Live Video and new track out now - The 26th of May

LIVE VIDEO BY MATT VEND AND THE TENDER TEN:

This song is only 4 chords with no chorus to speak of, it’s extremely simple, and the lyrical approach is what makes the song unique. As it really is nothing more than a paragraph I wrote while riding on the sky train through Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand. A diary entry, a random captured moment, weaved into a poem for the sake of a song.

Looking back on the writing process, now in quiet reflection. In a subconscious way, I was inspired by The Jam’s classic 1980 hit, “That’s Entertainment” where songwriter Paul Weller absorbs whatever subject matter he can see in his peripheral and merely puts pen to paper. The result is quite magical and “That’s Entertainment” in my opinion is up there with any great pop song released in the ’80s.

Even though my arrangement and playing style is completely removed from The Jam’s classic minimal poetic homage to dreary Thatcher-era London. I feel in some strange way I was channeling the stream of consciousness nature of this timeless track.

I was consumed by work while staying in Bangkok and never found much time to play guitar. Yet in the long hours in between class waiting to teach at an extremely daunting public school, I found time to write and I wrote whenever I could. Since returning to South Africa, during one of the most turbulent times in modern history, I suddenly found myself with numerous other commitments, yet within these perimeters I also found my guitar lying among a pile of clothes.

I picked it up and strummed away while looking through some of the poems and paragraphs I had been scribing into a notebook on my recent sojourn abroad. I slowly started to make sense of the images and reflective feelings I had put onto paper.

I have often been an artist who has neglected the marketing side of making art and when I completed this track in a studio format, I felt I wanted to do something more with it than just put it up on Soundcloud as a single for it to eventually be considered for a future album. Just to be lost in an endless sea of Spotify playlists and Bandcamp amnesty days.

So on a lonely Sunday morning in Durban, I decided to do nothing more than plug one condenser mic into my recording desk just to record a dry take of guitar and vocals live while I recorded video using my webcam on my laptop, so I could later splice the audio with the video and release it as an accompaniment to promote my new song. I noticed the additional recording from the video recording sounded thin and the condenser mic recording sounded equally as thin and didn’t add much, the experiment had failed.

However, I did do something right in the performance aspect and it was perfectly in time to the video so the audio linked up with minimal effort. I looked down at my mixing desk and noticed 5 other channels, so I just went for it and started picking up whatever I could find, the washboard met my hands first and I sang backups as I played the aluminum cleaning utensil with a screwdriver.

I wanted to capture as much of a live feeling as possible, so I purposely worked quickly turning the monitors around as if to mimic a live show, purposefully using bleed from the speakers and the natural room sound. Finally, I added some overdub harmonicas, organ, and more guitar and the result was quite distinctive. As mentioned I have limited editing software for video on my laptop, so a friend of mine with video editing knowledge put the audio and video together and did the final editing, post-production, and added the lyrics. I think the result is pretty original and I hope to do more of these bedroom videos soon.

Hope you enjoy watching it.

Love

Matt

Credits:

Artist: Matt Vend and the Tender Ten

Song: The 27th of May (sky train ramble)

All music and lyrics by Matt Vend, guitar and vocals performed live, with overdubs by Matt which include vocals, harmonica, washboard, and organ.

Filmed by Matt using his laptop web camera,

Post-production and video editing by Alexandre Marrier DUnienville

Download and stream the studio version here:

https://soundcloud.com/mattvend/the-26th-of-may-sky-train-ramble

Lyrics:

 

This city sprawls,

And makes other places,

I have been to,

Seem like:

Dusty villages, backwater towns, and lonely outposts in the desert.

 

Monstrous buildings,

Shimmer from aluminum windows,

Fake gold furnishings,

Grotesque, beautiful.

A shining example,

Of capitalism, juxtaposed

With grimy street fighting.

 

Opulence and survival,

Attractive women,

And lonely, longing, drooling men

Searching for companionship,

Or

Searching for a paycheck…

 

All my old haunts have shut down.

Now they just haunt my sub-consciousness. 

Feeding my retinas,

With Déjà vu and nostalgia.

 

Street art, street life, jungle.

The Wats and vacant lots.

Dilapidated shacks,

Rack and ruin,

Perfectly in tune with the chaos.

 

Everything here has a life of its own

Everything here, oh everything here,

Everything here has a life of its own.