August 19, 2008
We're super excited to have Lauren Stockner as the new lead guitarist in The Spanish Channel. Plus the DeLeo brothers (of STP fame) signed her guitar, which makes her totally rad.

July 29, 2008
We're taking the next few weeks to write new material and bring the rock to our late August shows in New York City! Plus we have weddings to attend, and "Total Eclipse of the Heart" to sing.

April 20, 2008
We gots a show at Arlene's Grocery on May 6 at 11! Vince DeMasi's band is on before us, playing the entire War album by U2 as a tribute.

March 18, 2008
We're playing a band show at Don Hill's in NYC at 8pm Thursday night! Thursday, as in the first round of the NCAA tournament, so watch basketball and listen to us, we'll probably have an eye on the telly as well.

December 31, 1969

February 28, 2008
CD Release Party at The Annex! Saturday, March 1 at 8:00 pm, 152 Orchard St between Rivington and Stanton, NYC.

January 10, 2008
Check out my new music video! Filmed on Lake Champlain in Burlington, VT and created by Tamarack Media.

January 7, 2008
I've started teaching guitar at the New York City Guitar School. Everyone there is really positive and upbeat, and it doesn't even feel like work. Until I have to make lesson plans...

December 13, 2007
Fixed the music player!

December 7, 2007
The official release date is set: January 30, 2008. You can pre-order a copy of Upside Downer and get a free poster to boot!

December 4, 2007
Happy Hannukah!

October 23, 2007
Been a while! I just finished my new record, Upside Downer, it's off at Discmakers getting maked. Woo hoo! I'm hosting a weekly open mic in Brooklyn at the Hope Lounge, Wednesdays at 9pm. Come, sing, be awesome.

July 29, 2007
The Nietzsche Family Circus. Do it. Now. Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

July 19, 2007
Jeannine Hebb and Claire Wadsworth totally rocked at the Hope Lounge last night, with a lot of help from Yujin Amano. I played first, and Dan and Eleanor came out to support...bearing pizza. God's perfect food.

July 12, 2007
I went to the Live Earth concert Saturday at Giants Stadium. Let's just say watching Bon Jovi sing "Livin' on a Prayer" in New Jersey was like drinking Bordeaux in Bordeaux. Alicia Keys can come over to my house any time she wants.

July 6, 2007
There is a bone marrow testing drive (it's painless, they just swab your cheek) on Sunday at 4:00pm at Pianos in Manhattan! Go!

Michael Bouyea, who knew there was another?

July 2, 2007
My friend Vidya's cousin Vinay has leukemia and needs a bone marrow donor. Vinay is 26, recently married, and just started his medical residency but had to drop out. There is a 1 in 20,000 match rate for South Asians, and his family has been organizing bone marrow drives all over the country to try to find donors. I noticed a drive in Manhattan was added for the end of the month, so if you could send this information on to anyone who can help, please do. His story and information on the drives can be found at www.helpvinay.org. And even if you aren't South Asian, please consider becoming a donor anyway if you aren't yet registered. All it takes is a mouth swab (no needles!) to get registered. Please tell a friend!

July 1, 2007
So you wanna shred but wanna keep the 'rents happy too? Canon Rock is an arrangement of Pachelbel's old chestnut by Taiwanese guitarist Jerry Chang. This video is a rather insane montage of 40+ YouTubers playing along in the comfort of the greatest Green Room of them all: their bedrooms.

June 25, 2007
I've got a new music page on MySpace, although I'm convinced that Myspace's emergence is the first sign of the apocalypse. Coke with vitamins ran a close second.

June 13, 2007
The Spanish Channel is playing tonight at Don Hill's with Baywa, Jenny Martin, and Jeannine Hebb. 8:00 pm at 511 Greenwich St, New York, NY. 21+/$10
I also have a Solo Show at the mysterious Antiwar Yippie Cafe, 9 Bleecker St at Bowery, at 8:00pm this Friday.

May 25, 2007
I'm playing a solo show at Fat Baby tomorrow (Monday) at 9:00 pm.
I went to see The Old Ceremony at Union Hall in Brooklyn last night, they were awesome as usual. Check out their video for "Papers In Order", is nice!

May 25, 2007
The Spanish Channel played its first show in New York City last night, at the Parkside Lounge. We celebrated by getting our butts kicked in Foosball by a bunch of dudes with popped collars.

May 16, 2007
Like honey to my soul: A music reviewer in Uzbekistan reviewed the Wings of Fire Orchestra album we made last year. [Borat joke deleted.]

