Freshman Year Music

I actually have two posts two write about when it comes to making music with a good friend of mine, Tom Murphy. I felt like after tonight, with his band, far more talented and successful than anything we ever created together, winning the campus battle-of-the-bands for the spot of opening for MGMT on spring weekend, I should write about something related.

Coming into college, there were 21 of us from my high school class entering Fordham as freshman. I don't know for a fact if that is the most from one school, but I would have to imagine it must be close. Funny thing about that is that it was not a school around here. We aren't from the West Coast but we are also much further than some other schools with close ties to Fordham, especially Fordham's own Prep school which shares the same campus.

I was rooming with a very close friend of mine from said high school and had a couple other close friends of mine who were part of that 21. But there are some kids in this group that I had known, spent time with, and become friendly with in high school but never got really close. Tom Murphy and Warren Rati and not people who I would have expected to get closer with in coming here.

Two weeks into the school year, and they were the people I was seeing the most. Warren lived down the hall from me and Tom in a different dorm building, but they basically were my 3rd and 4th roommates. I think I can actually remember a few times where I came home from class and they, at least Tom, were already in. They learned, early on, that with a student ID card you could easily get my dorm room door open.

We made a lot of music that year. It was never developed or planned or anything like that. We had a keyboard in the room, and sometimes two, and a few acoustic guitars, and we would all just jam for awhile. Someone would decide on a chord progression or maybe just a key and that would be enough guidance for 20-30 minutes at a time. It didn't matter who was talented or not, we just played off of what the other person was doing. There was a time where we developed a serious obsession with 'Lux Aeterna' which is the famous piece of music composed by Clint Mansell for the film Requiem For A Dream.

Whether it was on two separate keyboards or double teaming one keyboard, Tom and I would play the full quartet's worth of string pieces. This was intense stuff, too. If you've never heard the piece, or if it's been awhile - do yourself a favor and check out it out on youtube. It is fantastic.

This rendition of ours was so intense that everyone would just sit in silence, we would turn the lights off, and then we'd just go at it, and when it reached the climax it was like a rock song, but it was just two dudes playing synth strings on a cheap keyboard. All you had to do was close your eyes and you could get there, letting it engulph you.

Tom and I took a few stabs and creating our own music as well. One night in our first semester, we carried over my computer, some speakers, a bunch of cables, my electric guitar, and some other things and set up in a music room in one of the buildings on campus. We played a lot of different things and were probably down in that 8 by 10 room for several hours playing nothing in particular. We did manage to get something recorded that night. It is nothing exceptional and most of it was done in one take, but it's just a reminder of that whole dynamic. I don't think there was ever more than one day off between our spontaneous music sessions. I loved every second of them. There was never any pressure to create something or to impress anyone. Instead it was just a natural occurrence, with anywhere from 2 to 5 people contributing to music that had never been created exactly how this was and would never create it that way again. There is something incredible about situations like that, as quickly as the moment occurs, and the music is made, it is gone, and never reproduced.

I really do miss those sessions.