First Single From Home + SUPERHALLOWEEN REMIX

The first single from my Home album is available now on iTunes. It's called "Unparallel Rabbits" and it's track 9 on the album. Because we selected a single that is decidedly unsexy and not conducive to partying, we enlisted the help of NY electronica geniuses The Overclock Orchestra to remix the legendary Gruvis Malt dance hit "Since 1968" (about a four-legged zombie that is undefeated at the annual Monster Dance Party) for your listening pleasure (also available on iTunes).
For a free listen, you can hear Unparallel Rabbits on my myspace page and the Overclock remix of Since 1968 on the Overclock myspace page. I would advise you to discover the magical new Overclock Supercommuter EP, available at iTunes here and as hi-fi DRM-free download here --- it's magnif!
Happy Halloween!

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Cut and paste the code below!

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04-23-2054: For Me, 76 Was Too Much

2054

For three days I've carried all my stuff down from the attic
and cut it up into two piles:
the things that hurt I threw into the bathtub and burned.
the things that made me smile I cleaned them up,
and set them up in rows around my bed
so I could see them all together,
and then address each one in turn.

The first thing I held was my mom's dissertation
she had it bound into a book for me when I was only 14.
She fought 8 years as a single mom with 4 kids for that PhD.

I never read a page of it
but I remember her crying alone at her desk
when she thought me and my sisters were asleep-
she tried so hard to keep us far away from any weakness.

Then I picked up Chris' diploma from Brown University
and I remember how he asked me not to attend the ceremony
but I hid in the back when he walked up to get it
and my heart screamed his name when they said it

I found the plaque Sarah made when I first got promoted
she'd somehow found out about it before I did
and had it mounted on the office door before I even got in...

A hologram of our first family vacation
with the rain and the mosquitos and the flu
and Sarah and I juggling two screaming kids
I don't know how we smiled for the whole thing but we did.

I smelled Zooey's baby clothes,
my first program code,
the leotards I wore when I was just four years old,
the first cartoon I drew,
Chris' first pair of shoes...

The last thing I held
was a picture with no date
I had so much hair though that I must've been 27 or 28
I must've been warming up for a show,
or maybe just getting off stage

I'm sitting on a leather couch
I'm in the back room of some club
I had my old rap hat on and there's this beautiful girl leaning down above me
and I'm showing her my soaked shirt and I'm smiling...
and it's love.

The hopeful look on that face makes me wince
I haven't seen that look, haven't seen that face since.
I take it into the bathroom - light it up and throw it in

I empty out the medicine cabinet into my shaky hands
my fingers look so new for second I wonder who I am
I quickly stow them away, back in my pants

My boss says he'll live to be 140 --- ex-boss
he's all into enhancers, and attachments, and stuff
and when I asked him why he wanted to be around that long, he got all up in a huff

Some people feel like the world wants them around, and that's fine
I decided 10 years ago that I don't want all that time...
For me 76 is enough.
For me 76 was too much.


2054

One Life Goal Down

Last week in LA, with the help of two very talented people and some money from Five One Inc., I checked off one of my life goals: to get made up like a zombie and let loose in Beverly Hills.
Early Sunday morning, Sony Pictures CGI/Lighting Expert-gone-photographer Ryan Rogers and I drove two hours west of LA to what I believe was an abandoned winery in Los Padres National Park, Santa Barbara. We left at 5am in order to catch the morning light. I opted to just stay up all night (both so my face would be realistically exhausted, and because there was a MacGyver marathon on). My pants were still wet from walking into a hot tub the night before, and the morning was unusually brisk, so while Ryan set up his twin AB800's I used some of the techniques shown to me by Richard Dean Anderson to defrost my pants. We began shooting by 7:30, in and around this gloriously haunted shack/barn and stopped around noon. I was not nearly as good at acting scared as I thought I'd be, but was quite pleased with the results. We were depicting track eight from Home. Ryan took many many pictures.



The following day, back in LA, Japanese man Kenji and I met Lauren (the female lead vocalist from Home) at Ryan's apartment at 10 am. Always going above and beyond the call of duty, Ryan had rented a Uhaul, and acquired ten bails of hay from Craigslist in order to fashion his storage unit into what looked like the interior of a barn.
Universal Studios SFX artist Erin Dellamore arrived and quickly made Lauren and I look like Jennifer Connelly and George Clooney respectively. For several hours we depicted track seven from the album, and Ryan shot a million photos. Lauren was frustrated with my lack of seriousness in depicting a pivotal argument, so she threw hay at me. I sniffed a lot of that same hay in order to catalyze my allergies (so I'd look sniffly). We picked the hardest scene to start with, but we couldn't start with the zombie stuff, because then we'd have to undirty me somehow.



