Love Makes the World Go ‘Round (RPM Sketch #2)

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There’s some irony that, here on Valentine’s Day, I’m releasing my next RPM Challenge track, “Love Makes the World Go ‘Round.” It’s not the usual “love song.”

As I write, “love is misunderstood.” You think?

I’ve always had a problem with the way that the word “love” gets tossed around incessantly. IMO, it’s often used to speak of something other than what I think love ought to be.

I’ve said to people that I love, who said “I love you,” that they didn’t know what the word meant.

We see love used as a slogan, a word on signs about “loving neighbors,” when the people with those signs never once attempted to connect with me, their neighbor, next door. (true story)

Lest people just want to call me a “bitter crank,” I do know what real love is. I had that with my son and his death’s impact was so profound because of that deep-loving bond we had with one another. I’ve had that bond with my wife now for more than 40 years. I know what love is.

But, songwriting is subjective, so I’m not going to delve deeper into my intent on this song.

I’m happy with the lyrics and the overall production. The song has a 70s vibe to it, and I count that as a positive. Even added a little reverb on the vocals.

As a one-man-band, I don’t have a drummer or a bass player, but I find ways to lay down drum tracks (a drum pedal) and the low-end gets handled by tuning down a half-step and using my Danelectro and single-string intonations in creating a bottom on the track.

For those who like the lyrics, here they are:

Love Makes the World Go ‘Round

Love, Love Makes the World Go ‘Round
Love, Love Makes the World Go ‘Round

Not Sure Why They Say Its, Just Look at the Evidence and Weigh It
Love, Probably Don’t Make the World Go ‘Round

I Don’t Think That Love Makes the World Go ‘Round
No, No, I Don’t Think That Love Makes the World Go ‘Round

Come on Brother Be Straight, How Can You Not See All That Hate
Love, Love, Love Don’t Make the World Go Round

(Break)

Love Is Just a Word that People Say
Yes, Yes, Yes, Love Is Just a Word That People Say

They Love to Cast Their Spell, But With Them It’s Like a Clanging Bell,
Love It Don’t Make the World Go Round

Love Is Misunderstood, try to treat people like you probably should
That Kind of Love Might Just Make the World Go ‘Round

Love Is Misunderstood, try to treat people like you probably should
Oh Yeah, That Kind of Love Might Just Make the World Go ‘Round

©EveryDayYeah Music

Movin’ On Down (RPM Sketch #1)

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It’s February, so it must be time to write some new songs. This year is a bit different, though, because I’m tackling the RPM Challenge.

The RPM is an annual creative challenge, seeking to motivate anyone to record original music during the month of February. Artists set their own length goals (EP, or full-length), and have until March 1 to complete their projects.

JimBaumerMe is tackling the RPM Challenge in 2023

Last year, I could have entered what became Living in Some Strange Days, my first full-length, but come midnight on February 28, I wasn’t happy with my final track. Instead, I wrote a new song the next day, “Kick the Darkness,” because I needed something more hopeful than the overly dark themes on most of the other tracks. I’m glad I did, as the song really became the “single” of the release and garnered some worldwide airplay.

This year, in January, I was intentional about doing RPM, properly. I even started writing a song before the challenge officially began.

I view some of these tracks as “sketches,” not entirely finished. I’ll probably come back to some or all of the five or six tracks that will make up the release when it’s completed. I’d like to add some multi-tracks on the guitars and bump up the vocals, but I’ll have to see how much time I have.

This song is about moving to my new home in Lynchburg, Virginia. I’m calling it “Movin’ On Down” as Mary and I moved “down” from the North to south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

I really liked the riff the first time I came up with it. It didn’t take long to put the guitar parts together and the words followed. Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon laying down tracks and getting a “rough” recording of drums, vocals, guitar. I mixed it this morning and you now have my “rough mix.”

Not sure that the other tracks will be so “positive” in outlook, and that’s okay. But this one will likely be another one of my songs that gets lots of play in my live setlist. I really like that it captures the anticipation of a new chapter in one’s life, and figuring out the challenges of new geography, and finding some new people to hang with.

