 01)
Thoughts Over Coffee 3:31
02) Mind 5:15
03) Ode To Katherynne 4:24
04) The Visitors 6:09
05) That One Song 4:11
06) A Moment Lost 1:21
07) The Waitress 4:02
08) Bad High School Poetry 4:09
09) I, Who Hesitate 5:39
10) Countless Nights Alone 3:58
11) The Waitress: Reprise 1:54
12) Faded Dreams 3:02
*13) [there is NO track 13]
*14) F*** Me, Cheryl 3:06
15) Just Friends: Instrumental Interlude 3:14
*Available
only on Proceed Without Caffeine UNCUT!
After my first two albums went ahead
and got purchased a total of three times, I thought the problem with
the poor sales record was that I didn’t have enough material
available. (I mean, obviously!) I had been laid off from
my job in the summer of 2001 and I needed something to do while I
lived off my savings, of which I actually had quite a bit.
That “something” became two months of dedicated work to a real
album! Unfortunately, all I got was another fake one.
Well, not really. SHW was just a collection of
songs I recorded and TOCC was a cheap attempt to get a
second collection out, but PWC had some time and real
effort put into it, since my third album had to really be
something. I actually consider this an Album. And I’m
still proud of it, even though had I the chance to do it over, I
would have done it better.
Browse
Selected Lyrics • View
Album Artwork • Buy Album from mp3.com
Buy
The UNCUT! Version from mp3.com
A matter of months before this album
started coming in to being, I received my Parker electric guitar as
a birthday present from my then-girlfriend. (Wow, what a
girlfriend, eh?) Most of the guitar on Proceed Without
Caffeine was recorded with the Parker. Because of the
piezo pickup system and the onboard mixer and the stereo
output, and several other things as well, I loved this guitar and it
was a very versatile tool.
Another technique that contributed a
lot to the sound of the resulting album was the first usage of
SoundFonts. Instead of the stock, MIDI drums that came with
the SoundBlaster card, I now had access to downloads of various drum
kit sounds that I could still control through MIDI, still sequence
the way I had been used to. I found two good “kits” that,
while still cheesy and drum-machine sounding, blew away what I had.
This album was recorded, once again,
solely with Voyetra Digital Orchestrator software. I mastered
it and did some editing with Sound Forge 5.0, a trial copy that
expired after 60 days. Fortunately, I finished the album
before that expiration. (For my next album, I used a copy of
Sound Forge 4.5 I got from “somewhere,” but since it’s pretty
much just as good, it worked great.)
After PWC was complete,
uploaded in its entirety, and available for purchase, I recorded
another version of one of my “classic” songs, Fuck Me,
Cheryl. It’s a funny song which plays on the
unwillingness of one’s object of affection to notice the flirting
and subtle comings on that one offers thereto. “Cheryl” is
a fictional character which originated one drunken night when it was
inquired of me why I wrote “all these songs about girls” and why
they all have names like “Oh Suzie” and “Fuck Me,
Cheryl.” When I heard these made-up titles, I almost fell
over laughing (though that very well could have been because of the
drunken merriment more than anything else) and I declared at some
point, “Fuck Me, Cheryl … I have to write that song!”
And so I did. And I now had a nice version of it. But my
album was already “released” and I didn’t want to have to hold
on to the song until I had enough material for a fourth album.
So what did I do? I simply
appended this possibly-offensive song to the track line-up of PWC
and called it Proceed Without Caffeine UNCUT!, in the
style perhaps of those “UNCENSORED” videos and whatnot that
cable television advertised quite a lot of at the time. And so
both versions became available, and still are.
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©2003 Brian Michael
Weidemann