Love Button - World Came In (Acoustic)

Now that I'm in Texas, Love Button may finally finish recording the album we've been trying to do for over a decade now. We've made a really good start over the past few days here at the International House of Dancakes, and I think it's going to sound really good.

This is just a little side track we took for fun - an inappropriately upbeat acoustic version of our song "The World Came In".

Rough: For My Antiparticle

This one is still very much in progress. The song is currently entitled "For My Antiparticle", and it's based on the idea of quantum foam. The general gist of quantum foam is that in the emptiest regions of space, there are particle/antiparticle pairs constantly popping into existence out of nowhere and then almost instantly annihilating one another. One imagines that if a fundamental particle was capable of thought, its last thought would be something like "what in the hell was the point of all this?", and that's exactly what this song is about.

The recording is rough, but it captures most of what I want to get out of this one. I'll probably just do a bit of tweaking and maybe redo the vocals and drums at some point, but I think it's bearable as is.

Parallel Universes

Now that the podcast is back to full functionality, it's about time to start repopulating it more regularly. Here's an old favorite from The Scientist.

I'M APPARENTLY SOME SORT OF MORON

I've seriously been struggling with getting my podcast to show up on iTunes for months off and on, and had basically given up. Turns out Blogspot's "Link" and "Enclosure link" functions are two completely different things. God dammit.

Anyway, this song goes out to whoever designed the Blogspot interface.

For Teresa, on our 17th anniversary - The Problem With Love Songs

My lovely wife and I are unfortunately stuck 1500 miles apart for a few months, so we don't get to spend Valentine's day together, which is also the anniversary of the day we started dating. In 1993! Hard to believe, and yet so, so, so awesome.

Anyway, this song is her present. I guess it can be yours too, although I don't really feel that way about you. Sorry, but it had to be said.

Hoopity POW!

This is easily the goofiest piece of music I've ever written, and in my case that's really saying something. This was originally written for a Shmorky cartoon a couple of years ago, but by this point I think it's safe to assume that it's not coming out. Alas.

I have sold us all for food

Here's a quick and dirty thing I did about a year ago and completely forgot about. It's delivered as a presidential address.

The End of the Good Life

I've finally gotten enough crap reinstalled after my computer fried to record a bit, and here's the result. It's pretty rough, but some of that is intentional. The song is so simple and straightforward that I decided to really mess about with the arrangement, so it's basically a little loungey sad song composed of record pops, guitar line noise, and ukulele. I think it could use a better vocal track, but then I could use a better voice. We'll see if Santa provides either this year.

Sasquatch!

In honor of this lovely study of sasquatch distribution patterns, here's an old Love Button song. I haven't listened to this in like a decade, but here it is!

For what it's worth, yes I am the same Dan Warren quoted in that article, and it's hilarious to me that in literally minutes someone had twisted my words to call global warming into question. I feel like a real scientist now!

Jagadish Chandra Bose

It's been a while since I recorded something for a Musician's Lounge contest, but finally I'm back at it. A power surge (I think) killed both my studio computer and my MOTU recorder a few weeks ago, so I recorded this one using a temporary setup that's a bit wonky in many ways. If it sounds a little off, that's why.

Anyway, the contest was to write a song about this guy Jagadish Chandra Bose, who was quite an interesting Indian dude. He worked in fields as diverse as botany and physics, helped with the development of radio, and is considered the father of Indian science fiction.

Motivational Speaker

Here's one from Crush the Infamous Thing. The music is a combination of samples and me playing instruments. The vocal track is this really weird motivational speaker from the south named Glenn Turner. He put out a bunch of albums in the 70's telling people that they could be awesome like him if they'd just focus. He was a really weird guy - strong southern accent, harelip, and a moon landing conspiracy theory nut to boot. I've obviously chopped up the samples to make him say what I wanted him to, but it's really only a very incremental change from how weird that record was to begin with.

Ska version of Lovefool

Here's an old one from an SA cover contest. It's my take on a ska version of the Cardigans' "Lovefool".

French song

Here's one I made for my homie AltF4's Time Traveling Bears cartoon. He wanted something very French, and this is what he got. Lyrics by me and AltF4, translated into broken French by my sister Wendy. It's been a while, but if I remember correctly the lyrics mean something like:

The Americans always steal French culture
All French hate traveling in time
Stay out of France, yankee scum
Go, eat the shit, eat the shit


Check out the cartoon at newgrounds if you get a chance!

Work in progress - The Birth of Anubis

This is part of a much larger project I'm working on, and will probably change substantially before it's done. I don't want to reveal the whole story yet, but this chapter deals with the birth of a boy with the head of a dog. He's unnaturally intelligent for a child, but violent and unpredictable. Because of this, he is kicked out of his village to roam the world.

To be continued...

Oh yeah, it's also the first song I've ever recorded where I play banjo. Super-ultrathanks to Thomas Anderson for giving me his old beater banjo to fix up!

Surrender

Here's one off of Crush The Infamous Thing. All of the words are Jim Baker. The drums are sampled from a Steven Drozd solo thing, everything else is me.

The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

Still reposting the most popular songs from the old podcast - this one is my remake of Leonard Nimoy's "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" from a few years back. White guy rap!

Heroin

Here's my cover of the Velvet Underground song "Heroin". It's completely inappropriate, but so are most good things in life.

Spine Full of Pop Rocks

Hey there. This one's a distant memory from Make Room For Dada. I've said it before, but everything from that album needs to be taken in the context of what the album actually was - me learning how to use a new set of musical tools. I learned an awful lot while making it, but the actual quality of the music is wildly uneven. This is one of the better ones, in my own opinion.

International House of Dancakes is moving, and I'm gonna go teabag your cat.

Well this here is the first post of the new International House of Dancakes Podcast, and I figured I might as well make it as stupid as I possibly can. Blogmatrix is going down at the end of the month, so I really didn't have a choice. That's all right, I'd been meaning to move the files to my own hosting anyway. Hope people can still find it, though.

Love Button show at The Deli, 12-30-08

A good time was had by all.

Random Personal Picture Finder (tm)


A really simple idea. It generates random picture names in the formats used by a bunch of different digital cameras and plugs them into the Google Image Search. Gives you an intimate peek into the lives of a bunch of strangers.

I hit the button a few times and saw people getting married, babies being born, somebody's graduation, and beautiful places that I've never visited. There was one directory that was all pictures someone took of the World Trade Center attack. Very strange, to think that I'm seeing through the eyes of someone who was standing right there. Makes it a bit more personal, especially contrasted with all of the photographs of happy occasions that came up alongside it.

It's also really amazing to realize how many people there actually are in the world. All these people have their own huge milestones in life that are invisible to those outside of their circle of family and friends, things that seem big from the inside and tiny from without. Makes your own life seem rather smaller in comparison.

Man, do I feel like Doogie Howser right now.

Van Gogh apparently once said "It takes death to reach a star". That would be a great opening line for a sci fi novel involving hibernation.

The grain silos near my house look like capacitors.

I don't mean to write like Paul Harvey, but it comes out that way. Sorry.