Review 2

I copied the review mentioned in the previous post below: Several people in South Africa told me they couldn't view it from the link.

My apologies also.. I was informed of the review by Keith but it seems Abbey did the review. Thanks Abbey. I may have made it sound as though Keith did the review in my previous post.

Anyway, here it is:

Artist:Tim Pepper
Album: Beautiful Frustration


Tim Pepper knows how to write. His intelligence and way with words shows not only on his latest album, Beautiful Frustration, but on his website and his personal blog. He calls himself quiet, saying he does more listening than talking. Maybe he should speak up more often; he clearly has a lot to say, and a smart, quirky way of doing so.

Beautiful Frustration is a poppy, happy album that sounds like Jason Mraz, without being so cutesy it hurts. Pepper is smart, and his lyrics show it. Though he's sometimes cheesy, he has a way of capturing a melody that makes it okay. “Life is a journey/life is a road/every man carries/every man's load” he says on “Life”, a song that could be painfully cute if anyone but Pepper was singing it – instead, it comes across wise. “Yellow Dress Girl” is a warming song about a beautiful girl Pepper ran into, as though he's a much happier James Blunt, looking at the bright side of wanting someone you can't have instead of lamenting it. “I wanna learn to fly on eagles wings/I wanna fly into the sky/above the troubles in my life” he sings on “Eagles Wings”, an upbeat song about looking to God for help. Pepper is a Christian musician, but even those who don't share his religious views can appreciate his wit and charm.

The music on the album isn't phenomenal, but it does it's job. Pepper writes his own songs, but has a backup band that do their part in wrapping up the songs without adding enough to make it a band instead of an artist. Pepper isn't an extraordinary guitar player, but he's not trying to be. He's playing songs with genuine lyrics that you can tell he honestly means, and the music isn't as important. In another genre of music, this could be disastrous, but in the Mraz/Jack Johnson genre (most male singer-songwriters), it's not that big of a problem.

Beautiful Frustration is, seemingly, exactly what Pepper wanted it to be: a friendly introduction to his honest way of speaking and his simple but pleasing guitar parts and melodies. It's an album with a perfect name – the tracks are about frustrating subjects (life, love, living for God, etc), but they're written and sung in a happy, upbeat way as though to prove that while life can be frustrating, you should still be happy about it. Pepper might not be groundbreaking, but his music is sunny and fun, and since that's what he's aiming for, he's done his job.



Abbey K. Davis – MuzikReviews.com Staff
January 23, 2010
©MuzikReviews.com
For Questions Or Comments About This Review Send An Email To info@muzikreviews.com

My Music Reviewed

MySpace: http://www.muzikreviews.com/reviews.php?ID=944

Yesterday and the day before were spent fighting with a new software plugin called EZ Drummer. Great program that doesn't seem to work with my recording interface. In the heat of my battle I got a message from Keith who does reviews for this website. This made my day so I made myself a celebratory cup of coffee.

Check it out and let me know what you think. If the link doesn't work, copy and paste it into your browser...apparently some of my friends across the ocean couldn't get the link to open.

Words of Weight

Powered by Podbean.com

I haven’t always been much of a talker. My brother is a talker. He talks to everyone. My brother and I were pretty close growing up so I’d often find myself listening to conversations he was having with whoever we were hanging out with at the time. If you’ve been sitting on the sideline, listening to a conversation for while, it becomes increasingly difficult to jump into it with every passing minute. After a while you start to think that “jumping in now is just going to be weird. People will look at me funny”. Well…that’s what I thought a lot of the time anyway and to go along with it I’d get nervous. I don’t know if this is something that people experience in general but I have had my fair share of speech related nervousness. It’s not a fun way to be…getting all jittery just thinking about saying something to someone.

In school we had to give speeches in front of the class. I used to get up and just stand there for a minute before telling the teacher sheepishly that I hadn’t prepared anything. In retrospect I got it very wrong since the embarrassment of preparing a speech and giving it ranks about 0.5 on a scale of one to ten, whereas that of standing in front of the class for a minute or two saying nothing ranks about 7.75. Eventually, at the suggestion of my mom I prepared a speech on the origins of Socks And/Or Stockings. It was daring…no-one else was giving speeches on socks. It was unique and even a little funny…socks are funny I guess. It pretty much cured me of the fear of speaking in public. I could go on a tangent here about the fear of failure and how it relates to this but I shan’t.

