timothyweber.org

I improvised this while playing guitar for my daughter while she took her bath, one rainy Sunday in 2008, having just driven home from my wife’s cousin’s wedding in Vermont. I was just singing what was going on. Then it seemed worth remembering.

It took two years to get it recorded. The rain storm recording was from last night, after I spent most of the day finishing the solo guitar and bass tracks.

I got my daughter a lap dulcimer for her birthday in… 2007 maybe? Then, of course, I fooled around with it some. One day I was playing this. Clara asked what it was called, and I said I didn’t know - had just made it up - and she could name it. We had been talking about how nice daisies were, and how roses got more respect but in some ways I preferred the daisies - friendly, gregarious, long-lasting. And so she said “It’s ‘The Rose and the Daisy!’”.

Last week her kindergarten class had a field trip to a flower shop. read more...

I recorded this quickly for my daughter’s kindergarten class to practice with. We performed it together at the All-School Program on 12 Feb 2010. Lots of kids sang along! That’s Clara and Katherine shouting the alphabet. My good recording gear wasn’t working, so this is recorded on a cheap condenser mic and a Sound Blaster card.

I have now officially given up trying not to write songs about water. Maybe it’s because they always come to me in the shower? read more...

Clara sang the chorus of this song to herself during her bath one Sunday after spending much of the afternoon exploring outer space. I wrote the verses. We recorded it a cappella - including all the sound effects.

Recorded May 2, 2009 in honor of Pam Weber’s birthday. Hope we can sing with you soon!

I’ve now got the first batch of songs moved over from my old music page. It’s my most recent album (now nine years old), called off line. Took me a while to work out the right way to represent songs and albums in the Drupal content management system, but now it’s all quite easy to deal with and I hope that (and my weakness for shiny new technologies) will help accelerate the process.

This CD, confusingly titled off line, is a retrospective of my favorites from the last two albums, plus some new things. (Hey, one of the nice things about not having a recording contract is that you’re free to revise the past and edit out the songs you’re tired of!) It was time for a CD, and counting the moon was too long as it was… And I wanted to remaster the old songs, and fix things that had always bothered me. So the theme here is “songs from the analog age” - all these songs were first recorded on analog tape, even the new ones. read more...

A contemplative version of the old folk song about leaving, separation, and longing for return.

This song took me seven years to record. I did some tracks in 1993, of which only the harmony vocals have survived. I did some more work on it in about 1996, including recording the piano intro at a place where my friend Sharon was house-sitting. I redid all the lead vocals in October of 1999, then all the instruments in January 2000.

It’s a mysterious song, Shenandoah. I’m told it’s a sea chanty, yet it talks about inland rivers. Maybe it’s addressing the river, or a region, or a person. read more...

“Do you believe in a love at first sight?/Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time.”

Well, of course it does. Sometimes, unconditional love just occurs, with no discernible reason, no excuse for lowering the defenses, and no way to put them back up.

Love at first sight can take many forms. Sometimes it comes (at least to me) in dreams, and I spend the next day a bit dazed and moody and yearning. Sometimes it leads to romance, and sometimes marriage. read more...

I wrote the first verse of this song in an online chat conversation. That may not seem very remarkable, but consider that it was 1987 at the time (~10,000 computers on the Internet, before either the World Wide Web or IRC). The conversation took place on mainframe computers at IBM, where I and my friend Betsy were (supposed to be) working.

The first line was in response to the question, “but why would you?” I don’t remember what preceded that.