I thought.

Dan and I talked for about 40 minutes, and by the end I was convinced this wasn’t some sort of strange fellowshipping effort on his part. From where he sat, the news that I was an “atheist” (yeah, I used that word, because I really detest the fact it has such a negative connotation yet really means “not a believer”, not “anti-religion”) was a surprise — I guess he thought I followed the normal track of acquiring anti-mormon literature, questioning, etc. Guess my effort to remain somewhat incognito regarding my beliefs panned out there. He reassured me that I wasn’t “the talk of the ward”, and that he’d belabored writing me for about two hours. He’s the editor and a member of some commitee for Sunstone, and invited me to attend their symposium if I’d like to.

I’m kind of thinking I’d like to. Although Sunstone seems less like Mormon intellectuals, and more like Mormon fence-sitters, nevertheless I think there might be some kindred spirits there, and I certainly agree with (most) LDS moral ideals. There are some areas where I think conservative LDS philosophy is very over-the-top, but at the same time until I find another organization which can provide friendship for my children and family with similar goals in clean living and morals, I’ll probably be sticking around.

Still doesn’t mean I’ll pray over meals or offer “blessings” of any sort, but I’m comfortable bowing my head in respect for the beliefs of the person offering them.

The Justin Conversation

I yakked with my buddy Justin on the phone for several hours the other night, and he admitted to me he was a bit shaken up by my disclosure of the fact that I don’t consider myself religious anymore, and have, in fact, acknowledged that I don’t know if there are even Gods or other supernatural beings. I hope he won’t mind me talkinga about this; if he does, I’m sure he’ll let me know. Anyway, he’d had a conversation with his wife talking about the state of his soul and his own questions. I’m no religious advocate, but I hope talking to helped him sort out where he is, and what he wants to become. It was a pretty deep chat, and sometimes just having a friend to talk to is important.

He was there for me when I was weirded out about the whole MRI thing, chronicled earlier in my blog. Friendships go both ways. Glad to have a friend.

The Sam Call

I emailed Sammy G, one of my best friends from high school, wondering how to get in touch with Ben. This flowered into about 30 messages over the course of one day, with me CC’ing Ben and Sam on every message, just catching up on life and people we knew. He heard that I was kind of thinking about religion, and gave me a call to see how I was doing. Although it’s been a year since I let my wife know about my change of religious beliefs, I still struggle every day with de-programming myself and trying to see things as they really are, rather than how I’d prefer to filter them thruogh my own preconceptions. It’s incredibly difficult and draining, but rewarding as I feel better able to cope with reality.

Anyway, Sam’s a bass player in several bands. His advice? “Believe in four strings and the truth”. Never heard better advice. Maybe you have to be a musician to get it.

The Daughter’s Questions

My daughter, Sara, also ended up inquiring about religion this week, asking me why I don’t pray over meals anymore (it’s taken her a year to notice?), science, and how everybody’s related through Adam and Eve. I gave her the brief overview, and typical of children she simply accepted it and said “that’s cool, Dad”. We even started making up games to play with the Scientific Method, figured out how to make a hypothesis, and did a few experiments and observations to come to know the world around us. I think Zach is still a bit young (at nearly 6 years old) to totally “get it”, but he tried hard 🙂 Baptism time for Sara is rapidly approaching, as she was born in November. Being that this is usually a family occasion, if my mother or my dad haven’t already read this blog and figured it out, I’ll have to make sure they know what’s up before they get surprised that someone else is baptizing my children. That is, if Sara decides she wants to be baptized. I want to make sure she knows that this is a choice, baptism is an optional thing that you should do only if you believe in Jesus and want to show him that you are willing to be born all over again to show your commitment to him. I’m pretty certain she’ll want it to please her Mom, and since I’ll be officially neutral on the issue after explaining the options, she’ll figure out who she won’t upset by her actions.

Oy, veh, and with the upcoming birth of our next child in February, life will become even more interesting.