May 14, 2007
 I'm in Chapel Hill, it's so sunny and green out today. Joyce's law school graduation was yesterday at the Dean Dome. The dean of the law school advised them that instead of throwing their puffy caps in the air, they should doff them and wave them around, thereby avoiding any accidental injuries from falling caps. What a bunch of lawyers.
  The dogs upstairs from Joyce's apartment bark at anything that moves. The apartment is so flimsy that the walls and floor shake as the mongrels leap and paw and bark at whatever squirrel or mailman catches their eyes. It feels like they must weigh 400 lbs - the flower vase on the table seems ready to topple as the dogs bounce around.

May 9, 2007
Been busy booking shows! Next one for The Spanish Channel is Thursday, May 24 at the Parkside Lounge on Houston St in Manhattan. Also, Joyce passed the patent bar! Woo hoo! One more exam and she'll be a lawyer for realz.

May 8, 2007
WTF of the Day II: Add Manitou Springs to the list of Colorado towns that aren't ready for art with balls. Dog Balls.

May 7, 2007
WTF of the Day: Scientists in Taiwan have bred three pigs that glow in the dark. Seriously. I thought this was a hoax at first - take a look at the BBC reporter's name: Chris Hogg.

5-6-07
I started watching The Fearless Freaks, a movie about The Flaming Lips, who most people only remember for their 1993 hit "She Don't Use Jelly". They are definitely weird. Witness 1997's Zaireeka, four CDs designed to be played simultaneously from four stereos, with songs like "The Train Runs over the Camel but is Derailed by the Gnat." Or 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, featuring Yoshimi from the Boredoms. Lead singer Wayne Coyne still cuts his own grass and lives in his hometown, Oklahoma City. They've been around since 1983, and I don't want to say they are still going strong - that's what you say about an aging Rolling Stones. Rather than being old guys playing old hits, they're continually evolving and experimenting. But the sight of Coyne running on top of a crowd in a giant see-through plastic bubble and then fake blood trickling down his face... I get so...emotional...

5-5-07
If you haven't done it already, you might check out Michael Menche's musical novel Télétoile. He and I produced the music for it earlier this year, have a listen and buy it if you dig it! Mike is looking for a publisher for the book, so please email him if you like the music, or you have a rich uncle who owns Random House.

5-4-07
Katie Locke did some sweet background vocals on Me & You, have a listen to the rough mix.

5-3-07
Up all night recording vocals. **CRASH** I feel so much better when I go to bed at 11 pm and wake up at 7, but there's an undeniable vibe that only seems to come out late at night. It must look pretty strange to see someone screaming his head off at three in the morning, half-in and half-out of the corner closet of his mom's basement TV room.

5-1-07
Joyce is studying for the Patent Bar Exam next week. She's a smart one, she'll pass it. She's also a fashionista, and gives me great clothing advice.

4-29-07
I just finished reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis in the laundromat today. I had to put an extra quarter in the dryer so I could make it through the epilogue. The book grew out of a question Lewis was pondering: How could the Oakland A's consistently win so many games with one of the smallest payrolls in baseball? The answer was easy - their poverty forced them to think outside the box. The A's had to find players whose contributions to winning were overlooked by every other team because they didn't fit the mold of the "classic" ballplayer. Thus, these players were available cheap, yet were extremely effective. A large part of it had to do with the flawed statistics that have evolved over time. Batting average, for one, has always been a sacred measuring stick, but people like Bill James have known since the '70s that on-base percentage and slugging percentage are far better measures of a player's offensive value. Players who walked a lot were undervalued by the old batting average pricetags, but since a walk is as good as a hit, the A's got players on base, and for far less than their competitors. This, and other factors, led to more runs and more wins. A lot more wins. Knee-jerk criticism of this new approach from the old-boys club of Major League Baseball was understandable - no one likes to look bad. Yet Lewis gave the sense that A's general manager Billy Beane and sabermetrician Paul DePodesta must have felt a bit like Galileo to James' Copernicus at times. It was absorbing - Lewis is an excellent writer and storyteller as well as a thorough journalist. But now I can't stop thinking about what flawed statistics I rely on in my own life, and if there are inefficiencies in the music business that I can exploit given my own limited resources.

