301 Annotated TLG Songs

“I like a lyric to have a sense of mystery, some things that make you wonder,” said Trevor Garrod, the principal songwriter. “I get off on double meanings in songs. I don’t like to divulge what I’m going for. I like that to be people’s journey in the music, where they find their own meaning and maybe they’ll find something about themselves.”

Annotated TLG Songs is an Unofficial fan site for audience interpretations of music, created by fans for fans of Tea Leaf Green. To annotate or make annotations is, by definition: to furnish a literary work (song) with critical commentary or explanatory notes; to write notes about a song or poem to explain or interpret what it means.

Mostly fans crafted this site, but members of the band have been known to occasionally offer comments and correct additional lyrics here, and they occasionally access the Lyrics files while on-tour. Daniel Gold started the lyrics collection with a discussion thread on the TLG Forum in 2003, and relaunched as a website blog using WordPress in 2005. Thanks to everyone who contributes thoughts, ideas and words to the website: the site staff and curators, and the authors of individual comments, posts, and the songwriters are listed with each song.

Tea Leaf Green is a prolific rock band of original songwriters from San Francisco. Fans collect and annotate the repertoire of TLG on this evolving songbook site. Buy all the TLG albums; join the community on the band’s official homepage tealeafgreen.com; and stream live shows from the Archive.

Inspired by The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics site & now book.

The Annotated Tea Leaf Green Lyrics Songbook site won Fan Site Of The Month in November 2006 (article).

The blog makes possible the idea of a community-contributed lyrics collection, where anyone can upload a new song or post an interpretation, or annotate, link, illustrate, transcribe, or tab-out any song.

If nothing else, the fans can be sure that the band can’t forget an old tune exists. Nothing is “on the shelf” at the Annotated Lyrics Site, every song is given equal treatment and a slot to be heard and commented.

Update in 2008: Trevor Garrod made more remarks pertaining to this site in a recent article — Tea Leaf Green: Big Top Balancing Act, on JamBase written by Dgold’s friend and Honest Tune co-conspirator, Tom Speed. First the reviewer, Tom, described the fans and the lyrics project: “The fans have created their own communities and tributes, too. One such endeavor is the Annotated TLG Songbook, which collects fans’ transcriptions of every lyric in the Tea Leaf catalog. In addition to lyrics, fans submit nuggets of information about references in the lyrics and analysis that sometimes borders on the academic. Though it’s tempting to join in the discussion, Garrod acknowledges he tries to let those efforts exist in their own world.” Next is the quote from Trevor: “I kind of prefer to watch it from a distance and see what happens” says Garrod. “I have all of the lyrics on my computer and I’ve been tempted to give them the real ones because there are a lot of errors. But a lot of times people come up with stuff that’s better! I just like the fact that it’s a fan site, and I love the fact that someone else is doing it and I get to sit back and watch what other people create.” That is something to think about!

Site Updates:

October 2005. Welcome to Dgold’s alpha-version test site for a Tea Leaf Green Fan Song Notes Collection using WordPress (a personal publishing platform). This is (edit:WAS) my first post on an expirimental new alpha blog about Tea Leaf Green (TLG) so we can collect annotations and favorite versions of TLG songs for our online songbook. We’ll have a blog with a lot of songs by Tea Leaf Green. I posted 15 songs so far.

November 2005. Thanksgiving. This blog has been renamed “Annotated Tea Leaf Green Songbook” and is now in Beta testing with a small pre-release field of editors and lovers of song including Leafaholic, Muck, Sparkle, Biscuits, Bobby H. We have 30 songs posted so far.

December 2005. Added horizontal menu. Welcome username. Streamlined sidebar. Introduced more beta-testers — Minister, T42, and others. Muck is really taking a leadership in the editing and posting of songs. Biscuits is the go-to guy on the mp3 links. Gadiel is all about The Garden suite. We have 80 songs posted so far.

February 2006. New title function automatically counts total number of songs for the headline, currently 122 Annotated TLG Songs. Using the MsgCount Plugin to echo a dynamic total number of WordPress posts in the header. Added Recent Comments plugin from blog.jodies

March 2006. Launched guitar tabs section with initial input from Deuce, Swirlz, Minister of Propaganda and others. Put a drop-down menu of Everytime Played in the sidebar, which links to TeaLeafGreen.com setlist database, thanks to bkark.

April 2006. New lightweight flash mp3 player (Play/Stop button for instant streaming mp3), which automagically appears wherever we post an mp3 link on the Songbook. Very useful new feature. Also created a new alphabetical index of all the songs A to Z on a page.

June 2006 Updated backend, upgraded to WP2 and juggled plugins.

July 2006 Wrote custom query strings such as improving the Search Results to show all # results in alphabetical order by song title.

August 2006 Improved the quote-of-the-day function on the home-page and restyled the intro-area display below a secondary masthead saying “The Annotated TLG Songbook”.

September 2006 Created a Quotes page with mp3 recordings of between-song banter and other musicians talking about Tea Leaf Green. Plans to also link podcasts related to TLG. Created a page using queries based on the Custom Fields to show, for example, all songs sung by Josh, and all songs sung by Ben, and all songs sung by Trevor, as well as all the songs on each album and official release.

