Jon Cogburn's Blog

Devil In My Pocket - Hometown Blues

This is the first one I've done with photos. I think these are all in the public domain. If any of them are not let me know and I'll get it off youtube in a New York second, or (if you want) put in a photography credit with a link to your stuff in the notes.

All the videos for Devil in My Pocket songs that I've made thus far are HERE. Lots more songs are at the band webpage HERE. With fatherhood the music has slowed down a lot. My new thing is to allow myself to make a video every time I get a paper accepted somewhere (Mark and I got one in American Philosophical Quarterly recently). When I've finished making videos for all the songs that deserve them (there are some really bad songs in the "leftover songs" part of the web page), I'll let myself record one song when a paper gets accepted. It's nice to have little rewards like that.

I think if Emily and I were more committed to playing straight ahead Horror Punk we'd be a better band, but it's not our day job so we just play whatever we feel like.

devil in my pocket youtube playlist

I just figured out how to make a playlist for the weird videos I've been making using public domain content and music from me and Emily's rock band. The playlist is HERE (the one's that work best video-wise are probably Santa Sangre, Zombies, and the Zoo). The general webpage for the band with lots more MP3s of songs  is HERE. I"m decent at playing guitar and writing melodies, barely adequate at singing, bad as a lyricist, and even worse at getting a decent mix and timbre when recording these things on my computer.

When playing live I can keep an audience's attention if I am wearing a wrestling mask. Once it comes off they start drunkenly talking to one another and ignoring me. There's probably some Levinasian reason for this.

Music has mostly been on a hiatus with very young children. During the sabbatical year I could be a decent father to a baby, play music, and write philosophy. When we came back to Baton Rouge and I had to teach again while trying to be a decent father to a toddler it took me a year just to figure out how to write philosophy again (as much as possible do it two hours every morning very, very early- then the rest of the day is grading, teaching, prepping lectures, administrative stuff, helping students, and being a dad). I think it's going to be another year at least before I can work realiably rocking out back into the mix. Other musician friends of mine with full time jobs tell me that when your youngest hits three things open up in a way that gives you one or two hours a day rocking out time without being a bad father.

Devil in My Pocket - Babylon; Devil in My Pocket - Snake

These are the last two I'm going to do for a while. All the rest of the ones on the band web page in the second set are just acoustic demos (and they are harder rock songs so it does not work very well). The first set are all non-demos, but I'm going to let making movies for them be rewards for getting papers finished.

Devil In My Pocket - The Zoo

The theme here is borrowed pretty liberally from Adam and the Ants' "The Idea." If the lyrics irritate, please note that Johnny Cash didn't really kill that man in Reno, Nevada.



The reason I've been up to so much mischief with Windows Movie Maker this week is that I have a philosophy-I.Q.-reducing cold and it's something to do instead of think about Schopenhauer and modality. I also did some redesign on the band webpage HERE. This school year, I'm going to make little movies for most of the songs that are available there.

In the next couple of years I want to record decent versions of all the songs through the set I wrote in Oklahoma (the "third set" on the web page), then I'm going to take up piano again and learn Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, P.J Harvey's White Chalk, and the White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan. I'd like to write a set of songs around the piano instead of guitar. That will take a few years, at which point the kids will be old enough for Emily and I to practice regularly together again and maybe perform some.

It's very nice for a whole host of reasons to have hobbies that you are passionate about but on which nothing whatsoever hangs.

Devil In My Pocket - Zombies

I just started reading Noel Carroll's fantastic Philosophy of Horror, so I thought I'd do a video for this song.

Devil in My Pocket - Santa Sangre

This song rocks my socks. It's one of only three things I've recorded with backwards masking (a guitar track), and the only song where it really works. [I realize that the vocals are bit too loud and the overall sound is tinny. I'm not very competent at getting decent timbre. Someday I'd like to move up to protools and maybe also take a class in how to record things.]

The song is about the movie of the same name. I initially used footage from the following trailer for a video, and it was perfect. But I did not want to violate copyright law so I used a public domain Superman movie instead. I think this works pretty well though. Anyhow, you can run the below without sound while running the above and see what I would have liked to do.