At least now, I feel like I can approach every day honestly. I have a clear conscience that I’m not pretending at being anything that I’m not, that I’m willing to change when I encounter truth, and that I won’t allow peer pressure and groupthink to force my choices. I know what’s right, I know what’s wrong, and I know that I put everything I had into discovering the truth about deity, reality, and faith. Now I’m into discovering truth, helping others cope with change, and trying to improve the world. My contributions are largely through message boards and mailing lists, but it’s a wonderful feeling to know that I’ve been where somebody else is, and I can share my coping strategies with them. You don’t have to go it alone in your disbelief; there are millions of people who are also honest with themselves and acknowledge they don’t know.

Done yakking. My hope is just that some other person out there, one day, can read this and realize there’s somebody else who’s been in their shoes. My name’s Matthew Barnson, and I live in Tooele, Utah. You can easily look me up and give me a call if you’re in that situation, and you’ll find a sympathetic ear.

As long as you don’t call in the middle of the night. I’m grumpy that way 🙂

I have very few friends on the face of this planet. Justin Timpane is one of them. Three of my best friends in high school were Sammy G, Ben Schuman, and Kevin Graham.

So Justin found himself in the possession of a CD, created by Brett Clawson (an acquaintance of his and mine). Sam, Ben, Kevin, and I formed a band in high school called “Wayward Sun”. Brett had taken it upon himself to extract the audio from a tape we’d made, entitled “Together Again For The First Time”, and put it into CD format. That must have taken hours; I couldn’t believe someone would put in that much time.

Well, Justin took it a step further. He ripped all the songs, piped them through Cool Edit, applied some noise reduction and other techniques to restore the sound quality, and here’s the result! Unfortunately, our original master was crap, and that’s reflected in garbling on a couple of the tracks, but the songs still sound better than they ever did on tape. Click “read more” to read the full description and either download or stream the MP3 files.

All songs are 320kbps MP3, so if the tune sounds bad, blame it on our mastering & recording abilities at the time, not on the MP3. This, unfortunately, means you have absolutely zero chance of streaming these files unless you have a 480kbps or higher connection. (ISDN? Forget it. DSL? Maybe. Cable? Probably, as long as it’s not a peak time.)

Wayward Sun was:

• Jon Brusco: Bass. He left the band before we produced any tapes. If I recall correctly, he and Sam were like peanut butter and motor oil: they just don’t make a good sandwich together. Funny that they were my two best friends, but didn’t like one another much. Ben replaced him.
• Ben Schuman: Keyboards, Vocals, Guitar
• Kevin Graham: Drums, Keyboards, Vocals.
• Sammy G: Keyboards, Bass Guitar, Vocals.
• Matt Barnson: Keyboards, Guitar, Vocals.
• Ed Copeland: Guitar. He replaced me when in 1992 I went on a mission for the LDS church, and was the guitarist featured on “No Further ?”, the band’s third album.

Yeah, it was kind of funny that we all played the piano. We used this in a couple performances by having all the band members switch positions to play a different instrument. I’ll never forget Ben Schuman showing me up on guitar playing a cover of “Silent Lucidity” by Queensryche. I’m still bitter 😉

So, enough with the formalities!

Stream the whole shebang from song 1 to song 10 by clicking this link.