October 2006 Conceptualized a new plugin written by Kafkaesqui for a new alphabetical navigation to next-song and prevous-song on each entry (much easier to ‘turn the page’ to the next song in order!). —Posted a test version of the Firefox Mycroft Search…. EDIT: October, it’s still not working right in FF.

Oct. 5, new alphabetical navigation to next-song and prevous-song on each entry (much easier to ‘turn the page’ to the next song in order!).

November 2006 Annotated Tea Leaf Green Songbook won Fan Site Of The Month from Jambands.com and we got tons of new traffic and excitement about the web development and deployment of this lyrics archive database, from unsuspecting Leafers plus fans of other bands that jam AND sing meaninful words. Froey, Parttown, and Phoreal contributed more songs. Dgold uninstalled the Autometa plugin, and installed Ultimate Tag Warrior, in hopes of using UTW to collect and organize songs according to themes and topics that may not reveal themselves through pure word-search. For example, I want to make a list of all the songs about water, whether it mentions a river, ocean, or the rain. Installed a new Snap Alphabetization/Glossary method of navigation, currently on the homepage.

May 2007 Anyone can post a comment on any song without logging in or registering now. Login and password only required to post a new song transcription. This should make Commenting much easier and quickly increase the number of annotations posted by fans.

June 2007, new Commenting features: TLG emoticons plus bold-italics-and-quote buttons! New favicon: new green-fist favicon should show up in your browser address bar if you click refresh.

July 2007, RexFoundation article says, TLG “won masses of faithful fans along the way… One devotee even created a Web site dedicated to the band’s annotated lyrics — sound familiar?” – a reference to the Annotated GD Lyrics site that inspired this one.

May 2008, trofeo edited and added tons of missing songs. Dgold fixed some little things that were broken.

May 2008, many new and old songs added. Credits updated. New alphabetized index. More Comments now showing on the homepage because there have been more comments lately (keep ‘em coming).

June 2008, added search-term highlighting (if you get here from Google or if you search a term within this site, the word you searched will be highlighted for you in the song).

June 2008, Added new features! The ability to vote “+1 ups” on any song, no limit. Search-term highlighting (try the search and you’ll see). Total # of comments counter. Code cleaned up considerably. Website title now correctly tabulates total number of songs (currently 210 TLG songs).

Late June 2008, new counter for total number of comments, on the home-page. New last-modified date displayed on each song so you can see when we updated the lyrics transcripts.

Early July 2008, new Vote It Up based on the idea of popular social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit. I converted it to “ups” which is simply giving props to your favorite songs. Vote +1 for as many songs as you like. There is no voting down. A range of the most popularly voted songs will appear on the home-page in a special index with links to every song, like an ever-growing Top 50 of songs getting the most ups.

Late July 2008, new interactive Google maps can be posted. See for example Let Us Go. The reason Let Us Go is the first map I made is because it is the opening song of Tea Leaf Green’s new album Raise Up The Tent which comes out today. The map feature is a celebration from the Annotated Songbook site’s perspective. Let Us Go starts with a very geographical lyric.

July 29, 2008, WOW! Trevor Garrod remarks about this website in a fresh Tea Leaf Green story on JamBase. Read Tea Leaf Green: Big Top Balancing Act, by Tom Speed

August 2008, backend upgrades.

September 2008, index of Fan Favorites from the Love charts added to the homepage.

October 2008, backend upgrades.

November 2008, adding to the header navigation menus with number counts for original lyrics, instrumentals, covers, all-songs, words, comments. Topaz (Topes) and her recruited helpers have filled in many gaps of cover songs and transcribed rare and new originals. Annotated TLG Songbook now has 232 songs, 400 comments.

December 2008, extensive upgrades. Membership system improved, encouraging regular readers to register and login for the site so that comments by each person can be collated. Launched a new front-end interface for Submit A Song, using TDO Mini Forms. Currently you must be logged in to submit a song and the submission page tells you that while offering login form. Also installed Old Post Promoter so that older posts will recycle to the homepage in a random rotation, helping to make this website and the feed into a perpetual Song Of The Day stream.

January 2009, extensive upgrades and new features added. Tagging support extended widely across the site. Built a new Tag archive page showing most common (popular) tags, 50 random tags, and a comprehensive list of all tags in alphabetical order (currently 885 tags). I made a counter for the # of tags. Wrote explanation of what tags are and how tags relate to song themes and listeners’ labels. Working on TagThis feature to allow readers to submit new tags directly. Annotated Tea Leaf Green Song count 240 songs on the site so far.

The Future. What are your suggestions to improve the lyrics archive next?

Secret hint about the future: Moving to new Annotated Songs address

Wishlist:
Mycroft Search Plugin for Firefox to search the songbook from your browser (IN PROGRESS – Make it work)
BBcode support like the TLG forums in comments and posts for [b] and [img] tags
Get Posts By Key & list by song title / permalink… example, all songs sung by Josh. EDIT: Got this, just want to improve the line-spacing and CSS to make it look like nice charts.
Totally revamp the design, colors, font-spacing, and theme of the site aesthetics (NEED A PROFESSIONAL CONTRIBUTION – WHO CAN HELP?)
Need a counter for the number of songs with Tablature.
New domain name URL. (IN PROGRESS – DOMAIN NAMES PURCHASED)
Podbucket community podcast idea.

Plus top secret, Other Plans, that I’m not going to post about here. But I might tell you if you ask the right questions.