Here are the lyrics for those of you who like those things:

Movin’ on down to a brand new town
Gonna’ start a brand new life

Been talking about rollin’ out
Push away all that strife

Leaving the north, heading south
Lots of friends left behind
I touched down, looked around
Too much to process now

In a rut just hanging around
Find a new patch of ground

My new home in a brand new town
Picking up a welcome vibe

I touched down, looked around
Can’t process it all today
This new home in a brand new town
Enjoying it in every way
The old hometown, left in the dust
Place of birth not the same
Got so much I want to do
Before I go away

Movin’ on down to Lynchburg town
Gonna’ start a brand new life

I’ve been talking about rollin’ out
Push away all that strife

I left the north, I headed south
Toom many friends left behind
I touched down, looked around
New people to get to knowwww

Movin’ Movin Movin on down
I’m south of the Mason-Dixon Line

A New City/A New Home (JimBaumerMe Newsletter)

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Bunker Rock/JimBaumerMe

Movin’ On (A New Musical Home)
Vol. 3/Issue 1

November and December was music-free for me. Rather than playing music, I was immersed in holiday nostalgia via movies like Feast of the Seven Fishes and of course, the most nostalgic of all Christmas movies—It’s a Wonderful Life—while coming to terms with living in a new state and region.

In September, Mary (my wife) and me drove to Central Virginia to look at houses and scout out places like Roanoke and Lynchburg. Lynchburg is where we found a house we wanted to buy, so JimBaumerMe is no longer in ME, but VA. It may necessitate a name change. But perhaps not—Matt Pond PA never changed his moniker despite changing geography. Actually, Matt Pond PA is on hiatus until 2025/26 according to his website.

[New house, new city]

Here’s hoping that gigging in this area in 2023 is as good to me as New England was the past two years. I’m sure it will be.

I’ve yet to play an official “gig,” but I have been making it out to some local open mics. It’s been good meeting some of the local musicians. I also did a live stream on New Years Eve.

Given that my music is oriented towards indie rock and not just cover fare, I think Charlottesville and Roanoke offer possibilities. Then, I’m only two hours from the music hotbed of Raleigh-Durham and even Greensboro in North Carolina. We’ll have to wait and see how the booking turns out.

A resource that’s really meant a lot to me in 2022 is Zen Guitar, written by the late Philip Toshio Sudo. To say it’s a self-help book for guitar players diminishes the scope of the book. But that’s a good starting point. The author helps readers understand the guitar-playing isn’t just about virtuosity but infusing your playing with soulful spirituality. Or something like that. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to be a better musician.

I closed out my playing dates in Maine (and Mass.) with fair dates in Fryeburg (for the second straight year) and Topsfield (for the first time). I also played the Bolton Fair in Bolton, MA in August. Overall, I played fewer dates in 2023 (about 40) than 2022 (when I crossed the 60 gig threshold), but I began figuring out where I wanted to play rather than simply accepting a date for the sake of having one. Some of my favorite places to play in 2022 besides the fairs were SoPo Seafood, Tumbledown Farm to Fork, Side by Each Brewing, and participating in Newton’s Porchfest in June.

[Rockin’ at the Topsfield Fair]

My CD, Living in Some Strange Days, got some radio airplay on MIT’s outstanding college radio station, WMBR. I also got an invite from Lorenzo at WMPG to play live at the station in May.

Stay tuned for the next JimBaumerME musical chapter. Looks like I will be participating in the RPM Challenge 2023. I’ve already got one song in the can.

Happy 2023 from Central Virginia.

-JimBaumerMe

One Sheet for Living in Some Strange Days (indie rock)

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Artist: JimBaumerMe (pronounced JimBomberEmEE)
Location: Biddeford, ME
Album: Living in Some Strange Days

Maine-based indie rocker Jim Baumer recently released a new batch of songs on his latest release, Living in Some Strange Days.

Front cover, “Living in Some Strange Days” [Jonathan Braden design]

Baumer’s music hearkens back to a period of time when indie rock ruled college radio in the mid-1990s. Many of the tracks on Living in Some Strange Days originated during the past 2+ years of the pandemic, when he says he was “locked in my basement wondering if I’d ever play live again.”

Music has been Baumer’s path forward following the aftermath when his son, well-known environmental activist and poet, Mark Baumer, was killed in 2017.  Picking up his old Yamaha guitar he’d had around the house for 20 years, Baumer took it out of the case and started to play. He states “I’ve been playing it ever since.”

