Related to my previous post... part of doing a CD full of mostly original tunes is, of course, writing the tunes.

Over the last month and a half I've either written or co-written about 5 songs (can't actually remember without looking at the list and I'm madly typing this before I dash off to work). This is the most productive I've ever been at songwriting.

Thad and I are already planning to continue writing together (and separately) over the course of the next year so that when it comes time to record the next Snake Suspenderz CD, we'll be able to just choose amongst things instead of desperately writing (and digging out old ones). In fact, we're thinking of doing a recording session about every time we get three new ones together, so that we might actually have most the album done in advance.

We have a system for songwriting that probably bears a lot of resemblance to what the old Tin Pan Alley folks did. I'll be writing about that real soon.

My band, Snake Suspenderz, has been recording a new CD. It's called Serpentine and we're down to the final mix stage.

This is a total DIY project. We've been recording it in Thad's studio and he also does short run CD reproduction so we'll be manufacturing them ourselves.

That's right. We're Indie all the way.

Represent!

There are 16 songs on the CD, 14 of which are original tunes written by either Thad or me or both of us together.  You can listen to some rough mixes on the Snake Suspenderz MySpace page.

Barring a catastrophic circumstance, we'll have them available (for the first time ever!) when we play at the 5th Annual National Kazoo Day celebration in Portland, OR, this Saturday, the 31st. We'll be on the famous Back Gate Stage at Artichoke Music.

For you fellow ukulele phreaks, the opening band, KingniK, is also uke-centric.

You can get full details here.

Stay tuned! (Especially if you're on my mailing list. We got a special deal for you!)

If you're in the Portland area, we hope to see you there!

Here's how to tell.

Just another public service I offer.

Yes, I know it's supposed to be "Ministry of Silly Walks" but I didn't caption it and, let's face it, this is one hilarious kitteh picture.

A few days back, Donnie Bubbles, who runs the UkeToob blog, asked if I'd do an interview. I said, "Heck, yeah!" (or something of that nature).

What could be better than to be asked to bloviate on one of your favorite subjects? Hm?

This being the digital age, he sent me questions via email and I answered them the same way. I just sent the answers back yesterday and already he's got the interview posted on UkeToob.

And he even threw in one of my videos and lots of link love.

Thanks Donnie!

The other day -- finally -- I set up a MySpace for my band, Snake Suspenderz. I've said we probably should have one, but it took Thaddeus visiting a friend of his who's also a booking agent to convince him of the need. His friend asked what the band's MySpace was and when he said we didn't have one she said, "What? You don't want to get gigs?"

It's one of those sad, but true things. A lot of bookers won't take you seriously if you don't have the MySpace thing going on. It's still no guarantee that you'll get the gigs, of course. But maintaining one is a "cost of doing business" in today's weird music scene.

Once it's completely pimped out, someone else in the band will be taking over the daily management of it, but I said I didn't mind doing the set up since I was the only one of us who had been a longtime regular at the place.

Currently there are 5 tunes up on the Snake Suspenderz MySpace page, all rough mixes from our upcoming CD, Serpentine. Go check 'em out and let us know what you think!

If you're also a MySpacer (and you like our stuff) drop us a friend request.

Apparently 100 is sort of a "magic number" when it comes to subscriptions on YouTube. It took about a year and a half for me to hit 100, but since then the subs are coming in (relatively speaking) fast and furious. I'm very flattered, but that's not why I'm posting this.

About two weeks ago I had a particularly busy week in the subscription department. Enough that I was looking at several new subscriptions a day.

You can choose to put an area on your channel page showing your recent activity, like what vids you've commented on, any vid you've favorited, etc. and that includes who you've recently subscribed to. I suddenly noticed a lot of people had subscribed to more than one uke-phreak... and they had subscribed this order:

1. GUGUG
2. heftone
3. ukebucket
4. me

I'm further flattered to be in such fine company, but it totally escapes me how you can start with Gus and end up with me in such an order. Other than ukulele the four of us don't have much in common musically (though Brian and I both like old stuff).

Can you figure it out?

Why I haven't posted lately.

1. Depressed
2. Busy
3. Lazy
4. All of the above