So I submitted (via the fab cdbaby) Happy Sounding Sad Songs to a bunch of digital music sites, and I just saw that Amie Street is finally listing it--for FREE! I'm sure you have to sign up for their service, but as far as I can tell there is no fee involved there, and then you can get Happy Sounding Sad Songs for free, no strings, totally legit. If you haven't picked up the record yet, a perfect opportunity. To get $5 worth of tunes (the ones that actually cost), sign up via this cdbaby referal link...

In other news, I had to turn down a gig next week with the incredible Salim Nourallah (who also produced Happy Sounding Sad Songs). The bottom line is my next month or so is just insane. I started a new job the beginning of this week, it's a geek thing--bits to bytes to fun things you can click on, this is my life--I have a trip to Florida coming up, and then as soon as I return I move into a new house. I'm hoping that the extra room in teh house will be for teh music...I haven't had my drumkit set up in a very long time...and I'm hoping that with the immediate space in which to practice I might marshal some players to accompany me in this crazy live fiasco I'm planning.

Salim and I are also scheming to start recording the next record* in August. *This one is going to be digital-only, released a few tracks at a time.

I also have plans for a podcast and The Book which has been in the plans for a Long time but has still yet to surface. I've been in a big re-structuring phase this last year. Life has been...interesting.

I've had a really hard time finding musicians to play with in Dallas. It started off well enough, this was back in 2004. I found a really cool open-mic, the kind where the players were actually fun to listen to, supportive of my music, and the venue was top-notch. Well it's a long story, but it got shut down. Ever since a sense of musical community has been a hard nut to crack. I don't really know why.

In May 2003 I moved to Sarajevo with my then partner (in a very legally and financially binding way, if you know what I mean). It had been 6 years since I had seriously recorded any music, but I had just come out of a very fruitful and fun time in the Arlington, Virginia slash Washington DC area, and I had a gig coming up at the end of summer, in the UK. Besides the geeky stuff I was doing, the fancy ex-pat parties, and trying to buy groceries while having very little grasp of the local language, I hunted around for a place to maybe record an EP.

Through some creative networking I found a studio. It was in the middle of a bombed-out building that, during the siege, had been right across from the front lines. The elevator in this place was unbelievable; it made a bone-chilling scrape slash groan every time it passed the fourth floor. And every night someone pissed in the lobby--if you could even call it a lobby, mistaking it for a bathroom wasn't a stretch. Next to this building were the old communist barracks, trees growing on the roof, land-mines still inside.

It was incredible. Despite a whole pile of trouble going on in my life, I had the most amazing experience for 8 very hot, un-air-conditioned days. I had a producer who rode the bus up from Croatia, a Bosnian Serb guitarist, and a Bosnian studio owner. We had a Herzegovinan groupie. A lot of progress had been made in recording technology in the 6 year prior, and bass lines and drums and all manner of noises came out of a keyboard and into a computer and after a 36-hour marathon mixing session fueled by packs of cigarettes and cups of Turkish coffee, the Americana EP emerged.

There are about a million other stories from those sessions. I'll have to tell you them someday.

Within a week my producer had become my drummer, I had a bass player from Croatia, and with my loyal guitarist from the sessions we played a rock show at the same bar that had hosted underground, battery-powered blues during the siege. I'd spent two solid days burning the EP, two at a time on an old Pentium 1 I'd inherited from a previous employer; why we didn't have properly printed CD's is another great story for yet another day. Soon after I was on a plane to the UK.

When I returned to Sarajevo my life had changed completely. I enjoyed two final weeks in the city, sitting in cafes with artists from the local art academy, drinking in bars with the marginal, the surviving, the creating, the loving, the hating. I was Happy and I was Sad in equal measure. It was, indeed, Beautiful and Tragic.

...

I'm really into the new Ladytron record right now. It's not out on disc yet, but you can get it on Amazon as mp3. Love that shit.