This is more or less an SSP (shameless self-promotion) diary, but there's langniappe in it.
Hello, orange friends. I've been rather scarce 'round here since November, for multiple reasons. Most of those are a bit sad or more than a bit boring. (A few are interesting but irrelevant, such as my accidentally becoming a curator of abandoned furniture, but that is, in every respect, another story.)
As many of you know, the last two years has had a rather marked mortality theme around Chez Vor. We've lost an average or a friend or neighbor a month, culminating in the long-expected but still very difficult passing of my mom before Thanksgiving.
Two of those losses, those of my friends Clark Vreeland and Kim Fowley, have led me to consider my own remaining time and how best it might be best used. Both men strove, throughout their illnesses, to stay productive and realize as many of their artistic visions as they could.
Seeing how they lived has goaded me to increase my efforts to bring my own visions to fruition. The work of bringing one of those babies into the world has left me less time for bloviating and cracking jokes around here than I'd like. Bummer, that.
Still, as this community has been so very supportive of my writing and other endeavors over the years, I thought it appropriate to let you guys in on what I'm doing, and offer some token of appreciation, however small.
Of the many round tooits lying around the joint is a bunch of tracks I recorded over the last few years with the Thibodaux-based string band The Moss Pickers. The collection was always intended to be released as a record, but personal crises, paying gigs and political obsessions have kept it on the back burner.
No longer. Come April of this year (the 18th, to be exact, if the vinyl gets shipped in time for Record Store Day), the record, and a rather ambitious promotional campaign, will be actual things. Print ads, 400-station radio campaign, the works.
Like everything under the sun, the record of course has its Facebook page and Twitter account, still largely dark, and a web site, mostly finished but at present empty of visitors. Cute little site, with info about the band and guest stars. Poke around you'll even find a couple of the few, rare images of me on the interwebs. Bonus: there's a picture of my cat.
There is also, hidden from site navigation and search engines, a little something I built for y'all. A Lounge, of course. Sorry to say it's byob, but we're not set up to sell anything yet.
There are a couple of distractions for you. A jukebox, a TV, an Enigma machine...
As I say, you can bang on the bar all you want and nothing's going to happen. However, if you bang on the jukebox, you'll be able to hear the first single from the record and, if you right-click on the page where the link leads, you should be able to download the mp3 for free. Bang on the TV and you get to see the presently-unlisted video for the song, which many have seen before, but never paired with Chris Finney's elegant mix.
And what happens when you bang on an Enigma machine? Why, you get a code, of course. Come street date, you can take that code back to the site, where it'll be good for two bucks off a CD or LP.
Like I said, however small. But it's what I got and it's for you guys. I should warn you that if you have any desire for such things, you should hit the Lounge before the first week of March, when it will disappear (that's when I'm inviting the media in, and lord knows only a fool leaves an open bar for that bunch).
So that's where I'm at these days. I hope you enjoy the song and vid, and do keep an eye out in April. This one's actually pretty good.