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.

I still really like the lyrics on this one

She plays with time
The days are longer in between
When she disappears
She shows up in my dreams

And when I wake up
it feels like a day away
that day I’ll lose her
by trying to make her stay

And think the chorus melody line is pretty dang catchy

I’m happy with the sound of how how this turned out, and there are a couple of lines I really like (and one stolen/paraphrased from Emily Dickinson), but the rest could use another go through.

The whole thing came about just messing around with layered harmonies, which I’m an absolute sucker for.

This one has been around since 2012 or so, and I’d tinker with it on the piano from time to time and then I decided to get lost in the recording process on a weekend in February in 2016.

The act of taking a song from a rough sketch to a fleshed out work is without a doubt my favorite creative hobby. I completely lost track of time working on this, and spent all of Saturday and most of Sunday in my home studio putting it down, improving it, trying different things, and overall just having the best time. That’s where I’m happiest.

If other people enjoy the end result, that’s a nice bonus. But I’m thankful that this isn’t my livelihood right now, and I can write and record for me. If it pays someday, even better.

But even if it doesn’t, it’s not going to make me stop.

This song took so much effort to put together, and it’s still not quite right. But I still like it pretty well, and my friend Mark’s bassline really pulls the whole thing together.

They say that you can’t hold to the past
They say that time moves so fast
They say I’m fool, for dreaming of you
But sometimes, you wish fleeting would last

This is a lullaby I wrote, and I still think it’s really sweet.

It felt like my girlfriend at the time was always glued to her social media, and I jokingly wrote this on the piano one afternoon while she was looking at her phone. Then I wrote an overly preachy essay about social media addiction (now so cringe tbh), and attached this song to the end of it.

This song is the only thing I don’t mind you seeing, now, internet stranger.

Most of the songs I’ve written are semi-autobiographical, so writing a silly funk song about nothing was a pretty nice change of pace. I was just messing around on the keyboard and yada yada yada this came out.

I don’t want no heath food
I got my collard greens
Come down to Shreveport
Or down to New Orleans

The bayou’s not in Oakland
It’s not in Illinois
You’re talking baseball
But I’m not taking score

Does this even make sense? It doesn’t matter—I like it.

If we get together
well you’ll see what I mean
I don’t want your health food
I got my collard greens

These next two lines are a direct quote from a tennis coach I had in college who yelled at a foreign-exchange student whom, from what I remember, kept moving away from the middle of the court.

Read the rest of this

Let’s not obsess over the details, but several years ago, I somehow ended up with a folder full of voicemails on my computer. Most of them were from my brother (Roger) and skimming through them, I thought it was pretty funny that they all sounded so similar: “Jeff, It’s Roger, [message]”

If there’s one person’s voice in the world who I know, it’s my own brother’s. So the fact that he always announced who was calling really cracked me up.

I had these voicemails for years, and always thought I should do something with them. When his birthday came around I felt a little inspiration, and started with the simple idea of just joining them together.

But that wasn’t enough, so I thought I’d just put a simple repetitive backing part behind it. That seemed better, but I felt like it could be more.

A few days later, using all the time allowed (up to a few minutes before his birthday dinner), I ended up with what you heard above.

His reaction? Unbelievable. On the floor, gasping for air, especially at 1:00, and at 1:30 when the guitar came in and it was clear that these messages were not stopping.

I posted it a couple of other places, too. On MetaFilter music, it ended up getting featured on their monthly podcast, which was awesome. Here’s the clip where they talk about it:

And then, it blew up on reddit, and ended up getting 14,000 plays.

I don’t know if I can ever top this as a birthday gift.

This melody popped into my head one afternoon and I didn’t have any lyrics for it, so I started paging through my Evernote for lyrical scraps, where I came across the first verse, which I’d written a couple of years back.

Like a pine tree trying to hide its needles,
Like a ginger pretending he’s blonde
Well that Saturday, when I slipped and told you how I feel
Ever since then the feeling’s been gone

I also found another completely separate lyrical scrap:

Well you say you’re classy
but it’s just a veneer
you’re independent
as long as I buy all your beer

Read the rest of this

This is one of the earliest fully formed songs I ever wrote. I recently found the ancient demo and it’s all there, just with some slightly different lyrics.

My friend Mark really nailed the guitar solo in the middle.

Started doodling on the piano over Thanksgiving in 2012, and this came out. It’s just ok for me.

The lyrics to this song are from a 1965-1966 John Lennon postcard. I made it because of a reddit thread, and at the time was absolutely thrilled with what I came up with. Nobody else even tried really.

But I still really like it!

This was one of the first things I recorded after rediscovering songwriting in 2011, and it really made me feel alive.

Years later, I’m still pretty into the keyboard solo in the middle, and the whole drum track (not such a bad sound for one pretty cheap microphone on the floor) but the lyrics, the lyyyrrriiicss! Yikes. I was so blinded by getting the sound that I as long as the rhyme worked I was satisifed.

I’d like to retry this one, add another verse, and put some lyrics in that actually make sense. That’s what 10 years of songwriting perspective gives me.