Jeff Keen

Recording an album in an actual recording studio is on my bucket list. I want some songs I wrote on vinyl and to be out in the world far more than I want to be on a stage. And I think this is the year that I do that.

After nearly a two year songwriting slump I’m back in it, and have started organizing songs I have, re-working things that need re-working, and picking out the best ones to put on an album.

This exercise has been reaffirming, and I’d like to share for accountability purposes the excuses I have told myself in the decade re: why I couldn’t record an album.

• I don’t have enough songs - lol
• The songs aren’t good enough/ready - do it anyway (and yeah, they are)
• I should play the songs out in public first - But why
• I don’t have the money - I spend more money on less important things
• Who would listen to it? - doesn’t matter, me?
• I need to get a band together first - eh
• I can probably record them well enough myself - you absolute loon

This Time It’s Different

I’m pretty proud of this one. This was my first demo recording of it just to get it down, and I hadn’t yet written the bridge or the second half, but I think has the feeling I’m going for in it. Somber lyrics paired with a little skip in your step, ya know?

This version is the full song, adding a bridge and another verse, but I think at this tempo with just a piano it sounds way too sad. Pretty, but sad.

(Nobody to blame but myself for the one line that’s embarassingly off pitch. Randy Jackson would have a field day on me.)

My girlfriend suggested I re-record the vocals on this to sound sleepier, and it’s made all the difference. She’s my at-home producer now.

I dug up three different fragments from college and pieced them together to form this kinda cute song.

I really like how this song came about. The first verse was the root (and about something else entirely), and the second verse I had lying around as a songwriting exercise I did where I tried writing a verse out on a typewriter without a tune in mind.

It’s the type of pain that leads
into a night that bleeds
into a morning that theives
any joy you hoped it’d leave
the divining light
held back into the night

First song I’ve doubletracked the vocals on, and I really like the bassline.

I think this one is cute, but I’m not sure about the end break. Part of me feels like it’d be fun to have the whole song like that.

I find this hard to watch in 2022, gotta admit. I don’t know if it’s just remembering so clearly the state I was in at that point or what, but I’m half tempted to rip this thing down.

I entered the tiny desk contest in 2017. I didn’t think I’d win, place, or get tons of attention. I just wanted to enter, and seemed like a fun thing to do.

Before Strange Brew shut down, I played this song at an open mic and got some really great feedback on it which is why I selected it for my entry. My friend Andy had a great desk that I used, and setting up a little performance space and recording some songs was a nice distraction from reality.

This song sprung to life after re-watching all the seasons of Mad Men in 2016. Towards the end Megan says to Don, “pull back on the throttle a little”, yada yada yada, and this song came right now fully formed.

Read the rest of this

Here’s a fragment of what I’m working on. This is the first verse, the pre-chorus, the chorus, and a start of the next section and then chop. I used to have my live demo take recording posted here, (but I yanked that fucker down for reasons I explain below) and instead here’s a more recent fragment of the home-produced recording I’m working on.

I came across a letter that John Steinbeck wrote to his son Thom in 1958 on the subject of love, and thought it was pretty great.

I loved the sentiment and the wording of the last line of the letter, which inspired this song.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Writing this in 2016 felt like I leveled up in songwriting, and I was so dang giddy about it that I didn’t sit with it long enough to realize that it wasn’t done! So I pushed a half baked demo out the door and enjoyed the couple of strangers on the internet liking it, and the reactions I got from playing it at open mics.

Four years this song got kicked around at home from time to time, and I’d always stall on recording it properly. It was only last year when trying to pull myself out of a songwriting slump that I realized that what I thought was a chorus was actually a pre-chorus and so I still needed to write the cornerstone of the song.