Walk a Mile Video Round-Up
So you may have heard — I’m sure I’ve been quite annoying about mentioning it — we were asked to participate in the Walk a Mile/Hours Against Hate campaign to support global tolerance. I wrote a song called “Walk a Mile,” and we recorded it, which looked like this:[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=988BzChYqGM] You can download the song […]
Walk a Mile and The London Games
At the beginning of July, Stacey Haber of the Music Firm UK reached out to me to find out if I’d be willing to write and record a song for a social awareness campaign launching in conjunction with the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The campaign is called “Walk a Mile,” and draws its name […]
The Morning Breaks: My Life in Music
I just released a new video from our album The Ghost of John Henry, for the song “The Morning Breaks.” It goes like this:[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOx2HokCCwg]This an intensely personal video for me, and I have to be honest it feels a little weird putting it out into the world. The earliest footage in here dates back […]
How Important is Fidelity?
When Hi8 seemed like an impossible dream I’m not talking about matrimony, here, but how well an audio or visual recording resembles the real-world phenomena it seeks to capture. High fidelity sounds and images used to be both a mark of professionalism and a barrier-to-entry for hobbyists in the temporal arts (film, video, music, etc.). […]
Cutting a Swath Through the Self-Releasing Jungle
Years ago, people started sounding the death knell for traditional music distribution models, and now much of the doomsday scenarios have played out exactly as feared (or hoped, depending on your particular relationship to the mainstream). Unfortunate casualties have been the record store, many independent radio stations, livable advances for musicians signed to labels, and […]
Obsolete Technology Will Demand a Reckoning: The Ghost of John Henry
Our new album, The Ghost of John Henry, is available today. The folk tale about a railroad worker who raced a steam drill has stuck with me since I was a little kid, and so in a lot of ways it feels like I’ve been leading up to this record my whole life. That makes […]
Quick Album Update: The Ghost of John Henry
It’s a very exciting time for me, since the new album will be out on Tuesday and we’ll be playing our CD release show a week from tonight. We’re taking digital pre-orders here and physical CD orders here. It’s hard to quantify how much different this feels than when the first album came out in […]
House of the Rising Sun
We headed into the studio with ten songs to record for our next album, “The Ghost of John Henry,” but at the last minute, I decided to add an 11th to the schedule (we had to go up to 11, after all…). In a lot of ways, recording that last song — “House of the […]
Couch by Couchwest
Yes, SXSW is in full-swing in Austin, and while I once lived in Austin, that was a while ago. It’s cool, though, because the Couch by Couchwest festival is here for us all — those of us “too broke or too lazy to get off our couches and go to Austin.” Over the weekend, we […]
In the Studio, Final Weekend – Video Blog
We wrapped all of the recording for the new album, “The Ghost of John Henry” this weekend with our final cello, guitar, and vocal sessions, in addition to getting some miscellaneous percussion tracks. Percussion “instruments” on this record will include chains, old cast iron jail keys, artillery shells, homemade stomp box, a “thunder tube” (not […]