Explone is at Studio Litho this weekend to cut one final song for the new record and finish any overdubbed parts. Mixing starts in March. Yes, we're already writing tunes for the next one. So?
My sources tell me we're also going to record some sort of performance video thingy that weekend. Also, a website redesign (confidential: ASP makes me weep).
Kirby Krackle just finished up a new CD titled E For Everyone and it drops just in time for the 2010 con season. The new record -- it sounds huge. No nerdcore act rocks harder than KK. Unless maybe you count Blöödhag. I'll be playing some live shows with them this year starting with the Emerald City Comic Con in March. There are also shows scheduled for Chicago, Phoenix and possibly elsewhere.
Also: it's time for RPM and FAWM! Good luck to everyone participating this year. I've never done so myself, but there always seems to be residual creative energy crackling across the tubes that makes February one of my more fruitful months for songwriting. Shame-based productivity: it's the best!
Remember Pat DiNizio: ass in chair. And stay the hell away from the internet.
Coming soon: a long-belated recap of Explone's show at the Crocodile last month.
Here's a quick demo of "Note To Self" (I posted a video of this song a few weeks back):
[audio:misc/Scott Andrew - Note To Self (acoustic demo 128k).mp3]
One guitar, one shaker, a few overdubs, some flurbled chords and the roughest of rough vocals. And a hippie guitar solo I spent all of five minutes composing. Also, my first recording done with REAPER.
Read on for lyrics...
Note To Self
To whom it may concern:
it's time to call your bluff
the hardest thing to learn
is you don't want it bad enough
so lay the pen to rest
and commit to saner things
leave those strings to rust
another busted set of wings
and you fall behind
waiting for some planets to align
so what are you gonna do with your time?
tell me what are you gonna do with your time?
daylight slips away
and you feel it creeping in
in the faces and the names
of every place you've never been
and conscience is a curse
that you've never understood
but it won't add up to much
and always nothing good
but there's no crime
deciding where you want to draw that line
so what are you gonna do with your time?
tell me what are you gonna do with your time?
cutting corners
to find a shortcut to some truth
part the curtain
put this daylight
put this daylight to some use
[ instr. ]
and I think it's fine
deciding you don't want to change your mind
so what are you gonna do with your time?
yeah what are you gonna do with your time?
tell me what are you gonna do with your time?
Here is news: my band Explone is playing the famously famous Crocodile Cafe tomorrow night (that's Thursday 1/7) with a stellar lineup of fresh local bands. (I'm especially keen to see all-girl prog rock outfit Eighteen Individual Eyes.) It's one of KEXP's Recommended Events this week.
The Croc has long been on my list of A-list Seattle clubs to play before I die (score so far: Neumo's (done, solo), the Showbox (done, w/ Kirby Krackle). I thought I missed my chance when it closed down a few years back, but new ownership and a sweet remodel have restored it to first-class status. The stage has been redesigned, sight-line-blocking support beams removed, a Via Tribunali pizzeria installed in the former back bar area.
Last week I tweeted about rediscovering some song ideas I had written in DADGAD tuning almost ten years ago. I first learned about DADGAD when Megan forwarded me a page of alternate tunings used by Richard Shindell. Since then I've tried to work DADGAD into my own songs:
If you haven't tried DADGAD, you should. It's fun. Especially if you get bored with standard chord voicings as I sometimes do. Tons of video tutorials on YouTube.
Here's a video draft of "Blood Of Eden" by Peter Gabriel, in DADGAD tuning. I kinda want to record this song for a future EP, maybe later this year. The spot where I start grinning and my eyes pop out of my head is where I start running out of breath. That's what I get for trying a five-minute-long tune after months of no singing.
Here's another compter-nerd post for you artists who use both Wordpress and iLike. If those words make no sense to you, you probably have a life, and have actually been outdoors in the past few days, and would never spend countless hours hunched over a laptop working on something called a "Wordpress plugin." You are excused. The rest of you, follow me.
I've been neglecting my iLike page because it's such a hassle, but now that iLike is being favored by Google in search results, it seems like a good time to get that house in order. So I wrote a Wordpress plugin that re-publishes blog posts to my iLike account.
Unlike the plugin I made for MySpace, this plugin will send your WP content to iLike automatically once it's published. So you don't have to remember to push a button.
