Melanie Anne Phillips

Tarnished Karma is my stage name for the music I compose. This may be the very first tape ever recorded of Tarnished Karma's original music back in high school days. It is one of a series of tapes of garage recording sessions containing demos, melody lines, hooks, and riffs that were documented for further development in future studio sessions. No one has heard them in almost exactly fifty years, including me! I found the cassettes in a box of old items last week, transferred this first one to digital and threw it onto a video. Its a bit scratchy, but hey - what a find! I'll publish more as I get them transferred to digital. Enjoy!

My latest musical composition is now on YouTube under my performance name of "Tarnished Karma"

" Candy Loop " - mp3 This is a new song I wrote and just recorded. Usually I play all the instruments myself, but I just got a new Macintosh with Garage Band and thought I'd fool around with loops, which I'd never tried before. Both parts of the vocal are me, each heavily filtered. (Neither one is my normal singing voice.) Amazing what computers can do these days! The lyrics are just one verse from a song I wrote a couple of months ago and haven't had the time to fully record yet, so I thought this loop version with just one verse repeated would be kind of a fun experiment. http://melanieannephillips.com/music/candy-loop.mp3

I like discord. That is to say, I enjoy composing music in which truly discordant harmonies are included in such a way the, in context, they are completely acceptable. This composition is one of my first experiments in discord, and I think it works pretty well. It's called "Jangle" not only because it is a jangly kind of music but because it is also intended to jangle the nerves.

I like writing themes. I remember recording this one some forty years ago. I was laying down this great melodrama villain theme I'd composed and then I got tired of playing it. In fact, I wanted to change the mood. So, rather than doing another separate recording, I just extemporized a completely contrasting melody to work agains the first part. Never revisted it, but decades later I began to wonder that if the first part was the villain, who did the second part represent? Having recently seen the animated cartoon "Despicable Me" with its not-so-evil villain who ends up being a foster dad, I originally thought it might be the villain's kid. But then I remembered the Simpson's episode in which Homer goes off chasing "dog with a fluffy tail", completely ignoring the fact he's just seen his own double for the first time! Those two animations made it pretty obvious this composition was about "The Villain and His Dog."

An upbeat little ditty, this piece is designed to go on forever by simply connecting the end to the beginning again. I've written quite a few circular songs over the years, but this was the first (and simplest) of the series. There's something comforting about a positive spin that will go on forever, just like movies that finish up the story and then show the characters starting a new identical quest all over again, giving us the sense that the adventure is "Endless".

This composition struck me as the start of a quest, when the entire journey lies ahead and one begins with eager anticipation of adventures to come. Again, one of my innocent optimistic tunes from the 1970s when I was in my late teens. You know, I always hear full orchestration when I write these things, then just jot down the basic sketch and leave it at that. But try to hear the timpani and the French horn and the string section. If you can, I'll never have to bother multi-tracking it!

I was pretty proud of this song back in the 1970s. It was one of the more adult pieces I wrote during that time. But years later, I listened to it again and realized it was exactly the same chording as "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" by George Harrison. Now, I never intentionally ripped him off, and there's no melody line so it isn't plagerism exactly, and I don't know if my subconscious was mimicing his song or creating a whole new one of my own. But, ol' George himself did the same thing with "Isn't it a Pity" on his "All Things Must Past" album, since it has the exact same chord progression as in the long fading chorus of "Hey Jude." All in all, what the hell....

Back in the 1970s, a lot of the music I wrote was extremely naive and optimistic. These days, while I've kept the optimism, I've lost the naiveté, so my compositions are far more complex, though not necessarily better. Innocence is pretty hard to maintain in a hard world, and even more difficult (though not impossible) to recover once it is lost. But this song, Mexican Morning, is just one of those simple little tunes with no pretensions of being art that joyfully ambles along, oblivious to any darker issues since there isn't a cloud in the sky.

I once saw a cartoon in M.A.D. magazine where a fellow is standing on a dock watching a dollar bill with wings fly away from him as a symbol of his lost wealth. He ties a ball and chain on his leg and jumps into the sea. On the bottom, he lands next to a treasure chest bursting with gold and jewels. The title of the cartoon was "Look Before You Leap". That's the inspiration for this song of mine (see video below). I've never truly been suicidal, but like most everyone, I've known severe depression at times. But, it always passes and life gets worth living again. Still, I began to wonder, what happens if you succomb to the darkness and then change your mind after it is too late? Consider this song a cautionary tale. (I wrote this song back in the early 1970s when I was in my late teens): Here's the same song as I re-recorded it last year: Finally, here's the music track only (no voices) from the re-recording. It's a bit monotonous, b...

Another old favorite I composed about ten years ago....

Today's Old Favorite - a song I wrote last year under the "Tarnished Karma" name I use for my compositions.