If you care:
I've put up a MySpace page and have been rotating songs in and out over the past couple weeks. There are some pretty deep cuts up, including three tunes I uploaded today.
I'll be refreshing the playlist every Monday until further notice... I'm fairly confident that I won't be running out of material anytime soon...
Mike, what the hell are you doing hanging out with brass players?! You're just askin for trouble.
Lisa Brennan had a great idea today! Besides SHAKING ESCHATONE TO THE CORE, she might have given me a solution to the conundrum of what to do with The Cutting-Room Floor. (Finished record, sounds great... but I've moved on.) We'll see.
I have a similar condition, though I'm not quite as good at connecting the information with calendar dates. I tend to categorize by subject, not date. Dates are often included but they're not the trigger.
Obviously this dude doesn't consider it a problem - but I'm inclined to agree with A.J., one of the article's other subjects, who claims that "whenever she hears a date, memories from that date in previous years flood her mind like a running movie. The phenomenon, she laments, is 'nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting.'
"'Most have called it a gift, but I call it a burden,' she wrote. 'I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!!!'"
It's comforting on some level to know that an abnormally potent memory might actually be some kind of medical syndrome. Doesn't make my life any easier, but whatever.
I got my new keytar case today! It's so awesome... holds the keytar, a Korg M3 sound module, cables and a direct box, and even has backpack straps. Fully loaded, the whole thing weighs less than a Les Paul. I can't believe I finally have a portable rig after all these years of lugging around a full-size hard case, stand and rack. Plus my new direct box will enable me to run in stereo live. Let's play some fuckin gigs!
We have all three mixes in for the Rebellion's new single. You can hear one of them - "Let's Get To The Fucking" - on our MySpace page now. Just waiting on a couple of special remixes and it's off to press.
I've also put up a MySpace page of my own. I was thinking about the old Collider Jukebox and how much fun it was to poke around on there, and decided to do a mini version of it on MySpace. I'm just going to keep rotating demos and old tracks in and out, a couple each week, with track notes on the page. If you like what you hear, please pop on and say so.
Work proceeds on Failing Upwards... a full string section is recording one of the tracks this week. I've always wanted live strings on my stuff and I'm really, really psyched for this. Hopefully I'll be able to also get strings on a couple of the songs I'm producing for my pal Amy Willey. I brought her tracks up to Woodstock last weekend, where Jerry Marotta laid down some of the coolest drum and percussion tracks I've ever heard, essentially turning it into a whole album's worth of "In Your Eyes". Willey's tunes were already great, but this is going to sound magnificent!
Right now LB is watching the Food Network. Marc Summers is telling us how they make molten chocolate cake. That dude is hard to listen to. He pauses right before the end of each sentence, like everything he says needs a cliffhanger ending.
I'd like to thank the fine folks who came out to Crash Mansion on Friday and waited for us until after midnight! I enjoy these Crash Mansion gigs for a number of reasons: it's an excellent room, it's always packed because of the awesome drink specials, and we see old friends who haven't been out to shows in ages. (I'm talkin about YOU, Greg Gordon!)
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We're one Rebellion mix away from wrapping the new single. Pressing quality vinyl with all the trimmings is proving to be an extremely complicated process, as we're learning with Michael Bassett's soft verges record. It's like the Wild West - there's no one-stop shop that can deliver top-notch mastering, pressing and printing. Several elements are time-sensitive; for example, mastering needs to happen within a couple days of pressing or the lacquers degrade. For this reason, jackets and inserts need to be completely printed (and, in Eschatone's case, autographed) and at the plant before we can even get the record mastered. And the printer that makes the nicest jackets doesn't print labels for the center of the record - those have to be done elsewhere. Also, the equipment for making this stuff is so old that direct-to-plate printing is unavailable, which means the additional expense of running film. Man!
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Things I'm psyched about:
Dweezil Zappa is playing all the guitars on Failing Upwards - so awesome. Also, the album will include a fresh mix of "Bowery Electric" featuring the surviving Ramones, marking the first U.S. release of that song.
Johan Santana. My lucky numbers are 7 and 5; it's only natural that my three favorite Mets are Jose Reyes (#7), David Wright (#5) and now Johan (#57).
I rarely watch football, but I enjoyed the Super Bowl very much. What a great week for New York sports.
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