Singing Through Sickness
One of my longstanding fears has been having a show booked, and then getting sick right before it. I am not a trained vocalist, and therefore do not possess any of the mystical secrets they no doubt teach opera singers for this very eventuality. Nor do I own an old-timey atomizer, which is kind of […]
Time-Lapse John Henry Painting
In a previous post, I waxed all poetic about the silk-screened posters for The Ghost of John Henry that LA-based artist Mike Estano created. I love when art inspires other art, and having been on the receiving end of so much of that inspiration, I consider it a tremendous compliment when the band is able […]
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
Two years ago, I released the fist Sci-Fi Romance album, …and surrender my body to the flames, and that holiday season, put out a version of my favorite traditional holiday song — and staple of Jimmy Stewart movies — Auld Lang Syne. It seemed appropriate, then, that with the release of our album The Ghost […]
Your Walls Have Never Been More Beautiful
There are moments where life just makes me so tremendously happy and thankful. This is one of those. Last week, I met with LA-based illustrator Mike Estano, who my wife used to work with. He’s a tremendously talented dude who liked our album “The Ghost of John Henry” and wanted to talk about collaborating on […]
Coming Soon – Folk Art!
I like computers, they’re fine. Every piece of music I’ve recorded this millennium has been aided in some way by computers, although I usually try for as non-digital a sound as I can manage. Some people dinged us on the latest album for it not sounding “perfect,” but I wanted the sound of people making […]
Election Night Sounds Like America
On Election Night, I was asked to go sing some songs down at the M Bar in Hollywood. For some reason, as the day got closer, I started thinking I wanted to play a lot of cover songs. I don’t usually. But as I rehearsed, I kept coming back to the idea that there probably […]
“This Machine Kills Fascists”
As I’m slowly writing songs for a new album, other outlets seem to be popping up, like the Walk a Mile campaign back in July we were asked to participate in. And last week I recorded a new song, called “Just to Win the Fight,” that I felt would be better off heading out into […]
The New Gatekeepers
Democracy has come to creativity, and capitalism has come to overwhelm democracy. I am, of course, talking about the Amazon review scandal that has come to light, revealing that as many as 1/3 of all reviews on Amazon were bought and paid for. This is a catastrophe for everyone involved — musicians, writers, consumers, and […]
Different Writing Muscles
Different kinds of writing require different brain muscles. I’ve been reminded of this recently as I’ve started exercising my prose muscles for the first time in a while. My first ambition, as I remember, was to be a professional novelist, back when I was small and green and the world could grow such things. I […]
Anybody Else Tired of Personal Branding?
One of my favorite lines of poetry is from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, where he writes: Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.) This guy: sweaty-toothed madman,hates branding. As artists and human beings, we should probably be trying to embrace diversity, and what better place to start than […]