Spiff – Tom Cruise Crazy
I think my favorite moment is Tom sliding across the floor in his underwear (but then I have always been a sucker for an attractive young man in briefs):
Len – Blue Sunny Day
Oh man, no wonder this vampire’s so sad, he’s only got four fingers on each hand! As usual, Len finished this in record time and I took a million years to post it. (Check out his initial sketch too, probably done in two minutes with ketchup and a toothpick on the back of a napkin.)
New Song – Blue Sunny Day
Unbelievably, there is a new song. As I’ve mentioned the couple of times I played this live, I tried very hard to NOT make this about a sad vampire, but of course it is. It started out with the idea that I should just, for once, write a song that was kind of bouncy and happy. Though once I had decided to use the phrase “blue sunny day,” it was hard not to notice that the word “blue” can have another meaning. From there it’s only a quick jump to vampire suicide. I don’t know what happened to him exactly, perhaps he suffers from seasonal affective disorder? Or maybe he’s just sick of working nights.
I’ve had this chord progression and melody running around in my brain for a long time, so it’s nice to get it out. This was one of those songs where the arrangement started to build itself in my head before I had really finished writing, I could hear all those vocals from the very beginning. I’m stealing from all sorts of places of course, there’s more than a little Tally Hall influence, some Queen in there, maybe a little Jeff Lynne, and the bridge makes me think of XTC so much that I fear I may discover it’s a direct lift of something and I just haven’t realized yet (in which case, sorry Andy!).
Other cool things: Dave has already posted a video guitar lesson for this song here, as well as put the chords into the wiki.
As always, you have a choice: stream it, download it free, or buy it.
By the way, I have messed up the store link to the flac version somehow – sorry to everyone who’s trying to buy it, I will fix it as soon as I can, and then offer you some kind of lavish compensation for your trouble. UPDATE: Fixed. Let me know if you bought and ran out of downloads. This is very embarrassing.
Texas!
Dear Texas,
I’m sorry it’s been so long since I did any shows here – both Houston and Austin were really fun, despite the breaking of strings and the throwing of monkeys. Thanks to everyone who came out, especially here in Austin where doing so meant that you were unable to enjoy unlimited free Sierra Mist cocktails at some kick-ass web company party. Not that you don’t have better things to do in Houston. I mean, you know, Houston is nice too. I love all cities equally!
There are a lot of nerds here in Austin, there must be some kind of nerd convention going on or something.
-j
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