About
Key of Em, Tempo 110
1980, College Station
A 12-bar cosmic blues tribute to Jimi Hendrix, who of course I idolized as a young guitar player. I always felt his story was so tragic because his career was so brief. This is a musical version of a poem I wrote in a high school Creative Writing class my junior year. It was never intended to be a song, but I was inspired in 2022 to convert the poem to one after reading a biography of Jimi written by Philip Norman called “Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix”. Jimi’s sound was so unique and so wild, I always wondered where it came from. The idea of a “God of Noise” unleashing “the burly sounds of life” is something I think is one of my more original conceits, and I’m pretty proud of it. And who knows – it could be true…
The video includes probably the most sophisticated animation out of all of the videos created for these songs. It is the result of a collaboration between myself and the very talented Mike Fisher from Galactic Fish Productions in San Antonio, Texas. Mike taught a Community Education class on Adobe After Effects and Motion Graphics at the UTSA School of Art in the spring of 2022 I attended when I was working on these songs. I felt that “God of Noise” was one of the strongest tunes I had recorded, and so I really wanted to punch up the video with some special sauce. Mike did the drawings for me, and carved them into layers I could then import into After Effects and animate using some of the techniques we had learned in class. Mike and I held a few Zoom sessions where we reviewed the drawings, and he gave me suggestions on how to animate. It was a very fruitful collaboration and I’m very proud of the results. To give you an idea of where we started in this process, here are a few of the early sketches Mike provided to me.
The Hendrix inspired guitar solo in the middle was taken from Chris Buck’s great “Friday Fretworks” channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqYd5X6Dx58&t=580s&ab_channel=ChrisBuck
NOTE: This song was remixed and added to the Happiness is a Warm Guitar album in July of 2023.
Music available on all major streaming and social platforms. Watch video below.