• Wayward Sun, our title track! I believe Ben’s Schuman’s exact words, after playing bass on the keyboard at our first rehearsal after Jon Brusco stopped playing bass for us, were “Guys, playing bass for this song is really boring.” I think it was at that moment that Sam began saving money towards buying his first bass guitar. Sam, wasn’t that bass Jon’s old one, actually?
• A Moment Away From You. Featuring Ben Schuman on lead vocals, this piece forever cemented Kevin Graham’s hate of electronic drums, and Matt Barnson’s shortcomings as a lead guitarist.
• Pushing Us Down. The requisite 16-year-old rage against the power of parents. The whole tune started one day when I was goofing off with the Ensoniq synthesizer in the front room of my folks home. Sam was chilling out on the couch in the family room, around the other side of the house. I had it turned up pretty loud. Anyway, I was playing with the sequencing function, just noodling. I noodled for about an hour, then took a break for a minute and heard Sam yell from the next room “Hey, don’t stop playing, I’m writing words for that!”. Thus the song was born. I think Sam was pissed at his Dad that day. Or was it is his sister? He spent a lot of time pissed in high school 🙂
• Wrong Words. Required slow tune. This also was a fun tune to kick around as a quartet at parties. Kevin would sit down to the piano, and the rest of us would crowd around. We’d act like we were so into the music, really artsy-like, all the while eyeing the girls that would inevitably cluster aound us like seagulls on garbage. Mmm, I don’t think I like that allegory, but anyway, it was a great chick-grabbing tune 🙂
• Madness. This was one of Wayward Sun’s signature tunes. We liked it so much that at one of our concerts poolside, we were asked to tone it down by the management. Kevin had a pretty killer double-drumset for that show and from that point on began lusting for double kicks.
• Mad Mad World. This is Ben, all Ben, except some vocals! This one fits into the “great tune but impossible to play live” category. And made Kevin even more bitter about electronic drums 🙂 If I ever upload our second album, you’ll notice that we never had just a drum machine on our next two albums. I sang along with this one yesterday, and realized I could hit the low notes. When we originally recorded it, we had to speed up the tape so that I could. And then Ben overdubbed me anyway 😉
• Sweet Lori. What was Lori’s last name, anyway? I can’t remember, but she was one of those “untouchable” girls. She was, to my 15-year-old eyes, incredibly beautiful, delicate-looking, sweet high soprano voice, and acerbic wit that made you think you were stung by a butterfly. Apparently, Sam thought the same and wrote this ode to her.
• Into The Night. This is, quite possibly, one of the most boring tunes in existence. I wrote it one day following onto the success of Sam’s rebellious “Pushing Us Down”. I figured I could do “evil” just like Sammy G. I learned that NOBODY does Evil better than Sammy G. And here’s the permanent record of it. I click the “skip” button in XMMS (an MP3 player like WinAmp) when I get to this one.
• The Sky Is Always There. This is, alternatively, titled “This Guy Is Always There” because, well, it’s impossible to tell which one is the right words. According to our first-ever concert for, oh, crap, what was my old girlfriend’s name? (Edit in February 2005: Her name was Grace. Don’t remember the last name, but she was the girlfriend that had pity on me for passing out during photos and cracking my head against the stage floor in high school). Her dad handed us $200 for performing there when we’d agreed to work for $30. That permanently inflated our fragile egos, I think. Anyway, I introduced the song as “written for a dead aunt”, and unfortunately pronounced “aunt” “ant”. Alas, the imagery of singing to an insect is more powerful than the original intent.
• On My Way. It provided a nice bookend for the opening tune, but unfortunately our “fast song skills” at that point rendered “Wayward Sun” and “On My Way” as sounding really, really similar. This song is probably most memorable as living on forever as a much slower tune where Ben Schuman lampooned all of our band’s tunes. Think Weird Al’s “Polkas on 45”, but a little stranger.

This is a repost from my old blogging software, Movable Type. I figure, given my planned posting of some old Wayward Sun tunes, it would be good to give a little background here and there.

—————————–

February 28, 2003 The Genesis of Wayward Sun

Ever been interested in how the terrifically obscure East-coast band, Wayward Sun, got its start? Read below to find out more. I’m trying to make it moderately entertaining, but it may not be so to anybody but me 🙂

Wayward Sun, or Two Guys and a Dead Cat

I have a thing for cats. I like them alive, I like them dead… I just think they are cute, fluffy, and the name “cat”, rhymes with enough other words that it’s pretty convenient at some point to have a cat in most songs.

