Score!
The independent superhero comedy Spaghettiman made its theatrical debut in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and is now available on VOD from all the places (iTunes, Amazon, etc). It’s about a self-centered, lazy, and generally repugnant slacker named Clark who gets the ability to shoot spaghetti out of his hands, then uses that ability to fleece […]
“Fields” Music Video
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy8fIbVTm2M] My folks were both raised in small, rural towns in Texas, but moved to Houston in the 1970s, where I was born. I spent my childhood, then, living in the suburbs and for holidays, summers, different events, shuttling back and forth out to farm and ranchland and towns too small for grocery stores. I […]
All the References: Goodbye at the End of the World
We recently gave away a pair of autographed CDs over at the all-purpose geek-themed site Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together to people who correctly identified the most sci-fi and film references hidden in the animated video for our song Goodbye at the End of the World. But nobody was particularly close to getting all […]
The Couch Abides
A few weeks ago, Couch by Couchwest, the online music festival for everybody who couldn’t or didn’t want to go to South by Southwest, called it a day. They started in 2011, and they were recommended to me just before we released The Ghost of John Henry in 2012, so Sci-Fi Romance participated in every […]
Announcing: “Dust Among the Stars” by Sci-Fi Romance
Big news. A lot of you know we’ve been working on new music, and I’m thrilled to be able to officially announce our third album and its release date. The album is called “Dust Among the Stars,” and it will be available January 26th, 2016, with pre-orders starting tomorrow available now at Amazon and rolling out […]
Couch by Couchwest 2013
There’s this thing, kind of a party, kind of a “festival,” that happens in Austin every year about this time. Maybe you’ve heard of it. But there’s this *other* thing that also happens at the same time, that maybe you haven’t heard as much about, and that is the Couch by Couchwest festival, “where the […]
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 […]
Great Album Reviews: The Milk-Eyed Mender (Joanna Newsom)
Album: The Milk-Eyed MenderArtist: Joanna NewsomGenre: FolkYear: 2004 Joanna Newsom plays harp and sings. When my five-year-old first heard her in the car, after about ten seconds he said “Oh! What a terrible voice!” Probably any discussion of Joanna Newsom has to include, somewhere, the mention that her voice isn’t for everybody. And now that’s […]