After a late lunch we moved to a garage in Beverly Hills where Ryan had arranged a Janitor's closet scene. Erin immediately went to town on my thigh, applying latex globs and other goodies to build me a grubby gash. After that, she worked on my veins, forehead, fingernails, and eye sockets. She put slime in my hair. She flicked blood all over me, and covered me with a weird dirt that she fingered out of a bottle. Lauren tore holes in my favorite pants and shirt, both because we were depicting the aftermath of a zombie attack and because she suddenly found me intensely attractive. The Japanese man filmed much of this. All of this happened just off the side walk where mothers, babies, and young children passed without so much as a blink. People in LA cannot be shocked by anything (only morality).







While Ryan positioned me every which way in a corner, a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a glue bottle (which would digitally be replaced by a flare gun) in the other, Erin transformed the arms of Lauren and Kenji into those of the undead (we would need a nice variety of reaching arms to digitally place in the barn scene). The Japanese man was far too excited about his zombie arm, and so quickly abandoned his filming duties to pretend he was being chased by his eroding arm up and down the street. We closed the day with some goofy shots in front of a nice Beverly Hills home, Lauren playing the trophy wife, and I her rotting husband.

I SAW U: Two-Seat Man with One-Seat Plan

You: Michelin Man incarnate
Me: wishing I had the arms of a T-rex so they weren't wedged in the hills that used to be your rib cage.
Meet me in baggage claim so I can tell you to book the entire row next time.

When: Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Where: PDX Airport
Date posted: Friday, October 10, 2008

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Micropoem: Coke Goggles and Peacocks

the well-tailored cholesterol thick in the blood of LA

Micropoem: A letter to find when this night has grown up and become a quirky thing that happened to me way back when

Dear Me
Is it worth it?

Work Update

Couple things to put out there:
1) I'm working on vocals for tracks with Zach Lipkins, and remixes for Meiko, that face on myspace that won't leave you alone. Inbetween that and designing promotional material for Home, I'm working on new arrangements for some songs from Home so I can play them as just voice and piano.
3) I guess most importantly, we will be releasing the first single from Home on 10/28, just in time to play it at your Halloween party. If the composition makes you uncomfortable, then you can just play the b-side, A RIDICULOUS GRUVIS MALT REMIX BY MY MANS BRIAN CASS AND ROB PEMBERTON. These men dropped a dance remix of Since 1968 that is unbearably sexy, and so it is the perfect warm-up for Brian's upcoming record which is about robot goblins.
B) I'm doing 5 shows in LA this week solo style. Well not quite solo - my good friend Doug Showalter will be sitting in on a few songs on guitar, and the wondrous vocalist from my new album Home is rumored to be appearing as well. I'm very excited to return to The Hotel Cafe on the 9th, and play some new spots as well. My good friends Facing New York are dropping the hard copy of what may be my favorite record of 2007, Get Hot, on the 10th at the Troubadour. I'm opening the show with a solo set, and then will possibly get shreddist on a few of their hits. Also while there, I'll be doing a very gruesome photo shoot with this man and this woman. I can't really reveal too much except to say I had to find bails of hay on Craig's List.
2) After that I'm going back east for 2.5 weeks for a run down to FL and back with Ebu Gogo. Dates will be on my page shortly. I would advise anyone in the area to attend those shows, as there will not be more.
F) My For the Love of Pete album will be released in Japan on Sideout Records on Nov. 18th. The secret B-side, a studio version of this song is available for streaming on my myspace page.

Year of the Oatmeal Bear

This year marks the first installment of my annual Suit-the-Snoot campaign. What is that you ask?
When my portly niece Eva was born, I made her a promise: I grabbed her pumpkin cheeks and pushed my grizzly face into hers and nuzzled, "Darlin, by the power of Greyskull, I will put you in a new animal suit every year until your 18th birthday." She cried for a few minutes, both out of joy and as a response to my sandpaper facial hair. One year later, having been driven to the brink of sanity by overly-constrictive Pampers and copious amounts of Goldfish crackers, she had clearly forgotten my pledge, and so was caught completely underwears by my timely gift.






Tupac Ruxpin