But real, live, one on one conversation still gives me a little bit of anxiety. On t.v. you get moms and daughters like the ones in The Gilmore Girls. Those two ladies are a couple of dictionaries trapped in women’s bodies. No-one in real life talks like these girls. At least no-one I know. We are mostly full of “umms” and “you knows?” and “likes”. Our conversations are a little less fluid than lava. Somehow by extracting the meaty bits, discarding the “umms” and “you knows” and reading the nuances of the body language of our co-talkers we manage to communicate.

Anyway… words are pretty important things. We say them all the time and rarely think much about their impact or what they really mean. We’ve all said things we wish we could take back. We’ve said things too soon. Sometimes we never say the things we should. This is a song about saying too much, too soon and receiving too little in return. It’s a relationship song. It’s about how some words, or maybe what those words represent, mean way too much to be encased in such small packages. At least one person has told me that they think the song is crap. I disagree strongly with that and I’m sure that there’s at least a few of you out there that think as I do.

Steaming Pee and The Evolution Of Man

Powered by Podbean.com

PUSH PLAY


Above is a representation of the apartment where I live in Nashville, TN. The red and blue spots represent the ambient temperature; red being warm and blue being cold. Room 2 is where I spend most of my time. You will note the little table in the corner with the computer and chair and microphone stand (yes, that’s and microphone stand with microphone drawn there). Room 2 is toasty warm. Room 1 is more or less closet space and a passage way from Room 2 to the kitchen and/or Bathroom/Loo. You will note that the Bathroom is the coldest room in the house.

I wrote the following piece a few days ago but I felt I needed to preface it with the floor-plan of my house:

There is steam rising from my pee-stream, which is breaking the icy surface of the water in my toilet. Behind me the floor dips ever so slightly towards the wall. My faucets have all been left dripping since the weather dropped into the ‘teens (Farenheit) a couple of weeks ago. The constant dripping has led to a drip from the bottom of my shower. I can’t figure out where the water is coming from exactly but the end result is that there’s now a sheet of ice on the floor that I have to step over to go to the bathroom. At least it’s frozen and therefore more or less contained. My plan for my day off tomorrow is to chip the ice off the floor and try to stop the drip.

According to scientists mankind is evolving. We, collectively, are getting better at surviving. We are the pinnacle of the evolutionary chain. Living as I do right now I don’t feel very evolved at all. I feel like I’ve taken a step backwards. But I suppose any change is evolution so maybe I am evolving.

I wrote a song a few years ago when I was trying to write punk songs and it currently has had three incarnations. I’ve never been happy with the recordings. The first two are a little more rock n’ roll but I used a terrible drum loop when I recorded them out of necessity. The most recent recording is an acoustic version and in a way I like this one the best because the song is fairly introspective despite its punk-song origins.


I thought it would be interesting to put all three of these up to demonstrate the only kind of evolution I believe in. My voice has changed, the guitar parts have changed, some of the melodic elements of the song have changed and the structure even changed a little but in the end it’s still the same song. An amoeba is an amoeba. A monkey is a monkey. A man is a man.


p.s. after listening to the original again I decided it would be best if you didn’t have to hear it. So there’s only two versions here.

Acknowledging The Journey

image courtesy of this guy

Push Play



Powered by Podbean.com

Tonight I sat in a little music bar called The 5 Spot and listened to Jacob Zachary from Baton Rouge. I had to board a plane a little over a year ago to get from South Africa to Nashville, Tennessee. I had to stick it out through good days and bad until this very moment. I had to spend Sunday afternoon being a little bored to get motivated to go out and find music tonight. I had to get through a rock band at 12th and Porter (FlashMob…. They were good and loud and all things rock but ultimately not what I was looking for on this Sunday night) before moving on to The 5 Spot. I didn’t know who Jacob Zachary was before tonight. I didn’t know he was playing but as soon as I walked in the door, ears still ringing from FlashMob, and started listening I was glad my night ended there. Sometimes the destination matters and sometimes it doesn’t. Tonight it did but I didn’t know where I was going until I got there. I’m just glad I decided to take the journey.

