New recording: “Hell”

March 7th, 2011

I wrote this song a decade ago and per­formed it maybe once or twice over that time. I’m really not sure why it’s taken this long to record, as I’ve always liked it, and when I’m prac­tic­ing on my acoustic, I often find myself play­ing it. I sup­pose maybe I was sus­pi­cious of it, test­ing it like I’ve heard zen monks would test some­one ask­ing to study at their monastery, mak­ing it wait out­side the gates for a while. If it was really worth doing, after all, it would make sure I remem­bered it. That’s what I told myself any­way. A cou­ple of weeks ago I decided it had been wait­ing long enough, and I’ve been obsess­ing over its record­ing since then.

I think it’s finally ready, and I hope you like it. Just head on over to the music page if you want to give it a spin. It’s right at the top.

Dancing with the Stars

November 14th, 2010

Last month, a friend asked me to make a song for an indie video game he was devel­op­ing (yet to be released – I’ll let you know!). For a while now, I’ve wanted to try some­thing like this… so it was great to finally get the kick in the ass to do it. The require­ment was to have some­thing instru­men­tal that was eas­ily loop-able, but that might be able to be cut up a bit to add a lit­tle vari­ety. He also wanted some­thing that wasn’t typ­i­cal for that type of game. Because I have a ten­dency to throw as much pos­si­ble into a song these days, I also wanted to make it an exper­i­ment in sim­plic­ity. After I was done, I had this lyric float­ing around in my brain that seemed to fit the energy of the song, so I played around with the phras­ing a bit came up with a few small verses, and “Danc­ing with the Stars” was born.

Why the name? Another exper­i­ment. Appar­ently that’s what a lot of peo­ple are search­ing for online these days (I’m as sad about this as you are), and it’s a song about celebrity, so here you have it. If my lame attempt at SEO suc­ceeded and you’re a sorely dis­ap­pointed Danc­ing with the Stars fan, you should leave me an angry com­ment or two, and if they’re funny enough, I might even put them up.

You can check out the song at the top of the music sec­tion.

Familiar Places on Blalock’s

March 23rd, 2010

Muchos gra­cias to my friend Jason for sub­mit­ting Famil­iar Places to Blalock’s Indie/Rock Playlist. You can check out and down­load the whole playlist, includ­ing songs from Tokyo Police Club, Zero 7, Thom Yorke, and yours truly here. And I just made Famil­iar Places avail­able for free down­load on the Music page. Grab it while you can! Thanks again to Jason, and by the way, if any­one else out there sees a playlist that you think some of my music would be good on, feel free to shoot/submit first and ask ques­tions later. No need to ask for per­mis­sion! But let me know so I can thank you ;-)

New Website & New (Old) Songs

February 9th, 2010

I’ve been work­ing furi­ously over the last few weeks to move my old site over to a much eas­ier to man­age one and also wanted to bump up the design a bit. The result is now up.

Hope you like it.

And as an added bonus, I’ve got­ten around to adding all of my songs with Johnny Feel­good plus some really early songs from 2000 that I recorded on my first solo disc (if you look closely, you’ll see that one of those songs made it all the way to Johnny Feel­good — I pre­fer the JF ver­sion, but the older one’s cool in its own way too) to the music sec­tion.

I’m also going to the open stage again at the Druid tonight and plan to play a few songs with my friend Ryan. You can get more info about that here.

New Recording: Chemical Wonderland (electronic!)

January 4th, 2010

So you’ve heard the Johnny Feel­good ver­sion, but believe it or not, I had orig­i­nally intended Chem­i­cal Won­der­land to be a full on rock/electronica song. That was three years ago. Johnny Feel­good was just com­ing together, and the song fit really well with the band and as an acoustic arrange­ment. Plus, I didn’t have nearly enough expe­ri­ence with synths, etc. to do it jus­tice. So it became a stan­dard at live shows, etc. and the acoustic ver­sion that every­one knows was born. Now, I love that ver­sion, but with a lit­tle more time on my hands over the hol­i­days, I decided to take a crack at that orig­i­nal intended ver­sion that was still only float­ing around in my head.

I’m pretty happy with this one, and I hope you are too. There are even trum­pets! ;-). Yes, believe it or not, I decided to put trum­pets in the elec­tronic ver­sion three years ago as well. It just took me a while to find some good ones.

New song… Ordinary Life

December 31st, 2009

Contin­u­ing on my exper­i­men­ta­tion with elec­tron­ica, I fin­ished record­ing this new ditty over the hol­i­days. And you can lis­ten to it here.

I know, I know… some of you are scream­ing, “Why, oh why must you for­sake your acoustic gui­tar! We likes the acoustic gui­tar! It is music to our ears!” Do not despair. I’ve also been test­ing out every one of my synth-heavy tunes with the acoustic and they actu­ally work quite well when totally stripped down, so I’ll be sure to be per­form­ing them at open mics in the new year, and if there’s high demand for recorded acoustic ver­sions of any, you might even be able to con­vince me to do that.

In other news, happy New Year! Mr. Stephen Harper is help­ing us cel­e­brate by pro­rogu­ing Par­lia­ment (again!). Isn’t that won­der­ful? I was kind of get­ting bored with democ­racy anyway ;-).

And muchos gra­cias to senior War­den for sug­gest­ing a reduc­tion in cow­bell! The mix is much better!

New Song — TBA

September 8th, 2009

I have been exper­i­ment­ing once again in the won­der­ful land of elec­tronic music, though you’ll find a wall or two of real gui­tars in here as well… I couldn’t resist ;-).

Enjoy.

[ and props out to my mys­tery beatboxer ;-) ]

New Recordings

October 15th, 2008

I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing around for the last cou­ple of years with more exper­i­men­tal record­ing (for me, that means any­thing more than a cou­ple of gui­tars, some vocals, bass and drums ;-)) and adding the odd bit of syn­the­sized music in… writ­ing songs with­out the crutch of an acoustic gui­tar… etc. Then I went and com­pletely changed my record­ing setup ;-). At long last, after much pro­cras­ti­na­tion (in my defense, I did help put out a cou­ple of Johnny Feel­good albums and work on a few other projects while I was pro­cras­ti­nat­ing!), here are a cou­ple of new tracks:

And here’s the year or so old one that started off the more exper­i­men­tal record­ing, if you didn’t get a chance to check it out… still my favorite…

Hope you enjoy!

p.s. Yes, still writ­ing songs with JF and still do the odd one with just me and my gui­tar, for all you purists out there ;-).