If you are at all interested in this Twilight & Ghost Stories business I would like to direct your attention to a full stream of the album here. You can also download two sections from the album and purchase a copy for only $10.

To celebrate the album’s release, listening events have been organized throughout the country. They will feature a special quadraphonic mix of Twilight & Ghost Stories, food and drink, as well as a performance from one of the album’s contributors. These events are free and you are welcome to invite as many friends as you would like. The more the merrier!

December 7th- Indianapolis, IN. @ Harrison Center for the Arts w/ Michael Kaufmann
December 8th- Austin, TX. @ End of An Ear w/ The Weird Weeds
December 8th- Long Beach, CA. @ OPEN w/ Languis
December 8th- Chicago, IL. @ Heart of Gold w/ thearmorclass
December 8th- Brooklyn, NY. @ Monkey Town w/ Inlets

I have also been invited to perform at the Next To Last Festival in Athens, Georgia on the 8th of December. I will be putting together an ensemble to perform a version of Twilight as well as performing alongside Liz Janes. Others performing at this festival include Daedalus, Themselves and Circulatory System. If you are in the area, it would be great to see you out there. At only $20 for an entire weekend of music it really is an amazing event to be a part of.

Both Paper Thin Walls and Stereo Subversion have published interviews within the last few days. The interview with Stereo Subversion was an enjoyable duet with Tom Steck regarding I Heart Lung and the other was a feature story about the weekend I lost to Sean Carnage a few months ago.

Many thanks to Jessica Suarez at Paper Thin Walls and Dave Cantor at Stereo Subversion for deftly sifting through all my words.

Hum- Downward Is Heavenward
Sting- “…Nothing Like The Sun”
Bill Connors- Double Up
Herbert- Scale
makeShift:shelter- a makeShift LP
The Police- Best Of
The Isley Brothers- Best Of
Frank Zappa- Imaginary Diseases
The Gap Band- Best Of
Radiohead- In Rainbows
Joe Jackson- Night and Day
Luscious Jackson- Fever In/Fever Out
I Heart Lung- Live at Rhinoceropolis

Seven days ago my wife and I woke up in Nick Hennies‘ house in Austin, caught some excellent breakfast tacos and jumped on a plane home. The night prior Nick and I got a bit of recording in for a video game score that I’m working on. We both remarked how much we would enjoy playing a game with music like ours. We’re that easy to please.

I had only been home for three days when Pitchfork published Joe Tangari’s tag team review of both Twilight & Ghost Stories and the new I Heart Lung album Between Them A Forest Grew, Trackless and Quiet.

A number of kind people dropped me a line to wish me congratulations. I also read more than a few vociferous comments about the “mediocre” review. Honestly, aside from the fact that the review is a month early and only featured one album cover I have nothing but positive things to say about it.

That Mr. Tangari reviewed the albums came as a pleasant surprise as I hold him in high esteem as one of the more contemplative, contextual writers working (Douglas Wolk, Phillip Buchan and Ned Raggett also come to mind- heck, so do Ian Patterson, Brandon Stousy and Jon Pareles). Although the scores (7.2 and 6.0 for Twilight and A Forest, respectively) might not incite the kind of rabid blog buzz that anything north of an 8.0 does, the review was sensitive, thoughtful and free from histrionics. I rather enjoyed it and am grateful for the time spent really listening to the albums. It’s too bad that a rating (numbers, stars, thumbs) can, on occasion, upstage such relevant writing.

Twilight & Ghost Stories, by the way, is now available from Asthmatic Kitty Records via pre-order for $10. I have a feeling that if you order the album now, you’ll receive prior to the December 4th release date. Between Them A Forest Grew, Trackless and Quiet is also available now, you get an immediately mp3 download while you wait for the CD in the mail.

I’ll be home for another few days before flying out to Indianapolis to work with Liz Janes on our forthcoming album. When we last got together in July we knocked out five solid demo recordings. Now that I’ve listened back to them I am both surprised and enthused. I’m looking forward to recording them with a full band early next year.

There’s much to be done between now and then.

A few weeks ago I talked with the fine folks at 37signals about using their online project management software Basecamp. This week I happily downloaded a new software program called Taskpaper and it got me thinking. Occasionally I am asked how (with a wife, two children, jobs, etc.) I am able to produce and record albums and films, tour the country playing live music, run a record label and so on.

The simple answer is that I am obsessively goal-oriented. I also happen to be obsessively software-oriented. Undoubtedly this is because I own a Mac and its operating system is home to an astonishing software development community.

Back to Taskpaper. It’s a simple notepad like program that effectively bridges the gap between Merlin Mann’s hipster PDA and something like the Ta-Da List widget. It looks and acts like paper but is easily searchable and organized. It’s also handsome and simple, much like WriteRoom, the other flagship program from Hog Bay Software.

Taskpaper works within David Allen’s Getting Things Done framework but if you’re not familiar with GTD, don’t let it scare you off. I’ve read Allen’s tome to contextualization and productivity and the bottom line is write stuff down and do it. No other program allows you to do that any better than Taskpaper. Within minutes I was off to the races. Pouring out all the big and little things that needed doing. It helped me knock out a few of the mental blocks that saw my flagged emails piling up. In one afternoon after using Taskpaper they went from thirty to five and I’m feeling pretty good.

