Hi, internet person, and/or fellow robots. You have arrived at daveme.com. You must be wondering, who is Dave Me?
Dave Me has written an album of music, and therefore, I have written an album. Appropriately enough for a musician known as Dave Me, the album is called Self-Expression.
Don't get me wrong – I don't mean to promote this album. It's not very good, and some of the songs are like, so many years old. But hey, listen to it if you want – whatever floats your boat. Suit yourself; be your own tailor.
You can check out the album here on this page, with this magical link that scrolls down below....
If you are so inclined, you could also check out my Soundcloud, which has a lot of the same songs as the album. But why would you do that when you can check them out here? I guess it's kinda social and stuff, if you like being blasted with garbage ads, or you want to be tracked by our big tech overlords.
I don't want to be a successful musician because the music industry just chews people up and spits them out, and then makes people make music they don't like. Music is a little hobby for me - or rather has been a little hobby of mine. I haven't done it in quite a while for a few different reasons. Nevertheless, here's some of the best of what I have done, such as they are.
Guess what? These songs are in MP3 format. So your browser can probably play them unless it was written in the 70s. Or you can download them if you want.
If you want higher quality versions, you can email me at this address and I'll send you some. Notice how this email is masked? Ha, you thought you were gonna get my personal email, but I totally faked you out, potential groupie! No groupies for me *sniff*
⬇ Download whole album (52 MB)
This is a little ditty I recorded while in an Apple Store on GarageBand on an iPad, and then uploaded to Soundcloud before leaving the store. It feels to me like it's about being carefree and playful like a child in an organized place, like Apple Stores often are. This has a brightness that I like. It seems to say it's ok to express yourself, and even if you make a mistake, it's still ok.
This song is about a girl who had some problems with her Nintendo Entertainment System - abbreviated "N.E.S." for short, that I subsequently fixed and was lauded for. Sigh, I remember her so fondly.
I wrote this as part of another album I never released. It's about a particular, personal part of my life story, which I won't go into here. This song is about the feeling of guilt that could accompany dishonesty — and how that could lead to bad things, like blaming other people for things they're not responsible for. I really like the guitar solo in the middle and the guitar stylings throughout. The lyrics are a bit incoherent at times, but I think that contributes to the sense of inchoate rage and self-hatred. It is a dark song.
This song was about that time that I met a woman who invented a time machine, and she took me on a trip to the past, and then maybe about sometimes living in an imaginary world that doesn't really exist.
Have you ever had bedbugs? I don't think I have. But I might as well from just imagining it, and sometimes your imagination is bad enough. I wrote this first on guitar, and I am not that good at playing keyboard, but I think this one is better with the keyboard.
This song is about a person who thinks he's enlightened, but really isn't — he just likes to travel. So the idea for this was that a lot of people like to travel, but it isn't necessarily a source of enlightenment. The protagonist basically follows a hedonistic lifestyle, and does progressively more empty, and eventually depraved things in his travels, until by the end he's fully insane. It also has five languages because I was challenging myself to write a song in multiple languages – English, Dutch, German, French, and Spanish. I thought the guitar solo was kind of cool and melodic - I did it in one take, and then I spent two weeks learning to play it again, by slowing it down.
I spent so much time working on this one. I mean months. And I think it's only just maybe barely ok and passably mediocre. Sigh. One time I was involuntarily confined in a mental hospital, and this song is about analogizing that time as a character who is trapped, but then invents a machine to escape captivity. I really like the guitar solo at the end which kind of sounds like a helicopter. There is also a little faint guitar solo right before the end which is so triumphant.
I saw Jonathan Mann, the musician who has been writing a song every day for a considerable length of time, at a CocoaConf conference in 2016. I saw him write this Double Dongle song live in his presentation and it was really cool. I decided to try writing a song every day myself for 30 days. "Machine Learning" is the best song that came out of that. It came about after I had gone to a meetup discussing machine learning. I also had taken a class on machine learning a few years prior, so I was primed to write this, including as much of the terminology and process of machine learning that I could get in there. It's kind of quirky, and I love it.
I wrote this one when I saw a palm tree near my apartment, and I was inspired by analogizing it to my growth. I was thinking about how the Earth's atmosphere was affected by plants. After the rise of plant-like organisms, maybe the sky looked different. So in a way, you could say that the trees built the skies as a result of their own growth, and that a tree might call out building the sky as its own accomplishment, which is a metaphor I am in love with because it feels so profound. So I incorporated that idea in the climax of the lyrics. I don't think I had read it at the time I had written this song, but another related thing I love is a quote from The Inner Game of Tennis about "The Rose." That idea is that a seed at all times contains its entire potential, and thus there is no need to criticize it for not being its final form. It's a beautiful idea, and you can find it here.
This is just a cute one about childhood romance. I like the culmination of going to heaven at the end, the spiralling of the lyrics, and the counting, which sounds like kids learning to kiss each other more. It has a playfulness I like.
This is me singing over a well-known GarageBand jazz loop in a sultry way. What can I say? I'm a lonely romantic. It's kind of meh, and if you've heard the loop elsewhere it's a bit cheesy. But I do like the vocals, and sometimes I do get emotional to hear the loneliness in it.