Category Archives: Music
Current Status: The New Album
I’ve started writing (which, since I use computers, also means “recording”) the second Red State Soundsystem album, which will probably either be called SPQR or The Big Darkness or possibly Senatus Populus Que Red State Soundsystem. (Probably not, though. But maybe.)
As a songwriter, one of the biggest problems I have is getting over my abject [...]
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120 Minutes and the value of curatorship
I was delighted to find on Metafilter a link to The 120 Minutes Archive, a site dedicated to preserving the history of MTV’s long-defunct underground music show 120 Minutes, which was, back in the early 1990s, my gateway to the world of alternative music. (For example, I recorded this show from the summer of 1992 [...]
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The Indelicates – Songs For Swinging Lovers
UK group The Indelicates are that most endangered of species — a band with intention. They defy the current notion that rock and roll songs should be about, y’know, whatever you want them to be about. Every song on their first full-length album American Demo was a thesis, a statement of purpose from the band’s [...]
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Things I have discovered in three days of selling my album online
1. People are willing to buy online music via PayPal from your website.
2. Not all of these people are my mom. Or actually people I know. This is encouraging.
3. Not having a label or distributor means the music goes directly into my PayPal account. No quarterly reports, no sending my boys to the label accounting [...]
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Ghosts In A Burning City — available now!
My debut album as Red State Soundsytem, Ghosts In A Burning City, is now available for preview/purchase over at Redstatesoundsystem.com. More when my brain is fully functioning.
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The value of music
So apparently a group of musicians in England called the Featured Artists Coalition have voted to support a “three strikes” law against illegal file downloaders: get caught three times and have your bandwidth reduced to a point where you can no longer download big files. It has not met with enthusiasm from the British blogosphere. [...]
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Ghosts In A Burning City video
So I’m thinking about doing a video for “Ghosts In A Burning City”, the title track for my album. The song is about chaos in the global South — in my head, it’s about Uganda, but it could really be applied to any place.
I’d like to do a video for the track. The idea I [...]
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Show Review in CityLife Blog
Las Vegas CityLife writer (and my neighbor and buddy) Dave Surratt dropped a very cool review of last Friday’s RSS show for Neon Reverb at Meet Lounge (aka Meatheads) on the CityLife blog:
Driven by a voice that visits Elvis Costello, Ben Lee, Tom Waits and Anthony Kiedis (and despite Ellis’ apologies for the endearingly slap-dash [...]
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New Red State Soundsystem wallpaper
To celebrate the upcoming release of Red State Soundsystem’s first album, Ghosts In A Burning City, here’s a Red State wallpaper for you. This image will also be available soon as a signed print, or as part of the deluxe album package.
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My Top 20 Albums Of All Time