Monday, 3 March 2014

My Way

This song must have been recorded more or less around 1992 too. Unlike the other songs on our "Demo 2" (even though I dont remember if there was a demo 1) this one is played by me alone.

I remember that we have recorded this whole "Demo 2" in the band room at the music school "Studio de musique André". My friend Guillaume Poitras was going out with the daughter of the owner of the school (and yes its her that the song Mr. Cornflakes is about) and as a result of this he had the key to the music school and we got to go there for free to practice after the school was closed. That was actually very nice of the owner

But that one time we had practiced quite enough and we were planning to record. So we connected a tape deck to the console all the instruments were connected in and just played our songs. So all that to say that when I played this song, even though I was playing it all alone, everybody was there with me :)

I'm gonna kill her!! A rage song!!

Well I guess I got a little bit mad because I had a crush on that girl who looked half asian at school but I never managed to get any attention from her, so I wrote this song about that. It's an angry song and it sounds pretty kewl!!

For some reason the band had taken the habit of ending the song on a drum solo. Drum solos are fun and really cool, plus it gives us a chance to notice the drummer and what he can do.

It's our first drummer François Brousseau who started the tradition, but after we changed drummers for the local drum legend Iohann Laliberté this part became even more interesting. This song features a pretty intense drum solo by Iohann who must have been around 15 or 16 years old at that time.

This must have been recorded also more or less around 1992.

I guess none of my friends spoke much english at the time, so they did not realize how horrible the lyrics were!!

Beatin', possibly Miss Steak's first song

I must have written that song around 1991 when I was 14 years old. I was a big fan of Guns and Roses back then and I used to love listening to their Use Your Illusion album while singing along with the lyrics from the tape cover. I did not speak very good english back then so I didnt understand most of it, but one of the few parts I could understand in their lyrics was mentioning "beating a dead horse". I liked the image, to me it represented the fact of working too hard on something that was hopeless.

I wrote a song about that metaphor. However due to my poor english skills at the time the grammar is slightly deficient in the lyrics, but it is still a very nice little piece I find.

I like the way my voice sounds in this song, somehow it does not sound like its me singing, but it sounds good, not that I sound bad but you know what I mean :D

Miss Steak's first success, Mr. Cornflakes

This must have been recorded around 1992. The lyrics of this song were initially "I am in love with my best friend's girlfriend". But since my best friend was in the band I felt this was problematic, so before anyone can ever hear the song I changed the lyrics to "Mr. Cornflakes, avez vous faim pour déjeuner?" (Mr. Cornflakes are you hungry for breakfast) as a joke and the rest of the lyrics were about a guy eating his breakfast and spitting it out.

It was a hit!! All my friends and everybody at the school were crazy about the song, they asked me for tapes, were playing it on the student radio. I literally became a school star after making this song. I was the Mr. Cornflakes guy!!

Back then we already had a band that I founded myself called Miss Steak but our drummer, François Brousseau was an ok drummer but he hated to practice and repeat the songs, he kept complaining. One friend of a friend Iohann Laliberté was renowned to be a monster drummer for his exploits in the "Harmonie Jeunesse" (an orchestra for kids organized by the city or one of the schools). My best friend and I had asked him to join our band but he was not sure if he was interested he said he would think about it. One night at a party I played this song for him and that's when he decided to join the band, its also him on the drums on this recording and every Miss Steak recording up to date, there are no Miss Steak recordings with François Brousseau but I have recordings of him playing with my previous band "Explorers".

Mr. Cornflakes was the song that initially gave life to Miss Steak and put them on the map, but a few years later we had so many other songs that were so much better and less lame we started refusing to play this song, partially because we were so tired of it :P