One day in the summer of 1988, my buddy Jon Brusco and I were chilling in his garage. I’d just bought a really cool new electric guitar. It was a ?Mako? brand that I’d picked up at Victor Litz, the local guitar store, for about $75. I was freaking EXCITED, man. Unfortunately, I didn’t yet have an amp for my guitar, so Jon plugged his bass into his amp, and I plugged my guitar into the second input jack on the amp and we plugged away. The song of the day was an innovative little ditty I’d proudly entitled, “Fred the Cat”.

Fred Fred the Cat Fred was Dead On the welcome mat

Whoah, Fred. Fred the Cat. Fred was fat That was that

Fred. Fred. The. Cat. (end with flourish, attempt at soloing, rolling around on the garage floor on the back, etc.)

In case you’re interested, the chord progression was D minor, G major, C major, A minor. Make up a tune to match that chord progression, and you’re probably pretty close to what I sang in at least one of the rounds of singing this song. Jon and I were in stiches over it. Well, at least I was; he laughed politely a few times.

Anyway, so we’re chilling in the garage, and we figured out that we wanted to make a band. Of course, the first step in making any garage band is to figure out a really cool name. We tossed around some ideas we thought were cool, stuff like: Flying Butt Monkeys Artistic Nonsense Mud Scrapers Satin Knights Heinlein Lookalikes Football Umpires Wayward Sun Overdue

We eventually decided it was a toss-up between ?Satin Knights? (from a Moody Blues song, “Knights in White Satin”, if I recall correctly), and “Wayward Sun” (a play on “Carry on Wayward Son”, by Kansas). Like all good things that needed deciding, the best choice to make the decision for us was Jon’s Mom. In my opinion, she was the epitome of all things Good and Wise. I thought she was pretty, too, and for a 15-year-old, pretty was pretty important.

“Hey, Mom, I,” Jon began, then had a thoughtful look and restated, “I mean, ‘we'” he corrected, grinning at me, “have a question for you.” “What’s that?” she replied, shutting off the vacuum cleaner she was using on the upstairs hallway rug. “Umm, we’re trying to decide on the name for our band. It’s a choice between Satin Knights…” Jon began, “…and Wayward Sun,” I concluded. “Which one do you think is better?” asked Jon earnestly. Jon’s Mom had a thoughtful look for a moment, then spoke slowly. “Satin Knights sounds like somebody that wants to get you into their beds. Wayward Sun sounds like a disobedient child. Given the choice between a disobedient child and someone trying to seduce me, I’d take the disobedient child.”

Thus the band was born: Wayward Sun it was!

We practiced that summer, and I wrote a theme song for the band. One of these days, I’ll get an .ogg stream up on my weblog so that people can listen to it, but since the original sources appear to be permanently stuck in Ben Schuman’s grandmother’s basement, they will probably be pretty poor quality rips from one of the crappy tapes we made. Maybe one day I’ll fly back East to pick the tapes & original recording deck up to try and re-master the stuff.

Unfortunately, I’m out of time for the weblog today, so I’ll continue this story in another entry later.

I wrote “For Jenny, For Josh” a few years ago upon the death of a good friend’s son. Josh had a very troubled time for his short life, and his death, although not unexpected, was still heartwrenching. I hope that my little tune brings solace to those who mourned, and honors his memory for his parents and others who’ve never met him.

I’ve often though about adding more accompaniment to this piece, and yet may, but by itself the piano seems to work pretty well. Still a work-in-progress, though, as evidenced by several errors in my performance. I’ll work on those before I upload this one to Garageband.

Download For Jenny, For Josh.

OK, so I’m doing recording on a bunch of tunes. I know my one dedicated listener has heard “My Lady” before, but I decided to re-record it so I could get a better arrangement, mix, and recording quality. Hate to put up the same song twice, but the arrangement is different enough that I’m thinking you may take notice!

You can download the new track here. Let me know what you think! I was playing around with mastering options on this one, too, so I’m hoping the overall volume is louder and the song carries more energy.