LISSD is a mix of solo acoustic material, rooted in 70s music and artists like Arlo Guthrie, Neil Young, Big Star, and T. Rex. The one-man-band electric songs like “Spaceship Flying Saucer Bluze” and “Soros Jam” are influenced by angular indie bands of the 1990s and similar to Pavement, Silkworm, and even some of the Amphetamine Reptile noise bands of that period.

A child of the 1970s, Baumer grew up with music that never shied away from the topics of the day. “TNT (Acoustic Mix)” speaks to freedom and protest and tilts against so-called leftists and their locking down of dissent in Canada and elsewhere.

Photo by Shawn Munro Edgecomb [design, Jonathan Braden]

The final track, “Kick the Darkness” is the first single from the release. It takes the refrain from Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” and offers a glimmer of hope for anyone who thinks that we might be living through strange days.

Baumer has one prior release, an EP on Bandcamp called All You Stupid Sheep, which came out in early 2021.

All songs written by Jim Baumer
All instruments (drums, guitars, found sounds, loops) and vocals performed by Jim Baumer
Website: http://jimbaumerexperience.com/music/

Merchant Page: Living in Some Strange Days

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I created this page for those who for whatever reason are averse to Bandcamp. One advantage of having this page on my website is that everything that gets paid to me stays with me, save for a small fee PayPal takes. I have no issues with either Bandcamp or PayPal for that matter. Both are equitable in my opinion. And you can choose what one you prefer.

Did I tell you how much I appreciate Jonathan Braden’s artwork?? It’s amazing!

[CD cover-Jonathan Braden design]




Releasing (hit) Singles

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Spent the month of February recording a record/CD. I still say “record” because I grew up with records. When I mention that I have a “new record” what I mean is that it’s a grouping of songs with some thematic consistency—just like rockers used to make. Actually, musicians still do it apparently, as there is this thing called the RPM challenge. This year’s February call motivated me to get off my duff and cobble together some new material, and gather an assorted unreleased track or two that’s been sitting there for a year or more. I also re-recorded a new version of an older song.

Full discloser…I didn’t complete my project in February so technically I couldn’t pimp my new release along with all the others on RPM’s platform. That’s okay. I would rather make sure that I had a group of songs I really liked rather than feeling I was a song short.

In fact, that’s what I had at the end of February. Eight songs, seven I really dug, but track #8 just didn’t seem right. On a darker collection of songs, you gotta’ give a listener a little hope, right?

As a songwriter that’s been mining life lived after tragedy, it’s been hard not to write songs that tend towards the downer side. The clusterfuck called COVID didn’t help, at least it didn’t help me. What felt like governmental dictats—two weeks to flatten the curve, then weeks turning into months, etc. Gigs cancelled, me back in my bunker in the dark. Shit! Worse, people began pulling away from family and friends. To me, it felt similar to what I felt following Mark’s death in 2017.

But not to despair. So yeah—the record isn’t a reworking of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” But I’m not apologizing. If you know who T. Rex were, get what Arlo Guthrie was doing with his talking blues and “Alice’s Restaurant” and have a clue about newer bands like Car Seat Headrest, then you’ll at least understand (if not love) the new release.

Friday, March 4, I sat down with my Epiphone acoustic and came up with a chord progression. I then started jotting down words in my lyric notebook. Then, scratching out and rewriting. In about an hour’s time, I had “Kick the Darkness,” what is now my single and a somewhat hopeful capstone to the new record, “Living in Some Strange Days.” The cover, done by old friend and Canadian expat Jonathan Braden (living in Europe these days) is ambiguous in an amazing way!

[CD cover-Jonathan Braden design]

The song, based on Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” namechecks a host of Canadian performers I’ve been a fan of over the years: Cockburn, The Tragically Hip, Eric’s Trip, Sloan, Matt Mays, and Joel Plaskett (and the Joel Plaskett Emergency). Someone I know, a fellow musician told me he thought the single sounded like Lou Reed to him. I’ll take that as a compliment.

The new songs will be showing up on various streaming platforms thanks to Distrokid: Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Amazon, etc. One of my favorite streaming services modeled after an actual radio station with real DJs picking and playing the songs is Amazing Radio. They have a US station, as well as one in the UK. There is cross-pollination, especially with the artists and releases.