On the surface Taskpaper uses nothing more that text and symbol based prompts. A name or title followed by a semi colon creates a project. A dash followed by a space creates a new item within that project. The item also gets a clean little circle in the far left column and once you complete that project you mark it as done with a simple “Command + D” keystroke. You can create “contexts” or groups by adding an “@” followed by a simple word or phrase. Currently my most popular are “@audio” and “@write” which means I have a lot of music to work on and a lot of things to write.

Under the surface however, Taskpaper allows you to create and organize tabs based on either groups or projects. It’s a deceptively simple program that is perfect for obsessives and goal oriented folks alike. Thankfully I’ve accomplished enough in the last few days with Taskpaper that I had no problems sitting down and writing this post (in WriteRoom by the way). If things keep up I just might talk about TextExpander, Quicksilver, Coda and MarsEdit too.

One of my favorite blogs (and favorite little companies), 37signals, published an interview with yours truly today. I use their Basecamp web-based software to help run Sounds Are Active and keep my many affairs in order. I focused mainly on the process of working on 40 BANDS/80 MINUTES! but there is some interesting stuff in there about Twilight & Ghost Stories too.

I haven’t gotten much sleep this past week. I spent four days recording a plethora of L.A. bands for a new Sean Carnage film, Friends in Other Dimensions and one night talking to a small but enthusiastic music business class at West L.A. College.

Last Tuesday I was summoned to Pehrspace to record one of my favorite local bands, HEALTH, who were leaving on a US tour the following day. On Thursday night I spoke for almost three hours at the bequest of teacher and musicologist Nathan Bush. Clearly passionate and determined to educate themselves, I enjoyed sharing my experiences and opinions with the students in attendance. It felt good to put some of this information to good use. People ask me about running Sounds Are Active all the time, maybe one of these days I’ll write a book. I’d better hurry up though, the music business may be ending soon.

Without much time to catch my breath I was an emergency hire to engineer three more days of recording at Pehrspace. Excluding HEALTH, I ended up recording all of the bands or artists in 72 hours: Bad Dudes, Foot Village, 14 Year Old Girls, the Munchers, Bark Bark Bark, Ty Segal of Epsilons, Whitman, Anavan, Laco$te, Weekend Warrior, Kyle H. Mabson, Robin Williams on Fire, Tik/Tik, IE, Holi Buffaglow, Abe Vigoda, Team Andrew, Bon Voyage, Juiceboxxx and The Mae Shi. Each were set up with a full studio quality mic rig and recorded in full 8-channel audio. The bands paraded by essentially in rotating fashion: noise, punk, metal, pop, rock, electronic, faux-hop, dance, folk, no wave… sounds like a Sean Carnage film doesn’t it?

Sleep might be for suckers but my headache is coming back.

I have to thank Lafayette over at 4 Brothers Beats. Over the last few weeks he has gone above and beyond in sharing some extremely rare jazz, fusion and r&b records. These albums in high rotation of late reflect his direct influence:

George Duke- Faces In Reflection
George Duke- Inner Source
George Duke- The 1976 Solo Keyboard Album*
George Duke- Reach For It
Syreeta- Stevie Wonder Presents Syreeta
100% Pure Poison- Coming Right At You
Bernard Wright- ‘Nard**

*my favorite album title in a long, long time!
**another classic!

Last week I finished Christopher Hitchens‘ newest book and current best-seller, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, thus completing a Trinity of recent readings about God which included Richard Dawkins‘ The God Delusion and Francis Collins‘ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

While I found Dawkins’ book intelligently written and informative I found it too condescending to be enjoyable. His seeming contempt at all who have believed in the Divine prior to the age of scientific enlightenment, while understandable, is hard to take page after page. Collins, a born again Christian, pro-Darwinist and head of the Human Genome Project, provides a welcome ballast to multitudes of undernourished zealots who find in science nothing more than pagan contradictions to the Holy Word of God. The Language of God provided a number of illuminating anecdotes (and theoretical similarities to Dawkins’ book) but Collins’ own faith seems to be more deeply influenced by the words and concepts of C.S. Lewis than that of the Bible itself.

Hitchens, however, struck a long dormant chord within my internal skeptic and successfully disrupted some of my already tenuous beliefs. Although the book is by no means an all inclusive manifesto it is written with passion, experience, anger, wisdom and, thankfully, a good bit of humor. Hitchens is not above hyperbole; in some ways the scope of the book welcomes misquotes and, occasionally, stereotype. However, he distributes his scathing, common sense critiques across all belief systems and he provides a deep, welcome breadth of first hand experience in cultures and climates very different from those I am familiar with.

Personally, I have long attempted a well balanced world view that succumbed neither to Nihilism nor Fundamentalism but rather walked down the lonely road of the critical thinker. Today, I am further down that road than ever.

After 100 degree heat all weekend the power in Long Beach finally gave out. On Monday afternoon, September 3rd, the entire neighborhood went dark. In the early evening dozens of neighbors came out and met each other for the first time. People talked, laughed and shouted early into the following morning when the power came on again. Around 7pm, I grabbed my acoustic guitar and sat out on the porch watching the night come down.

Here is an eight minute recording with my “warts and all” improvisations accompanied by crickets, cars and my newly discovered community.