4-28-07
There's a story going around about Japanese women being conned into buying what they think are bargain-priced poodles, only to find out that they've been stuck with sheep imported from the UK. A Google search of "japan sheep poodle" turns up hundreds of these articles. But the kicker is that it's a hoax, at least it seems to be, based on a few websites that call it out. These are in the vast minority. So, if the world news media is such a rumor mill that it just spreads a false story around about sheep-poodles without bothering to check its facts, what does that say about ANYTHING that comes down the wire?

4-27-07
Pete Franklin played me Fountains of Wayne Hotline by Robbie Fulks. it's so worth the 99 cents.

4-26-07
Tina deVaron is a singer, songwriter, and jazz pianist I met at the ASCAP convention in New York. I'm looking forward to co-writing with her. She performs jazz standards and children's songs on Saturdays and Sundays from noon - 4:30 pm at the Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan. Her music emphasizes the woman in every mother, a woman who may feel her femininity buried under layers of work, kids, and chores. I wonder if there's an analogue for fathers?

4-25-07
I remember hearing about The Tragically Hip from time to time, and Andrew Por decided it was high time I came face to face with a band he claimed channeled the very breath of God. Or at least, is a member of the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. The Hip, as their Maple Leafs-jersey-wearing, Canadian-flag-waving, stereotype-busting fans chanted, did bring the rock at Irving Plaza last night. For a band that's almost a quarter of a century old, they played with the energy of giddy teens on Red Bull. But that's what you get when you have two Gords and the truth.

4-24-07
Nicaragua, peaceful since 1990 thanks to the departure of the CIA, and home to my good friends Warren & Julie, has suddenly become a firepit of anger. An American named Eric Volz was tried and convicted of the murder of a Nicaraguan girlfriend on what does seem to be flimsy evidence. I'm glad we went there when we did. It seems that the latent resentment of foreign real estate investors was sparked into flames.

4-23-07
L.A., all day, last week. I went to the ASCAP conference in Hollywood. All the musical legends there - Randy Newman, Bill Withers, Hal David, Glen Ballard, Mark Hudson, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, and many others - seemed like they had The Secret.

4-8-07
Eleanor & Dan's wedding celebration party at Rialto in Little Italy, or is it SoHo? The place was packed with snazzy sportcoats and dashing dresses and the wine flowed like beer. I got to know some of Dan's b-school friends and spent some time encouraging Saffi and Anabel to eat brightly colored foods.

4-7-07
Dan Por married Eleanor Kung in a beautiful ceremony at Gallery Vietnam in Greenwich Village yesterday. Eleanor had her hair up and wore a cream-colored dress, a total knockout. Dan was dressed to the nines as well. Their families flew in from Seattle, Toronto, and even as far as Australia. I made an emergency run to Duane Reade for some L'Eggs. For Eleanor. Nieces Saffi and Anabel scattered yellow flower petals down the aisle. Eleanor's parents initiated Dan into the family with traditional sweet rice and bitter soup (which I'm afraid might be poisoned when my turn comes along). Dan successfully stomped the ceremonial glass and kissed his bride, and then the stories started coming out. But I'm sworn to secrecy.

3-22-07
Finished the music for Télétoile, a musical novel by Michael Menche. Think Garden State with a French twist.

2-26-07
Videos! Friends Don't Let Friends... and Road Rage - made for the Convenient Truths Green Video Contest. It was a little odd trying to make a convincing video about global warming when Burlington, Vermont was covered in three feet of snow. Pete and Bill at Tamarack Media, my co-conspirators, ended up winning third place overall! Way to go!

2-2-07
Livin' in Brooklyn! $5 bootleg reggaeton CDs by the crate.

12-30-06
Nicaragua! Warren and Julie are getting married on the side of Momotombo, a green-forested volcano tomorrow. We're in Granada, surrounded by pastel stucco, tile roofs, and an odd mix of poverty and Spanish Colonial architecture. The shower works sometimes. I have the runs, not because of the water here, but because of a bad chicken sandwich I ate on the way to JFK. Yesterday we swam in a lake in the crater of a dormant volcano. It was warm and the beach was black. Everyone is very friendly, especially Alvison Hunter, a guitarist who speaks five languages.

11-8-06
"The quandary of the whole solo singer/songwriter thing is that one listener's deeply personal and affecting music is another's boringly self-absorbed slop." -- From an AllMusic.com review of Ron Sexsmith. True dat.

9-28-06
Shooting the first video for The Spanish Channel this weekend in Burlington, VT. Very psyched. Too bad my brother won't be there, he's crazy like that. I get some quote time in this article on Duke alums trying to make it in the music world.