That's right up the road a piece from our house. There's a four-lane highway under that snow. It was closed due to an avalanche a couple hours ago. Whee.

I was pondering the fact that I have roughly 300 video tapes of SMG performances, interviews, dog 'n' pony shows, etc. The trauma necessary to import and upload that shit makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit (I don't even own a VHS deck, let alone a 3/4"...) but I might cherry-pick some of the more fun stuff. I'll see if I can't grab a VHS machine at a pawn shop or some shit. Or come to think of it, they're probably like $19 at Circuit City now. Then I have to no doubt buy some USB contraption to actually get the video in to one of my Macs...

sigh.

Perhaps it wouldn't be any fun after all. Well, I'll keep thinking about it.

Okay, here you go. Something to tide you over until I get the first CR song done. "Yesterday Is Here," off of Tom Waits' seminal "Frank's Wild Years" album. Obviously, this violates YouTube's TOS six ways to Sunday, so I can only assume it'll be removed at some point.

If you want an MP3, 'tis here. Enjoy.

Anyways, as you may or may not have noticed, Elle has added the ability to comment to blog posts here. We tried this format out with Analog Industries, and it proved to be a resounding success, so we'll give it a go here. This would, of course, obviate the Blog Thread, as the commenter on the previous post posited. This will theoretically be a more comfortable vehicle for discussion, I feel.

Long story short, this is how a song is written.

Anyhow, I think I have something I'm happy with. What I'm not used to is the minimalist constraint I put myself under for this album. I tend to fill the available space up with rhythmic information, given the opportunity, but for these songs I"m not giving myself the opportunity, because I am aiming for Sparseland. Not "Music For Airports" sparse, but "Erotic City" sparse. So it's a bit of a struggle, artistically.

So all I have to do is re-write the second and third verses, then assuming I don't do yet another 180, I'll burn some SD space and Tube this bitch.

Okay, a lot.

Bill Kristol is essentially everything I hate about neo-cons. Unapologetically polarizing, he'll say anything to get a rise out of a tree-hugging liberal pinko commie like me. And he usually succeeds. My usual solution, when I see his smirking, eminently punchable face on pretty much any television show I watch is to jump for the remote. So I was like "now I have to stop reading the Times? Life has no meaning any more."

However, this article made me feel better about things. Sort of. One thing I like about the Times is that their editors have absolutely no problem calling each other to the carpet right there on the op-ed page.

And on the bright side, they didn't hire Ann Coulter. But I suppose an ability to string words in to a coherent sentence is a prerequisite (as opposed to "perquisite") for working at the New York Times. And in that, she is mercifully lacking. And hey, I don't have to read Kristol's bullshit.

I'm not gonna try to explain the depth of my feelings for this cat, because no matter how I put it, I'm gonna sound like a fucking retard. But suffice to say that Fatty brought a lot of laughter, a bit of anger, and a metric fuckton of little white hairs to our lives in 13 years on this mortal coil. She was fine on Sunday. She was diagnosed with rapidly accelerating cancer on Monday, and Tuesday she's in Cat Nirvana, I can only assume. We'll miss her.

This is nice for snowboarding, of course. Hoodoo, my local area, has a seven foot base now. I took my cousin to Mt. Bachelor on Thursday for my second trip of the season, but now that Hoodoo is rocking, I'll get back to my normal once-per-week trip. Then in March I'll replace the windshield in the Nitro. (One logically follows the other, if you know driving in the mountains in winter.)

All that aside, I've spent the last few days working on the first song of the CR batch that is about to be set free on the world. This particular track is very sparse; just a loop of a guitar part with vocals and some incidental sounds, but I'm happy with the way it is working out. I should have it done enough to put on YouTube here in a couple days.

Now that you're up to speed, it is pretty much as you guessed. The long and short of it is that it actually costs us a not-insignificant amount of money to turn petroleum in to a certain quantity of compact discs, most of which you don't buy, for varying reasons. We've been talking about doing something along these lines for almost a year, and it's nigh-on time to turn words in to action.

Some of you will no doubt be all up in our grill about this, but suffice to say that the future waits for no man, and I'd be surprised if any CDs at all are pressed in 2012. This is, for better or worse, the way it's gonna be, and we might as well get down to business and start dealing with it.

Elle is working on making some changes to the way the store operates to take this transition in to account; you won't see these for a while, but when they're done, for each album you purchase directly from our store, you will get the normal VBR MP3 we've had for a while now, plus an uncompressed version if that's the sort of thing that floats your boat. (You will be able to download either or both, of course.) The formats available in the other digital outlets such as iTunes will remain at whatever they offer. I submit an uncompressed version to all of them, then they do whatever they do on their end and I have little to no control over it.

I'm currently researching what the best uncompressed format to offer would be. Right now I'm leaning towards FLAC. Personally, from a professional musician's standpoint, FLAC is kind of a dumb format. But most people that aren't musicians that want uncompressed music want it in that format, for better or worse, so that's probably what we'll do. But I'm certainly open to ideas in that regard. We will only offer ONE uncompressed format and ONE compressed one. I think that the BLEEP store, a pioneer in this department, does it right and I'm prone to follow their example.

So anyways, yeah. We have a reasonable quantity of CDs still in stock (we've been anticipating this move for some time, and have not re-pressed any titles for a while) and it's all on sale. This is a time to get the CD for at or around the digital price, and get the download too, of course. So go forth and rock that shit.