Steve.Savitzky.net / Albums / coffee /

Coffee, Computers, and Song! Coffee, Computers, and Song! is Steve Savitzky's first studio album; it's DONE and available NOW from DAG, Random Factors, and CD Baby. Just click the link. You know how to click, don't you? You just put your finger on the mouse and... go.

Note: The official directory for the album is (now) here. This directory is a copy of the working directory, and it's updated daily. It includes mp3 and ogg copies of all tracks, in whatever state they were in at the end of the day. At the moment, their undisclosed location is only available to people who have preordered the CD. After all, they've already paid for it. The rest of you will have to wait.

Status

See the to.do file.

Tracks

Warning! These are automatically generated from the most-recently exported .WAV file in each track directory. They're not necessarily in any shape to be heard!

0x01	(01)	Guilty Pleasures (Savitzky)
		This was actually written in realtime--I finished it at about 2am after everyone else had gone to bed.
0x02	(02)	The Programmer's Alphabet (Savitzky/Trad.)
		My first computer song, based on various sailors' alphabets.
0x03	(03)	The Mushroom Song (Savitzky)
		Wrote this one while my job at Zilog was going down the tubes. They'd just hired a CEO named Sack, and that's just what he started doing...
0x04	(04)	Stuck Here... (Savitzky/Trad.)
		Ever wonder what it would be like to have your mind uploaded into a computer? You could live practically forever...
0x05	(05)	Bugs (Savitzky)
		A big favorite with kids, for some reason, based on a poem I once read in Datamation magazine. It sometimes acquires topical verses.
0x06	(06)	High Barratry (Savitzky/Trad.)
		Performed at Baycon2007. There are two kinds of barratry: in civil law it's filing bogus lawsuits for harassment or financial gain. In admiralty law it's like piracy, only an inside job. Both fit SCO.
0x07	(07)	Vampire Mega-Byte (Savitzky)
		An old Silicon Valley folktale from the days when men were men and transistors were germanium.
0x08	(08)	Demon Lover (Savitzky)
		I wrote a story that included a description of a duet between a singer/songwriter and an AI built into his guitar. So of course I had to write the song to fit the description.
0x09	(09)	Silk and Steel (Savitzky)
		Another song about the AI guitar. I still don't know the full story behind this one--there's a big gap there.
0x0a	(10)	Daddy's World (Savitzky)
		I wrote this one for my older daughter based mostly on some of her favorite computer games.
0x0b	(11)	The Little Computing Machine (Savitzky/Trad.)
		A song of seduction, obsession, and madness. Written while listening to Golden Bough singing "The Black Velvet Band" and wishing I could afford an Apple ][.
0x0c	(12)	Cicero in the 21st Century (Savitzky)
		More than 2000 years ago, the Roman orator Cicero wrote: "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." It's amazing how little has changed.
0x0d	(13)	Paper Pings (Savitzky)
		Sometimes you just have to parody your own song before somebody else does.
0x0e	(14)	I Wanna Be a Webmaster (Savitzky)
		Some of the numbers are a bit dated, but it's amazing how little has changed in the last 10 years. That should be www.mydotsite.net, by the way.
0x0f	(15)	TEOTWAWKI v2.0 (Savitzky)
		As it turned out, the biggest problem the doomsayers of 1999 had was how to dispose of the leftover canned goods. But they may still come in handy.
0x10	(16)	Uncle Ernie's (Savitzky/Trad.)
		Inspired by a now-defunct surplus joint in Oakland called Mike Quinn's.
0x11	(17)	The World Inside the Crystal (Savitzky)
		My first serious computer song. You can always tell the programmers in the audience. They've been there, and they know.
0x12	(18)	Someplace in the Net (Savitzky)
		The Usenet, and alt.callahans in particular, is what made me realize that cyberspace is a place.

Dedication

• This album is dedicated to my father. He introduced me to science fiction (he went to grad school with Isaac Asimov), computers (I first read the Algol 60 Report in one of his ACM publications), and folk music (we snuck into a sold-out Pete Seeger concert at intermission one time when I was about 12). He got to hear many of my songs; I only wish I'd gotten this album done in time to give him a copy.

Performers

• Steve Savitzky -- vocals, guitar, occasional percussion. Lisp hacking on "Vampire Mega-Byte".
• Robin Baylor -- vocals on "Programmer's Alphabet" and "Paper Pings".
• Callie Hills -- vocal on "Demon Lover" and "Silk and Steel"; flute on "Cicero in the 21st Century" and "World Inside the Crystal"; pennywhistle on "High Barratry", and "Guilty Pleasures".
• Emerald Savitzky -- vocals on "Bugs" and "Daddy's World".
• Kat Savitzky -- vocals on "Bugs" and "Daddy's World".
• Jordan Uggla -- drum on "High Barratry", "I Wanna Be a Webmaster", and "Guilty Pleasures".
• Joyce Uggla -- vocals on "High Barratry", "TEOTWAWKI v2.0", "Mushrooms", "Little Computing Machine" and "Guilty Pleasures".

Other Credits

• Label Artwork -- Bob Daverin of Eagle Unlimited Enterprises
• Album Cover and Photography -- Beckett Gladney (artbeco.com)

Equipment

• Guitars: "Snuggles", a 1952 Martin O-15 that I found, in rather bad shape, at an estate sale and purchased for an embarassingly small price. "Ruby", an Ovation thin-body, is my guitar for convention gigs and appears on "High Barratry".
• Percussion: I have a modest collection of shakers, claves (heard on "TEOWAWKI"), and other noisemakers. The shaker used on "TEOWAWKI" is a little metal mint tin (a trade show giveaway from Yahoo!) filled with a dozen or so 4-40 machine screws.
• Microphones: My studio vocal mic is a CAD E200, a large-diaphragm condenser mic. The guitar mic is an AKG C1000S. I used a Shure Beta 57 for Jordan's drum part.
• Computer: All recording is being done on a homebrew Linux box, currently with an AMD CPU in a very quiet Antec P150 case. At one point I was using a fanless 1GHz VIA C7 CPU, but although it did a good job of recording scratch tracks, it didn't have quite enough computrons for overdubbing. The soundcard is an M-Audio OmniStudio 66. Field recording for, e.g., sound effects, "High Barratry", and the occasional emergency track, was done using a Macbook Pro laptop with an Edirol UA25 USB interface.
• Software: The recording machine's OS is mostly Debian Etch, with low-latency kernels from DeMuDi (the Debian Music Distribution) and 64studio.com. All recording, editing, and effects processing were done using Audacity.

License

• The songs and performances on this CD are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 US License. Some Rights Reserved.