Halloween - Frankenconcert - FREE - Prizes - Music

School for the Dead's Halloween Weekend 2010

It's almost Halloween, the best holiday of the year. Do you have a costume? I hope so.

School for the Dead has THREE, count 'em, THREE shows this weekend. Here's the skinny:

1.) Families and Kids
Saturday - October 30, 2010 at 1:30 PM at Flywheel in Easthampton, MA
The No Nap Happy Hour present a Family Friendly, Not Scary, Halloween Costume Party
Featuring: School for the Dead and Billy Kelly and the Blahblahblahs
$6 at the door- $20 for a family 4 pack
Facebook Event
Presented by: Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child

2.) Adults
Saturday - October 30, 2010 at 10:00 PM at The Basement in Northampton, MA
Frankenconcert - a FREE, Halloween Costumer Party Rock Show
Featuring: Paper Piano, The Fawns, Spouse, School for the Dead
Facebook Event

The music starts at 10:00 come earlier to get a good spot.
Wear a costume if you have it in you. We'll be giving out three prizes for best costumes. The prizes include:
Two tickets to Bob Mould - Nov 9th at The Iron Horse
Two tickets to Ben Kweller - Nov 18th at Pearl Street
Two tickets to Langhorne Slim - December 2nd at The Iron Horse


3.) Everyone
Sunday - October 31, 2010 at 4:45 PM at The Florence Green in Florence, MA
It's the Rag Shag Parade and, like last year, School for the Dead will be there playing under the WRSI tent in the park as folks gather for the parade. Free, All Ages. In the leaves.

That's all three. I hope you can make it to at least one. I'd love to see you. You don't need to have a costume but if you do and I don't recognize you, you know, say hi.

October in New England

This morning I snuck down into the studio and worked on a new recording. I spent about an hour trying to get the right guitar part. I couldn't find the right notes and I couldn't find the right sound, so I looked out of the basement window. I saw the sun shining on a bright yellow tree.

Sometimes you have to step away and consider a new direction for a song. So I flipped all of the switches and turned everything off. I put on my sneakers and stepped out into the best day ever.

Paradise Pond as my phone sees it

Boo.

Next Saturday at 10.

Airbrushed Voices

This morning I watched some music videos on TV. I was switching between VH1, MTV, and Paladia, which were all, amazingly, playing actual videos.

You know how in some older movies and television shows they had this blurring effect that they would add when filming female characters? It was supposed to make them look softer and more beautiful I guess. Looking back on it now it just looks laughably ridiculous and totally fake and silly.

That's how I feel about the way vocals are produced in modern hit songs.

There's no people in there! Where's the people?!

Ribboncandy Photo

The Fawns had a great time at Flywheel last night. Here's a picture that my phone took of Ribboncandy.

Ribboncandy at the Flywheel, Easthampton, MA October 18, 2010

Winterpills in the New York Times

Our buddies, the Winterpills, just had a nice little review in the New York Times.

Winterpills
Devastation grows almost cozy on “Tuxedo of Ashes” (Signature Sounds/Soft Alarm), a six-song EP that Winterpills recorded at home in Hadley, Mass. Philip Price’s cryptic, folky songs hint at floods, murder and war. “I lay down in the ash heap and penciled in our names/On the rosters of the fallen and the legends of the maimed,” he sings in the title song, with an ethereal descant from Flora Reed. Around Mr. Price’s gentle voice and the picking of his guitar or banjo, Winterpills gradually builds elegant arrangements steeped in 1960s folk-pop and rootsy rock, hinting at Simon and Garfunkel and Fairport Convention. While the gathered instruments offer some solace, the songs stay haunted.

As a side note, I sang backing vocals on the title track "Tuxedo of Ashes".  So did Lesa Bezo and a number of other friends.

You can listen an purchase the album here: LINK 

The Night I Met Einstein

I don't know for sure if this story is non-fiction or fiction but I like to think it is non-fiction.

