Playing Music is About Having Fearless Style

There are two things holding back most musicians: lack of practice and fear. Most good musicians are acutely aware of their weaknesses when it comes to their particular instrument (your voice counts as an instrument). It could be a lack of dexterity or strength, weak lung capacity, weak knowledge of musical theory and how it...

Albums You Should Listen To This Week

There's some great new stuff that's come out lately. Here's a taste of some songs from those albums: "Solved" by MC Frontalot off of his album "Solved" "Brendan's Death Song" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers off the album "I'm With You" "Yellow Belly" by Thrice off of the album "Major/Minor" "Dimitri Mendeleev" by Astronautalis...

Things I Learned Today

At work: The mail server we use as part of our server environment is, in fact, scriptable, but only exposes a COM interface. I now get to figure out how to hook in to it from C#, and pray that I can write managed code to talk to it in a sane way. Energy Option Swaps are...

Songs Are Tricky Little Things

Writing a song can be a real pain in the ass. It gets even worse when you feel like you need to come up with a wealth of new material all at once. With the hiatus of Far From There and looking for a new direction, it's sort of fallen on me to crank out...

Couch Guitar Straps

Part of the fun of having a blog is being able to pimp awesome things or companies that I find. This is not an endorsed advertisement. I will always tell you if I sell ad space to a company here. This is stuff I use and love enough to share. This week I want to share...

Ira Glass – The Gap

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Every time I create something I think about this. I think it's because, even though I've done a lot of creative work, I still feel like I'm working my way across the gap. I feel a bit like Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade when he has...

On Writing

So I'm a writer. I write. I write here. I write novels every November. I like that kind of writing, but I don't love that kind of writing. It's not me. I am never fully myself when writing here or elsewhere. I am creating a caricature of either myself, or the world I see, or the worlds I...

Love Songs

Is anyone else deathly tired of love songs? I don't mean songs that inspire love, I mean those sickeningly sweet songs written about how much someone loves someone else, that are meant to pull at those particular heartstrings. I love Eric Clapton, that should come as no surprise to most of you, but if I...

Chasing Tone

If you talk to people who produce music, there's this whole culture obsessed with tone. As a guitarist, and as someone interested in the recording and production process, I seem to sit in the midst of two of the most heavily tone obsessed groups out there. These are the people who cling to, admittedly, archaic...

State of the B – August 2010

I figured, since I've been gone so long, that I should probably post an update on a bunch of things. Far From There will be going on a 3 year hiatus while Jeff goes off to grad school. We may play shows when he's back in town from time to time, though. Jeff is going...