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Category: Music - Mine

Osiris the Rebirth released a prog rock/space rock album recently with my voice on a few tracks. I've only heard the tracks I'm on and clips from others, but it sounds fantastic, and I'm looking forward to listening start to finish soon. My former music partner from Raspberry Silk, Milo Black, produced it, and everything he does is fantastic.

It's available on iTunes and at Amazon. I'm on these tracks:

• Phase Transition Initiate (speaking)
• Dragonslayer
• End of Something

The UK Amazon.com has a super review of the album (scroll down).

I'm singing on a new song from Osiris the Rebirth which is a reunion of the band, Osiris, that Miles Walsh (aka Milo Black, the silky half of Raspberry Silk) used to work with. It's called Dragonslayer, and it's available on the Osiris the Rebirth MySpace page. More to come.

• I got a tiny tree a couple of weeks ago. It started as a stick with roots, but shortly after I planted it in a pot on my back porch, the leaves started sprouting. It was a real joy to see the progress every day. One evening this week, I watered the little tree and marveled out how much growth it had. The next morning, all the leaves were gone. My best guess is that something ate them. It really took the wind out of my sails that day, and I'm not sure that I've recovered. I don't know why it affected me so much.
• My out of the house adventure today will include Waterloo Ice House for chicken fried steak and eggs, and Target for toilet paper and Lipton onion soup mix.
• I watched the pilot of The Unusuals. Amber Tamblyn and Adam Goldberg attracted me to it. It's quirky and looks like it has a lot of potential.
• I wish networks would stagger the television season. There are months when there's nothing new on. And then months when I can't keep up.
• It wouldn't be April in America without taxes and my song Tax Lady Blues.

Independent artists submitted 17 songs for Coverville Idol: Squeeze this year. Listeners were given the opportunity to vote for their favorite three, and my song came in third. Yay! Honestly, it was a total shock to be in the top three. If you like Squeeze or even only remember that one super popular Squeeze song, I recommended downloading the podcast and listening to all the covers. Then go to the virtual tribute album and download your favorites. The tribute album will only be available for a limited time due to licensing issues.

• The podcast: Coverville Idol: Squeeze
• The virtual album: Take Them (They're Yours): A Coverville Tribute to Squeeze

My favorite track is "Hourglass" by Lucky & Generous. A couple other favorites are "Goodbye Girl" by Zapruder Point and "Slap and Tickle" by MC Slap & DJ Tickle. And then ask me on another day, and I'll call a different one a favorite.

Coverville podcast Episode 532 features Coverville Idol which features a song from me! Brian Ibbott invited indie artists to submit Squeeze cover songs for the show, so I recorded "This Summer." One of the cool things about Coverville Idol this year is that all the songs are available for download on a Squeeze tribute album page in addition to being heard on the podcast.

Plus... you can vote for your favorites! Scroll to the bottom of the Squeeze tribute album page for a link to the voting.

Yay!

I finished my National Solo Album Month (NaSoAlMo) album, "Dead BBQ Grill," on Saturday night, a day earlier than the deadline, and spent Sunday working on my Web site in anticipation of releasing it. When I say "working on my Web site," I mean doing maintenance on the whole thing (not just the music related bits). But I think that was pure procrastination because once I finished the album, I kinda wanted to put it behind me since it had consumed me for the month of November. Read: I didn't want to talk about it.

I plan to do a wrap-up post to talk more about the individual songs and the process, but for now, here's Dead BBQ Grill in all her glory. Or most of her glory since the Squeeze cover song I recorded isn't available. You'll have to listen to the Coverville Idol podcast later to hear that one. I'll let you know when that's scheduled.

This article about blogs says bloggers should shut theirs down and start using Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Apparently, the author of the article thinks that people have blogs solely to attract readers. That people sit and agonize over what to write so they can compete with The New York Times. I run into the same kind of misguided impressions when people talk about independent artists. They believe we're all trying to compete with Radiohead and Carrie Underwood. Maybe some are, but I'm not.

Some of us write because we like to. Some of us make music because we like to. Some of us make Web pages out of that content because we like to. It doesn't matter if we get a lot of readers or listeners. It's the creation and expression that's important. The folks who read and listen and comment are a bonus.

I don't see the appeal of Facebook. At All. Twitter caught my fancy, though. Maybe because it's quick and easy. Myspace is simply awful. Flickr's cool, but I simply don't need it. 43 Things has something special in that the writing is guided by goals.

So no, I'm not going to shut down my blog.

Here's a glimpse into how songwriting works for me sometimes.

Last night, I recorded a new guitar track. It's just some chord progressions that came out of my fingers when I picked up my guitar the other day. I put that guitar track in my iPod.

On the way to lunch today, I played it on repeat. I tried to sing along with it with nonsense words. Sometimes I have to just hum. Sometimes I sing the same lame words I sing every time I do this. (I can't remember them right now, but they come out when I'm trying to write). Sometimes, something unexpected comes out.

The unexpected came out out of my mouth today in the form of "the look on his face." At first, I dismissed it, but then I thought it came out for a reason, so I'd better go with it.

I started thinking of events or movies where a look on someone's face was meaningful. I wanted to think of something in real life. I even switched it to "the look on her face" to see if something would come to me. That seemed even harder.

Eventually, Kevin Costner's face came to me. It was that look on his face at the end of Fandango when he sees the girl dancing. Oh, how I love that movie.

At lunch, I continued listening and tried to come up with the verses and chorus. I remembered a few things from memory from that movie, but decided I really need to watch it again.

I came home thinking I had it on DVD. No. I looked on my old VHS tapes. No. I looked to see if TiVo had it on radar soon. No. I looked at Amazon to see if they had an Unbox download of it. No. I've never figured out bittorrent, and the last I tried, it made me cuss, so... No. I ended up ordering the DVD from Amazon, and even payed more to have it shipped to me by tomorrow than the movie itself cost. That was probably stupid, but I only have a few more days of staycation left, and I'd like to finish the song before I go back to work. So there's how songwriting works sometimes.

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I'm so excited! And to think a couple weeks ago, I didn't want to do it.

New Song - Any Song Will Do
Stevie Wood, a friend from back in the days when MP3.com was all about showcasing the indie artist, asked me to sing a duet with him. It's a good, old fashioned rock n' roll song that gives you a clue why a lot of guitar players pick up the axe in the first place. Fun!

It has come to my attention that I'm hotter stuff than I thought I was. I can prove that I'm three degrees from Kevin Bacon. Here's the path:

• Kevin Bacon was in JFK (1991) with Gail Cronauer
• Gail Cronauer was in Boys Don't Cry (1999) with Paige Carl Griggs
• Paige Carl Griggs wrote, directed and produced Two Days (2006) in which Kim Novak (II) [that's me - Kim Novak (II)] is credited as a Composer - filmography

That quite possibly makes you at most four degrees from Kevin Bacon.

About four years ago, I wrote Shadow of a Girl based on a script for a movie called Two Days. The movie was written by Paige Carl Griggs. He stars in it and used that song and at least one other in the movie. It's being screened in April at the Philadelphia Film Festival.

You can hear my music in the trailer on the Two Days Website. You can hear the acoustic guitar intro to Space Needle in the beginning, and then you can hear me singing Shadow of a Girl in the background of the bar scenes. How cool is that?