How To Turn Off Rockin’ With The Cross In OnSong

Save yourself the embarrassment of accidentally hitting the Remote button in the song menu and calling up a bunch of contemporary Christian music in front of your band.

My Favorite Albums

Prompted by yet another Reddit hole of favorite album threads, I realized I need to catalog the albums that mean the most to me, or were a huge influence on me at some point in my life. Here they are in no particular order (with affiliate Apple Music/iTunes or Bandcamp links when possible).

Top Music of 2016

As you may already know, I have been scrobbling all of my music plays to Last.fm for the past 10 years. This year, Last.fm has a new report called Last.year that does all my homework for me! I have still recorded the usual stats below for future proofing.

No More Acronyms

I jokingly made a New Years resolution this year to remove acronyms from my vocabulary, but it’s working.

Dot

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

The audio of the original Pale Blue Dot video on YouTube has been muted for copyright violations. There are other versions, but they use additional images of Earth which completely deminishes the message.

Look at this single photograph—the most amazing of our planet ever taken—by Voyager 1 at over 6 billion kilometers away while you play the audio track.

Carl Sagan Day is November 9th.

Lemon

On July 30, 2016, I purchaed a 21.5ʺ iMac for my family on apple.com. Today—nearly three months later—they can finally use it. Every step of the way was a miserable series of unfortunate events.

Curse of the Clicky

I have been on a quest for the perfect double bass preamp for years. There are a lot of options, but almost nothing properly suited for a slap player who wants a clicky but doesn’t want to strap a giant metal box to their tailpiece or their waist. 

New Music Tuesday: VRTRA, My Bones Hold a Stillness

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a review. Honestly, there hasn’t been anything that has stirred me from my new release cave—not until I started my reluctant post Labor Day Tuesday morning off with VRTRA.

Pokémausoleum

Today the cemetery Kristyn and I visit on our power-walks was teaming with Pokémon Go players. We usually see one or two people, or sometimes a car or two—barring the occasional funeral. Today we counted at least 30 people and as many as 15 cars, all with smart phones in hand. It was surreal, not unlike this episode of Star Trek TNG, The Game.

Red And Black And White All Over

I “watched” (from Twitter) as Anti-Fascist (ANTIFA) and Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN) clashed on the capital steps of Sacramento yesterday in an childish display of sticks and stones and breaking bones and lots of name calling. Both sides are claiming victory.

New Music Tuesday: Luke Bell, Luke Bell.

Excellent from songwriting to production. Two seconds after hitting play, not only did I instantly fall in love with the first track, “Sometimes,” I felt like it had been a favorite for years. That’s pretty much how this whole album plays.

New Music Tuesday: Daniel Romano, Mosey

About half of a year ago, Kristyn and I went to see Daniel Romano in San Francisco in support of his latest record, If I’ve Only One Time Askin’, of which he played only slightly more than zero tracks. Nearly everything he did was new material. Only one of those songs appears on Mosey, essentially making this his third volume of music since 2015.

Pardon This

A trend I have noticed trickling down from the executive world over the past few years is to include the following sentence in your email signature:

Please excuse any typos, sent from my iPhone.

Hmm… Please excuse my bluntness, but with all due respect, computers are pocket-sized now. It’s probably time to adapt.

Clutch’s Psychic Warfare Finally Hits Streaming Music Channels

Released October 2, 2015, Psychic Warfare was available in iTunes, Amazon and other digital music stores, but conspicuously absent from the streaming music channels like Apple Music, Spotify and Pandora. Streamers, your wait is now over.

Me and Jake

My buddy, Ivan snapped the picture on the right of me playing bass for the West Nile Ramblers at Harlow’s this weekend.

My Bass Rig 2016

The Upright Bass Players Union is one of the few reasons I keep a Facebook account. It’s an awesome group of working class rockabilly and honky tonk players who share tips and talk a lot of shit. Amplifying the double bass isn’t easy, so it is incredibly helpful to see such a diverse range of rigs and setups. I think I have some pretty unique things going on in my rig, so I thought I should share it with the group. I like to own my mojo, though, so I’m posting it here as well.

New Music Tuesday: OLYS, Maps

Every week I try to find something new and interesting that is also a bit outside my wheel house. (Obviously, some weeks are more of a struggle than others.) I was tipped of to OLYS new single last week, and found myself spinning it quite a bit. As wheelhouses go, this fits fairly snuggly outside of mine.

New Music Tuesday: HECK, Instructions

I have to apologize, I’ve been sitting on this one for a few weeks. But you know what? This amazing Instructions record I found those few weeks ago has been in regular rotation in my iTunes. Actually, loop is probably a more appropriate word. It is so good that it has eclipsed all new releases for me for the past two weeks!

New: Upcoming Gigs

I get a lot of inquiries as to where I’m playing next (which I am extremely humbled by and appreciative of), but I’m not much of a future planner. I live in the “now.” You know, like a renegade. These things are hard for me to remember off hand, so I made a listing of my Upcoming gigs for this website.

Some Upcoming Gigs Spring 2016

The sun came out and dried up all the rain and the itsy bitsy bookers booked some gigs again.

How to turn off the microphone and language keys on the iOS keyboard

This has been driving me nuts for months—ever since I upgraded to the iPhone 6s from the 5s. I mostly type with my right thumb on my iPhone, but my tiny hands are simply too small to reach the frequently needed number/letter toggle button located at the farthest reaches of the keyboard, just past the useless microphone and irrelevant language buttons.

Young For My Age

I’m frequently told that I look young for my age. Yes, hearing that never, ever gets old. I also run in circles with many people that are a few decades my junior. The combination of these two things has lead to many interesting conversations.

New Music Tuesday: Laura Jean Anderson, Righteous Girl

What if Neko Case joined the Alabama Shakes? Well, you might end up with something a little like this.

Happy Street Date!

Interesting stuff this week. Lots of blasts from the past resurfacing. Prog rock seems to be a theme.