Songs that make me hate myself – Stornoway edition

This band out of Scotland*, Stornoway, has a single out called “Zorbing”. Listen. As a newly-minted solo artist, I’d say 30% of my energy is expended creatively, 30% on the business/marketing side, and the rest is spent propping up my fragile ego; telling myself to keep working, to do what I have to do to […]

Hayes Carll's "She Left Me for Jesus"

Was checking out some blogs and ran into this wonderful song by Hayes Carll via Jeff’s Songwriting Blog. “She Left Me for Jesus” by Hayes Carll. Those of you who know my songs know how important humor is to my music (and those of you who’ve known me for years saw it even more in […]

Abbie Barrett Joins in January 13th

A note to those of you thinking of coming to my show at Bloc 11 on January 13: Abbie Barrett will be going on after me, and has enthusiastically agreed to sing harmony on a couple of my songs. It should make for a pretty solid performance, assuming I don’t screw up, which I totally […]

grateful/disorder available on iTunes

Go buy it. Listen. Write a review on iTunes. Even a horrible, scathing, brutal review about how much you hate it and how I’m so ugly. People will still buy it out of curiosity. Unless you want to see me fail, in which case, don’t do any of those things. Just know that I hate […]

This Is What Happens When I'm Frustrated

Sometimes while rehearsing — particularly while working on a track that’s vocally difficult — I get angry. And that’s when weird things start to happen: David Gray’s “Lately” Sung in Intentionally Horrible Scott Stapp Voice (mp3) If you’re not familiar with the song I’m singing: David Gray’s “Lately” (On a side note, watch the David […]

A MySpace Less Horrible

It took most of my Sunday, but I managed to build a MySpace page that isn’t brutal to look at without resorting to cheesy page builders that also look horrible. No offense to you wonderful CSS artists and engineers who so painstakingly crafted the MySpace stylesheets during the Bronze Age. STETSON on MySpace. If anyone […]

Hey Vibration! — New Song Available

Available here. Spread it around: Hey Vibration! on TheSixtyOne Hey Vibration! on Reverb Nation Hey Vibration! on iLike And if you insist on MySpace, fine: Hey Vibration! on MySpace

Playlist: Dropkick Murphys' The State of Massachusetts

I was working on a Boston-themed song for shows in the area and I started thinking about “Shipping Up to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys. Turns out they’ve actually written some other pretty catchy songs. Here’s my favorite of the batch: The State of Massachusetts Some bands yell for effect, but these guys actually yell […]

More Jokes at Open Mics

Once again, I tell a joke at an open mic and it just dies. That’s three this week. I’m pretty confident it was a good joke tonight, but people don’t expect a singer-songwriter to pull out a stuffed panda who talks to the crowd in the first place. Whatever. They’ll just have to learn to […]

Jokes and Open Mics

Tonight I learned an important lesson the hard way: People do not expect jokes at an open mic. The audience expects to hear “Jolene” by Ray Lamontagne a dozen times, but not anyone trying to be funny. So when I stood up there and asked for a show of hands for “Team Jacob” and “Team […]

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