I can see some parallels in searching for good music and searching for treasures in day to day life. With music though I at least have some idea of what I’m looking for. I know what I like as soon as I hear it and I could probably give you a general description of the kind of music I think is “good” if I was pressed. Day to day life is another thing entirely. There are small treasures everywhere if you bother to find them. It might be an interesting conversation with a stranger or discovering a new thing. It could be a moment when the sun is setting just right. It could be walking into a music bar and being pleasantly surprised by what you find.

I’ve been trying hard lately to change my natural settings. If there’s a little sliding switch inside each of us that controls our attitude mine has certainly spent more time near the “not so fabulous” side in the past few years. I don’t know if it got permanently set to “Negative-Nancy” by genetics or if it just spent so much time there that, eventually, it stuck. Nevertheless I’m trying to get it stuck somewhere on the positive side of neutral. It feels like I’m making progress and that makes me feel better about myself and the world in general.

But I think it’s not only the positives that make us who we are. A one sided coin isn’t a coin at all. Instead it’s a party trick. I’m not advocating that we all become a bunch of grinning idiots. Whether you’re searching for “good” music or searching for treasures in life you’ve got to be willing to go on the hunt. If you can set out each day with a hopeful and positive attitude then the bad times don’t seem so bad and they’re less likely to knock you off course. If you can accept the knocks as part of life and refuse to let them get you down then you’re more likely to get where you want to go. If you reach the point where you get almost as excited about the bumps in the road as you do about the road itself then you are becoming a true adventurer; dedicated to the journey and the treasures you may find along the way.

I Dad It!

Push Play:






Powered by Podbean.com

So I’m going to be a dad…. On March 26th or some date close to that I will be a brand new father and that is something I have very mixed feelings about. One minute it’s, “Yeah! My boys are good to go…I’m gonna be a dad!” and the next it’s, “Oh man! How am I going to pay for this? I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.”

Carissa and I have somehow managed to keep our friendship throughout the ups and downs of this thing. There have been days when remaining friendly has been more difficult than others. There have been lots of 2 hour phone conversations…the awkward, frustrating, difficult kind. There has been exasperation. There has been sadness. There have been moments of laughter and tenderness too. There have been doctor’s visits that were educational to say the least. I wouldn’t recommend this approach but if you ever go through a pregnancy with someone you will certainly get to know them.

Carissa and I are not “an item”. I can’t say we are not together because having a child with someone thrusts you into a kind of togetherness with them whether there is any romantic interest between you or not. I think it’s fair to say that the situation has taken us both by storm. What neither of us could have known was just how difficult it is to be expecting when the mother and father are not together. They don’t write books called, “What to Expect When You’re Separated, Single and Expecting.” (I think that might be a fairly entertaining book though). There is an awareness that this situation is a little outside the natural order. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be done.

I hate to think of my little baby girl as a mistake; Somehow all of this works out for the best in the days and months that are queuing up behind today. Somehow God is working His magic and it’s a blessing, not so much in disguise, but perhaps being pieced together as if it were a puzzle. But there is no denying that I wasn’t planning on procreating just yet. I was perhaps a little irresponsible (that’s a really nice way of saying…I lost my head and wasn’t thinking at all). So maybe she’s in the grand scheme of things. She’s just showing up a lot sooner than I expected.

Most days I wonder about all the same questions and never really get any answers. I wonder about how I’m going to date in the future…there’s always going to be that moment of telling Potential Love Interest that I have a child. I wonder how it’s all going to work being a single dad sharing parenting responsibilities with a single mom. I wonder if it wouldn’t be best for myself and Carissa and Baby Girl if we found adoptive parents for her. At the same time I try to imagine the best possible outcome for all of the above (and several other) scenarios. There’s no point in trying to change reality because it doesn’t change…so I want to make the best of the situation.

I don’t know how all this will work out but in that part of a person’s mind where small wisdoms take hold and quietly make their presence known, I feel a couple of burgeoning wisdoms nudging me. The first is that whatever happens, Baby Girl is going to be an amazing person who deserves to be loved and cherished and recognized for the gift that she is. The second is that the two of us (Carissa and me) need to give this situation our full and undivided attention. In five years time I don’t want to look back at what’s happening now and wish that I’d done more to be a positive factor in all of this. So in the decisions I make today I’m trying to keep that in mind.