“You have never heard Bach?”

He made it sound as though I had said I’d never taken a bath.

“It isn’t that I don’t want to like Bach,” I replied hastily. “It’s just that I’m tone deaf, or almost tone deaf, and I’ve never really heard anybody’s music.”

A look of concern came into the old man’s face. “Please,” he said abruptly, “You will come with me?”

He stood up and took my arm. I stood up. As he led me across that crowded room I kept my embarrassed glance fixed on the carpet. A rising murmur of puzzled speculation followed us out into the hall. Einstein paid no attention to it....read the rest here
 

On The Radio, In The Box Office, Friendly Guitar

On Saturday afternoon, I brought my newly-repaired and fixed-up red acoustic guitar down to the Northampton Box Office.  I was going to be performing a song on air (WRSI The River) and doing a little interview about our show that night.  Also scheduled to appear at the box office that day were Erin McKeown, Bell X1, Jill Sobule, and Fountains of Wayne.

When I arrived, I found Joan Holliday and Scott Howard from the radio station setting things up and Joan asked me if I minded going first.  Of course not. So, five minutes later, there I was on the little stage with windows behind me looking out onto the bustling Main Street.  The small box office was packed full with people who had come out to watch.

I talked to Joan briefly and then played Back To School.  It's a tricky performance.  Do you play to the room or do you play to the radio?  You really have no idea how it sounds in radio land.  There's a microphone in front of your face and one kind of down by your guitar.  Ok, go.

It was a good thing I had my guitar fixed and cleaned-up because both Erin McKeown and Jill Sobule needed to borrow it for their performances.  There's a picture there of Jill playing it.

Also, The Fountains needed to borrow my capo.  Sheesh, good thing I was there.

Anyway, WRSI.com has each person's section as an audio file.  So if you want to you you can go over here and listen.

Fountains of Wayne, School for the Dead, Jill Sobule - October 9 - Pearl St. - Northampton, MA

Thank you, everyone who came out to our show on Saturday at Pearl Street with Fountains of Wayne and Jill Sobule.  We had an excellent time.

Live on the Radio

I'll be playing a song or two tomorrow afternoon at the Northampton Box Office and on WRSI River Sound Cafe (93.9 FM) along with Fountains of Wayne, Erin McKeown, and Bell X1. I think it'll all be live streamed on wrsi.com. Stop by if you find yourself wandering around downtown. You might have to join the Riverlution first, but I don't think so. It's all happening between 3:00 and 4:00 PM.

Shouting vs. Democracy

I was a comedy show recently. The comedian kept asking the audience questions about the area. Only a few people in the audience were loud enough to be heard by the comedian. The things that these people were yelling were actually not correct. They were misleading about how far some local mountains are. They were just factually wrong about a historic question. Once the loud incorrect answer was heard by the comedian, he added that information into his bit. Nobody, of course, could, at that point yell out a correction and it's likely that those who may have wanted to were not loud enough anyway. Even if they did cut through the crowd noise to explain the correct information, it would have seemed like a party pooper kind of thing to do. That person would have sounded like a know-it-all. That's the case with today's media and political landscape.

On the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, one of the life-lines is "ask the audience". The audience is given a chance to silently enter in their own answers. Every time that I have seen this happen, the audience has been overwhelmingly correct. That's democracy.

Fountains of Wayne, School for the Dead, Jill Sobule - October 9 - Pearl St. - Northampton, MA

Here's the official poster for this Saturday's huge show.

Get your tickets now

A Telephone Built For Two Lyrics

Here are the complete lyrics to A Telephone Built For Two. Common English words have been removed, words like "the" and "an". Bigger words are used more and smaller less.

The Living Rockumentary in Wordle.

Jason Bourgeois pointed me to this site wordle.net.

Here to the left is a nice graphical depiction of the Living Rockumentary over the last few weeks.  Go ahead click it.