And, of course, it’s the song I played least competently.  Oh, well.  At least Eloise sounds good.  And if you use your imagination, you can pretend that you hear Monkey playing something.

It’s summer, which means it’s time to get the band back together again.

Precisely one month from today, we’ll be opening for the Alien Funk Squad at The Kenton Club.  Be there at approximately 9:30!

Not to get your hopes up or anything, but there’s a good chance that we’ll be playing at least five brand-new songs as sloppily as you’d expect us to.

One of those songs HASN’T EVEN BEEN WRITTEN YET.  And you know what?  Screw it.  I am personally guaranteeing that we will play five brand-new songs at this show.  My mouth is officially writing checks that my ass has no ability to cash.

Famous Artist Jedidiah Chavez will be trying to sell hot dogs outside of the Arbor Lodge New Seasons. Apparently, he feels that people who hear me and Eloise singing songs will suddenly develop an intense craving for turd-shaped meats.

We’ll be there from 3-3:30 this afternoon, and if you want to see me look uncomfortable while playing guitar badly and singing mediocrely and sweating because it’s over 80 degrees, and if you want to hear the lovely and talented Eloise try to make up for my deficiencies, drop by and let Jed try to sell you a hot dog.

Apparently, all proceeds benefit the good work at Ethos.

UPDATE: Djerzi took a picture:

I’m currently listening to the one on natural history, and it’s just about the most absurd thing I’ve heard. Looks like Amazon has them for a couple of bucks each. Haven’t checked the iTunes.

DYM on hiatus. Back in July.

The joy of garage sales.

I think we might begin Operation Harass Chris Onstad Until He Let’s Us Write An Achewood Rock Opera.

Writing pop songs is an odd pasttime, or maybe it’s just that my approach is odd. The songs originate as fragments, which are then combined with other fragments, and the embryonic song then either dictates the direction of the lyrics or is adapted to suit a lyrical idea that’s been waiting around for an appropriate vehicle. This seems to work well enough for individual songs, but recently I’ve been working on writing an album, and the process of fragments becoming songs which are fragments of an ideally cohesive album isn’t really working. One reason it hasn’t been working is that I never figured out what this album was supposed to be (apart from good). It’s sort of like taking puzzle pieces and putting them together to form larger puzzle pieces and then getting into a car and placing those pieces in mailboxes around the city and then driving home and having a drink and watching an old movie while keeping an eye out for the mailman. The success of the venture depends entirely on the quality of movie, I suppose.

Over the past few weeks, Roboctopus has come up pretty consistently in a variety of conversations. I hadn’t really thought about it in a while, because hell, it’s done and over with. But it was mentioned often enough that it worked its way into my brain and forced me to consider it. And, more to the point of this post, it made me think about what kind of songwriter I am.

It’s odd that I’ve never really thought about it. Wait, no, it’s not odd–I’m not a songwriter, so why would I think about it? Sure, I write songs, but I also play tennis, and I’m definitely not a tennis player. On the whole, it’s probably a bad idea to think of myself as a songwriter, but it’s too late.¹ It happened.

Blah blah blah: in evaluating my perceived strengths and weaknesses, it turns out that I probably work best with conceptual/narrative-driven songs/projects.

I guess how I arrived at the idea doesn’t matter too much to anybody but me, but I needed to write it out to make sure I made sense to myself.

So here’s what we at DYM will be working on this spring and summer:

1. Mixing and finishing the Tough Nuggets EP.
2. Musicians of Sound: Soundtrack to the Motion Picture. Details on this will be forthcoming once I make sure that what I have in mind is logistically feasible.
3. Maintain the Feel EP. This is probably going to include the three songs that are currently slated for Musicians of Sound, as well as any decent-enough songs that don’t quite fit with what I have in mind.
4. A new rock opera. What the hell, right? Townshend has written four or five, so we can probably get away with two.

So there you go.  Two conceptual narrative projects, two random-ass EPs.  We’ll see how it goes.

1. The short version of why it’s bad: it has to do with self-consciousness.

It’s not freely available online at the moment (although it may be in the relatively near future), so you might have to do something crazy like actually buy the magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

One day in late 2000, I got a call from Monsignor John Egan, a labor priest and civil rights activist who had marched with Saul Alinsky. When he hit old age with his bad heart, he’d try to get people to join committees by saying, “Oh, Sue”—or Bill or Jean or Tom—“it’s probably the last thing I’ll ever ask of you.” He made these requests for years. But in what was really the last time, he wanted me to help him fight a new kind of loan—payday loans at rates of 100 percent or 500 percent or 700 percent, which were increasingly on offer in Illinois. I was astonished. For a guy like Jack Egan, who had marched with Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr., this seemed like such a minor issue. Who’d even take out a payday loan?

Now, years later, when there are well over a thousand of these loan agencies in Illinois, and Jack Egan has long since died, I wish I could say: “O Monsignor, you were right.” He could see, years before the rest of us: this fight against the banks was like the fight to unionize, it was like the civil rights movement. He knew, as the rest of us did not, where an Alinsky, a Reuther, a King would be—they’d be marching on the banks.

For those of you who’d prefer an 800 word distillation of one of the article’s main points, you can always check out yesterday’s Krugman article.

I know this phenomenon isn’t entirely Ronald Reagan’s fault, but nonetheless:

I hate to say it, but this is 10x better than Castle.

I wrote it from the POV of the Sultan, from the POV of the Sultan’s daughter, from the POV of a small village at the edge of the empire that’s lost communication with the capital, from the POV of the Sultan’s daughter/wife barricaded in the room of a crumbling castle in a town at the edge of the empire whose walls had just been breached by barbarians, and from the POV of the Sultan’s daughter/wife who had been exiled to a town on the outskirts of empire that experienced a long, slow decay into barbarism after decades of being out of communication with the capital.

I wrote a goddamn novel trying to write these lyrics, and they didn’t work. Not a single line. It was all horseshit.

So after realizing that I had blown two days failing to write lyrics for one song when I need to write lyrics for four songs by Sunday, I decided “The Princess is in Another Castle (working title)” is going to be a love song that has absolutely nothing to do with Ottomans, empires, or falling.

The lyrics should be done in approximately half an hour.