Just a quick note to those paying attention — I’ve been working on an EP called “How Does It Know?” with my friend John Krohn up in Lansing since 12/29/07. We record like once a quarter (or so it seems), and my progress on finishing has been incredibly slow. In between sessions, there was a lot of writing and figuring and arranging. This is the longest I’ve worked on a project, and now that it’s so far into it, I want to make sure it’s really good so as to warrant the amount of time I spent on it.

Anyway, at this point, we’ve got all drums, bass, organ, piano, saxophone, guitar (though there might a bit more of that) done, and we’ve got lead vocal done on 5 out of 6 songs… The sixth song is missing lyrics still, and it’s been stumping me for a long time. Love the song, don’t know what to sing. These days I’m trying to finish writing all the vocal harmonies so I can get those recorded when John gets back from tour with his band, Frontier Ruckus.

I did declare at first session this year that this was the year I’d finish this record. Better get to work. But it will be finished, if not released this year. It’s going to be awesome.

Some more the Low Hello stuff from the archives — I found this soundboard recording and some photos from this show at the Elbow Room in Ypsi… I remember the night being really exciting and electric in some regard. The crowd was well drunk and we got a lot of positive feedback and shouts of enthusiasm from the audience. I may have been well drunk myself — proof of that is evident if you listen to the full recording and happen upon the way I inelegantly screw up Recess and have no idea how to recover, though the band tries to guide me in one direction or another. But the crowd was forgiving, and it turned out being one of the more memorable shows we did, to me at least. The rest of the songs sound pretty damn good, as well. I (purposely) left off an individual MP3 version of Recess (which is the 4th song in the set) due to it not being good AT ALL (and to make you dig if you really want to hear me embarrass myself).

     01 Downside
     02 I Got Carpet
     03 Nostalgia Makes Confusion
     04 Summer Insects
     05 Check Your Pockets
     06 Lying Down
     FULL SHOW

I’m trying to make some space on my hard drive and going through old stuff, and I found these two videos from the Low Hello that weren’t on YouTube already for some reason. I like these songs.

Summer Insects

I Got Carpet

Life changes, fast sometimes. Brilliant ideas fail, progress is lost, chaos and stability fight each other, with chaos coming out slightly ahead. Careful planning for the unknown might help. If it doesn’t help, at least it keeps us busy, thinking, occupied awaiting the next change.

     Careful Planning (MP3, 4.5 MB)

I have no idea what I need or want. Anyone have any insight on this? Anyone listen to enough of my stuff and know enough about distortion pedals to do a quickie set-up of me with a distortion pedal? Let me know!* I don’t have a ton of time to try out a ton of them. I wish I could just have a bunch of them in my home to try at my leisure, sort of a pedal buffet where after I try some of the food, I regurgitate the stuff I didn’t like and get my money back. Something like that.

*Perhaps what I’m looking for really is an overdrive pedal? Again, I have no idea.

Ok. So I did some stuff. Totally boring stuff, but I think it’s good now. I changed up the Links at the top to make them make more sense (I think). I took away the link to How Does It Know? because I haven’t written there in several months. Not sure what to do with that blog, but I might just use that URL now to promote my upcoming EP, How Does It Know?.

Also, I’m pretty sure I’m done screwing around with colors. I just made everything the same color as the big text and lines and think that was a good choice. I’m not sure why I chose pink originally, but I did, and I’ve been wanting to get rid of the pink for a while. Mission accomplished.

The Music page is reorganized, and you can actually just get the songs directly from there.

In the sidebar, I added some more links I like, and got rid of the Blip.fm widget. I kind of stopped using Blip, and it kept showing my last listened to song as “Owner of a Lonely Heart”.

Ok. Come back soon for a new song (it’s sounding pretty awesome so far). I’m off to enjoy the rest of this beautiful day.

I just learned how to make a grid pattern (to emulate graph paper, which I actually drew my last header on) in Photoshop. I think it looks pretty good. Anyway, I’m done with that for now. Just as a reminder, if it’s not obvious that this is an improvement, here’s the old header.

OK! That’s all for now. Hope to have a new song up within a week, if I can get over to Dan’s sometime and record the drums.

I’ll be messing with the header in the next few days… The wonderful Angela Duncan drew up a new header that is way better than anything I did prior to now. I’ll be messing with the colors. Also considering a slight facelift in terms colors all over the site. Not sure yet!

That’s all. Carry on.