New Songs Drop In February

Starting in February, I'm gonna begin dropping new material on y'all. I'm aiming for one new song a week. I can't believe it's been three years since I put out any new stuff. Time flys when you're having fun, right?

No plans in the works for any live shows for the time being, but the threat of a reunion is always lurking. After I get the new material out there, and if there is not too strong of a campaign to make me shut up, then maybe...

What The Hell Is So Good About Blogs

Every once in a while, I will call time-out from music to tell you about something I think you'll find useful. Whether it's music-related or not.

This is gonna make me sound like a salesman for a second, but I'm not selling anything. All of what I'm about to discuss is free, and I found it useful, so I thought maybe you would too.

Imagine if you had an inbox - just like an email inbox - for all the info you liked best on the Internet. One place you could go to check out what was new on every one of your favorite web sites, and cherry-pick which items you'd like to read.

Here's why you should get an RSS reader (relax, it's easy):

Let's say you have a set of web sites that you like to check out fairly regularly. News, sports, celebrity stalker photos, etc. What you may not realize is that most of these sites provide RSS feeds of their content. They "broadcast" all their articles on this feed.

So, if you have an RSS reader, like the free Google Reader, you can "subscribe" to the feeds from all your favorite sites. Then you can read everything from a single site (in this example, your Google Reader homepage), with handy links back to all the original sites. It makes it much, much faster and easier to keep up with all your info sources. No ads. No clutter.

Besides music, I subscribe to blogs on people who receive ridiculous passive-aggressive notes, getting rich, gluten-free cooking, ESPN and the NYTimes. And a mess of other stuff. It's addicting.

Of course, you'd want to subscribe to this blog before anything else, right? Right.

Let me know if you find any more good ones.

New Songs In The Oven

Making some great progress on the new material, still hopeful you'll be hearing it within a month or so. This will be entirely solo stuff, with contributions here and there from my usual co-conspirators. The sound is very different than anything from the old EP. But that makes sense, since those songs represent what I was doing five or six years ago. Hint - less of the "J" word and more of the "R" word.

I'm producing it all myself, with beats and other noises I'm making with my silver robotic box of keys and buttons. Some of them light up, you should see it. Here are some song titles...

Quicksand
Learn
Stranger Again
Telescopes
Never Enough

and more....

Some new CDs in my ears

Recently bought a few new CDs from some piano players I greatly admire...

Marc Cohn - Join The Parade
Since this dude's last album, he's been shot in the head during a failed carjacking (in Denver no less) and gotten divorced. Think he had anything to write about? The songs are very light on piano, much more guitars than I'm used to hearing on his albums, but the formula is familiar - churchy, bluesy vocals and a lot of creole soul. The title track chorus is stuck in my head, as is the great cover art of a New Orleans marching band. When I die, I want a New Orleans style marching band procession.

Other favorite tracks... "Listening to Levon" is an apology to a wronged love that makes a nod to Van Morrison... "Dance Back From The Grave" is a gut-bucket funk tribute to New Orleans' resiliency... "You're A Shadow" is the bonus track you get if you download the album from iTunes, and it's a dark gem. I wonder if Cohn thinks this album was worth all the trouble. I do.

Bruce Hornsby - Camp Meeting
I will post later about how great Hornsby is, in depth. In the past year he's released a bluegrass album with Ricky Skaggs (which is also awesome) and this CD, with a crappy bassist named Christian McBride and an awful drummer named Jack DeJonnette. Wow, the three of them sure don't know how to play their instruments at all. Actually they're so good they make me want to throw my piano out the window and give up.

This is top-notch modern jazz piano trio material with a subtle tip of the cap to the rock/pop/bluegrass/mishmash world Hornsby has created for himself. No vocals, this is a jazz piano record. Ever wondered how Thelonious Monk's classic off-kilter blues-bop chart "Straight No Chaser" would sound chased by an obvious hint of "Not Fade Away," the Buddy Holly song made famous by The Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead? With these guys on the bandstand, it's gonna sound fun. Be warned, in spots this album gets harmonically heady, with some serious complexity and atonality. All in all, it's beautifully haunting.