Once the plugin is installed and activated, you can configure the plugin with your iLike info and options:
Once configured, post edit pages will display a status box:
That's basically it.
Installation
Make sure that your web host supports PHP with libcurl. Ask your hosting provider if you're unsure about this.
Unzip it and toss the post-to-ilike.php file into your /wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ directory
Log into Wordpress, go to Plugins > Installed, find the "Post To iLike" plugin in the list and activate it.
Now go to Settings > Post To iLike and configure your iLike login info and options.
Notes
Not yet tested in WP 2.9
iLike blogs support only a few HTML tags and no embedded media, so this plugin will strip out images, video embeds, etc. before posting. (a future version may convert these to optional off-site links.)
This plugin version does no error checking on the iLike side. If your login info is wrong, or the attempt to publish fails, the plugin will simply quit silently. Your post may still be marked as published even if the attempt failed, so it's a good idea to check your first few posts.
Use at your own risk. No warranties, including those of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, are given or implied.
Time to stick a fork in 2009 and call it a decade. Just think, this time ten years ago we were all bracing for the Y2K bug to destroy civilization and send us spiraling into barbarism.
Wuz gonna write a bunch of stuff here about resolutions, but I think we all know that's a bunch of horseshoes. My motto for 2010 is: Keep Trying.
The Wikipedia entry on Christmas is really facinating. Did you know the Puritans hated Christmas? Or that Christmas celebrations were once banned in England and in Boston? Or that Christmas was frowned upon in the States for years following the Revolutionary War, only to have its popularity resurrected by Charles Dickens and Washington Irving? I did not know these things.
Anthony Skelton's short film submission to the Nikon Festival includes the instrumental version of my tune Not The One. There are some very cool editing moments I really like. Check it:
UPDATE: looks like the film was removed from the festival site. So never mind, I guess. Anthony? You out there? What happened?
Working on a video? You can download free instrumental versions of all the songs from Save You From Yourself for your own multimedia projects right here.
UPDATE: nuts, MySpace has discontinued the "Post To MySpace" feature in favor of their dumb "activity streams," so this plug-in doesn't work anymore. FRAK. Check back later to see if I've coded up a solution.
If you use Wordpress and are looking for a way to publish your WP content to your MySpace account, I've written a dead simple plugin that makes it pretty easy. Read on for the gory details. Otherwise, just back away nice and slow-like. Or watch the nice video in the post below this one.
(And yes, I know MySpace totally sucks and is still totally ugly and why are we still supporting MySpace anyway and they're owned by Satan's News Corp. and urf hurf a durf.)
Some backstory:
Until recently, the best way to cross-post items from Wordpress into MySpace was to use Roderick Russell's MySpace Crossposter plugin. Nice work sword-swallower guy! Anyway, as evidenced by the long string of complaints and pleas in the comments over there, Roderick's plugin stopped working as MySpace "redesigned."
I thought I'd be a hero and figure out why the plugin stopped working. But after spending a day untangling the code and the MySpace login process, I was getting nowhere. MySpace is crazy-making, hardened against automated access via scripts, usually involves a CAPTCHA, and most of my attempts ended up here anyway because MySpace requires JavaScript.
But then I did some digging and found that MySpace has an open endpoint for people to re-post any web content to their MySpace account as a blog, bulletin or link item. Perfect! Forget automation, how about we just make it easier than cutting-and-pasting.
So I made a plugin that packages up a Wordpress post and ships it off to MySpace with a single button:
There's no automatic publishing; you still have to log in at least once. But there's something really elegant about the workflow. You get a nice preview, so there's no worrying about your formatting getting mangled in transit:
The plugin itself is very brief and hardly rocket surgery, but if you're into hacking Wordpress it's a good example of how to create your own "meta box" menus to the posting/editing pages. Feel free to hack away.
"Note To Self" is the only new song I'd call completed this year. I actually wrote most of it in August 2008, but it got stuck with a less-than-stellar vocal melody that was no fun to sing. I was pretty much resigned to abandoning the song when I caught a new melody driving home from rehearsal with Explone a few weeks back. That inspired me to bang out the rest of the lyrics. Consider this video a first draft.
Hope to post an audio demo soon, and more video stuff in general for 2010.
Here is news: my band 
