She's a Black HalloWEEN Cat

Jacqueline likes to ask me questions that she already knows--or "knows"--the answer to. So when she asks me, "What kind of cat is Jet?" (who, yes, is black, and who is named after the Paul McCartney song), if I say something like, "She's a Kitty Cat Cat!" (since I know nothing about kinds of cats) she will act aggravated with me and hiss, "No, she a black halloWEEN cat!" After she'd done this bit a few times, the phrase stuck in my head, and, like a lot of phrases, it turned itself into a piece of a song. Unlike most other phrases that turn into pieces of songs in my head, though, it turned into a trumpet song.

I play a little bit of guitar (specializing in the Em, A, C, D, and G chords, with occasional forays into E, F, and Am territory), can tap a tambourine with some facility, and have been known to play "Go To Dark Gethsemane" on a recorder, but that is pretty much the length, breadth, and depth of my musical ability. So I did what any 21st Century Man would do...I opened up GarageBand and messed around with the Trumpet sounds. And it was okay. But it didn't sound like the sound I heard in my head.

So I went to Mel Owen Music on Shelbyville Road and asked if I could rent a trumpet. The answer was Yes, and the price was reasonable...but there was one catch: in order to rent an instrument, you had to take lessons. I wasn't particularly averse to that, so I signed up. It didn't take long before I discovered that the lessons weren't taking me where I wanted to go, though, so after a few of them I quit, returned the trumpet, did some research, took a deep breath...and on August 3, 2017 I went onto Amazon and ordered a LJ Hutchen Bb Trumpet with Plush-Lined Case for $249.99. Which is pretty cheap for a trumpet. But it was Good Enough For Me. And I started trying to write my first trumpet song, "She's a Black Halloween Cat." I got the central riff down pretty quickly, but since that only lasted for 8.18 seconds, I obviously needed to do a little something something with it. So I repeated it, of course. 16.36 seconds down...maybe another 3 minutes to go, right? Piece of cake. As I played around with the riff and saw where it wanted to go, though, variations on the sound began to occur to me. And in some cases they were a lot easier to work with, so I started to write other songs. The first one I finished I called "Hey Aha"...because after I finished recording it I thought it needed some kind of vocal effect, and when I sat down to do it I found myself chanting, "Hey aha!" over and over again...and I thought it worked pretty well, so what was meant to be a scratch vocal ended up being the vocal vocal. Then I started working on another offshoot song which was kind of long and involved, but there was one section of it that begged for More Trumpet, so I recorded that piece separately...and layered something like five Really Me Playing The Trumpet trumpets into it...and ended up with "Alone For Two Minutes." Which was, as you would probably have guessed, two minutes long. That one went through several permutations, and I began to discover that some of the permutations actually were different songs...or maybe more like different movements in a symphonic composition if that doesn't sound too pretentious. So that song in the longer version became "Alone," which had very little trumpet but a pretty killer (imho) bass line. I was still trying to get "She's a Black Halloween Cat" down, but then weird shit started happening in my head. Little snatches of trumpet which I then incorporated into some outré rhythmic settings. Like "Ki'Dee Caut," named after the way that Jacqueline says Mickey Mouse pronounces "Kitty Cat." (As you can tell, Jacqueline's fingerprints are all over this project.) Other pieces came into being, and I began to realize that I was writing an album. 

And yesterday I finished it. I think. I'm still hearing some things in my head that didn't make it onto the recordings, but sometimes you just have to say enough is enough, y'know? So I thought I would share it with anybody who wants to share it. And thanks to SoundCloud, I am able to do that.

Here ya go.