I got an email yesterday (April 7) that my song was going to be played on Cubs the Poet’s show that night. I was playing a gig down the coast in Rockland, so I figured I’d come home from gigging and sit with a beer and unwind and catch the show. “Kick the Darkness” got played at around 11:50. While it as amazing to hear my own song coming out of the speaker, it hit me that it was going out all over the world. So cool! The new release is in production, and I should have actual physical copies available soon. Keep your eyes on my Bandcamp page for availability.

I think 2022 will really be the Summer of Baumer, aka, JimBaumerMe.

Oh, and I have a video (by Vizy) for the single.

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JimBaumerMe Featured in Bangor Daily News (Dec. 28)

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JimBaumerMe, above the fold (Bangor Daily News, 12/28)

BIDDEFORD, Maine — All things considered, it’s been a decent year for Jim Baumer. The artist wrote a few dozen songs, put out his first EP and networked his way to 45 gigs at pubs and other stages across New England.

But it wasn’t that long ago that Baumer, a writer, didn’t play music at all. Although he’d always wanted to, it wasn’t until his son’s death that he began to devote time to it.

Mark Baumer was a writer and climate activist who died in January 2017 at age 33. He was struck by a car and killed in Florida while walking across the U.S. to raise awareness about climate change, and to raise funds for a friend’s environmental organization. He was reportedly wearing a high-visibility vest at the time he was struck and walking against traffic in accordance with safety guidelines. His death was a national story.

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A Summer (and Fall) of Music

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Bunker Rock/JimBaumerMe

A Full Season of Music
Vol. 1/Issue 3

Sitting at my dining room table in June, I wrote a song that in many ways is my “Alice’s Restaurant.” By that I mean that it’s a song written in a vein similar to Arlo Guthrie’s late-60s classic—a sort of talking blues that spans nearly five decades of my musical journey from the age of 8 until now.

At the start of summer, I was just coming out of the chute relative to booking gigs. A mere few weeks into a calendar of bookings and venues that ran well into the fall and the eventual closing-down of many outdoor places catering to warmer days and music.

The cold and darkness of November now morphs into full-blown winter. My crowded calendar of the summer now has a smattering of dates marked in January, with other possibilities confirmed out into 2022.

Since I write my own songs, like “Finding a New Path,” the song I reference above, and my penchant and preference for the indie side of the rock landscape, I began seeking opportunities to play original songs, versus the summer-long slog of three-hour sets spiked full of cover material, even if what I cover tends towards my own preference for the more obscure side of music. There’s nothing wrong with playing covers if that’s your thing. It’s not really mine. So, where to look for opportunities and perhaps, a scene that still understands what indie once meant when it was still vibrant. And yes, Virginia, there are still places where indie still has street cred.

Apple orchard rocking

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Royce White 101

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My blog has transitioned to mainly music these days. Well, most of the time. But today, I turn back to the political.

Truth be told, this post is still about music—because the songs I write and even some of the covers that I do are rooted in a space where certain political and moral ideas are central.

There’s a guy named Royce White. If you know basketball, you recognize the name and maybe know a bit about his story. He was a force on the court, but he’s become a much bigger force off the court. The hardwood could not contain his breadth and boldness. Continue reading →

Living in This World-Remixed track and Amazing Radio

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In April of 2020, I attempted to reason thoughtfully with some leftist haters on Facebook. Rather than engage with what I posted, they simply attempted to shut me down with some lame “fact-checking.” It pissed me off. I wrote a song. That song was “Living in This World.”

In January, I released an EP digitally on Bandcamp, a great streaming platform for artists. The EP, “All You Stupid Sheep” takes a populist tack, calling out hypocritical leftists, Jeff Bezos, TPTB with their malicious divide and conquer methods set under the guise of “safety” and a so-called pandemic.

Recently, I’ve been considering other means of getting my music out to a wider audience. Spotify rips-off artists, so that’s out for me. Then I heard about Amazing Radio. The U.S.-based arm of the streaming service is 100% focused on helping new and emerging musicians. It operates Amazing Radio and CMJ, which together have more than fifty years’ experience of helping the world’s best new musicians get the break they deserve. CMJ was a big part of my DJ experience at WBOR during the mid-1990s, focusing on so many undiscovered bands and bringing them to the attention of DJs like me who was committed to playing new and virtually unheard music.

Play my tracks on Amazing Radio.

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