All posts by Joseph

News

New Home (Old Band).

It’s moving day, Major West!

Okay, starting with a quote from Lost In Space is probably a little too obscure for most of you young’uns, I admit. But the message is clear: Big Green is moving to a new URL. That’s right – we’re boxing up all of our baubles, winding up all of our furniture in bubble-wrap, and backing the U-Haul up to the front stoop of big-green.net. Time to load it in and pack it off to our new digs at … well, right where you’re at right now.

Yep, Matt and I have been hashing this out for a while (see the photo – this decision has clearly been decades in the making). But sometimes you just have to pull the damn trigger, am I right? Lord knows, we have plenty of reasons for doing this, but here are the top ones:

Reason #1: Leaky roof, squeaky floorboards

Leave us face it, the old blog flat at www.big-green.net/bg is a dump. The landlord is not cool. Every time something goes wrong, he sends in his brother-in-law with a Swiss army knife or some third-rate contractor who owes him a favor. Our blog was down for well over a month, and it didn’t come back up until we paid for service on top of our rent. Not cool! Time to hit the road, Jack.

Reason #2: No pets

You wouldn’t think Marvin (my personal robot assistant) would count as a pet, but he most certainly did – at least when they came in to do the census. (We had the mansized tuber just stand still for a while so they would think he was a potted plant.) Fuck all, let’s face it – if that place ain’t good enough for Marvin, it ain’t good enough for yours truly. That’s our position and we’re sticking to it.

Reason #3: Long grace period

Okay, so when you’re lucky enough to be able to afford it, it’s nice to have a span of time when you’re maintaining both the new joint and the old dump at the same time. That’s kind of what we’re doing. The blog is moving, but we will maintain the blog for a while at the old locale, at least while we settle in at biggreenband.com. Mind you, the landing page at big-green.net isn’t going anywhere; we’ll just repoint the links to the new blog when it’s ready.

Those are the best reasons. Want the rest? Of course you don’t! Trick question.

What’s next

Coming up this Spring, we’ll be releasing a single, name yet to be announced, so stay tuned!

News

Strange thing happened on the way to February

What the fuck was THAT all about?

Hey, friends …. something went badly wrong with our blog site last month. We’re just pulling the pieces together again, so bear with us. Some of our most recent posts have been lost in the great server meltdown, and we’re manually updating stuff as we go along.

While you’re busy with other things, we’ll keep trying to plug different cables into empty sockets, turn the bubble gum machine upside-down again, and pour nameless liquids from beakers into test tubes. Hopefully one of those things will work.

Nothing much happening yet this year. We’re still digging our way out from under a mountain of snow and ice. When we see the sunlight, we’ll check in again. Look for a new single in the coming weeks.

Cheerio. And Wheaties.

News

Let the sleigh bells play and the reindeer ring: your Big Green holiday playlist

Well, it’s that magical season again, people – the time of year when otherwise fairly normal people enter a state of frenzy, turning themselves inside-out to purchase holiday consumer items for family and friends before the 25th of December. Where’s the magic in that, you may ask? No man can say.

For your friends in Big Green, it’s time to look back at where the hell we’ve been all these years. We are more than a quarter century past the release date of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and while it hasn’t achieved holiday classic status as of yet (give it another fifty!), it does get a few plays here and there. And yeah, we DO listen to some of them, goosing the numbers a bit I suppose. Anywho, here’s my personal Big Green yuletide playlist:

Pagan Christmas

As I mentioned last year, Pagan Christmas tends to be a holiday favorite around this time of year among a select few, typically wiccans and assorted pagan. They’re always good for a few hundred streams, and it does well on YouTube (by our standard, which is pretty small potatoes). It’s kind of upbeat with a pretty simple lyric:

You’re a standing invitation
You’re a complete stranger at the top of the list
You’re just like a relation
You’ll be right there with us while we’re tearing away at our gifts
And you’ll stand there gleaming with a ton of decorations

You’re not very different
In a couple of minutes I’ll be heating you up
You’re not very different
In a couple of hours I’ll be serving you up on a plate
And you’ll sit there gleaming with a ton of trimmings at your side

Have yourself a Merry Pagan Christmas Sacrifice

Hear it on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

Merry Christmas Jane

One of my personal holiday favorites from the broader Big Green catalog is the live version of Merry Christmas Jane, which we tossed up on YouTube some time ago. This one features the nimble-fingered Jeremy Shaw on guitar, and it goes something like this:

Christmas Is All Done

Okay, this one was never commercially released, but we dropped it on YouTube a couple of years ago. It’s a song Matt wrote and we recorded sometime in the nineties, one of the first tracks we finished on our Tascam DA-88, the deck we would later use to record 2000 Years to Christmas. I always liked the atmosphere of this one, though I think Matt wanted to choke me for posting it. (He’s more of a perfectionist than I am … he and nearly all the rest of humanity.)

One Small Step

Okay, now I know what you’re going to say – that ain’t no Christmas song! Actually, it started life as a holiday number, the original version recorded with the group that included Christmas Is All Done. We resurrected it years later, added parts, then released One Small Step as a single. It is one of those rare Big Green releases that has an actual video associated with it. The original Christmas reference in the lyric was written out – it was pretty obscure, in any case.

All Saints Come

This is another number from 2000 Years To Christmas. I particularly like this track because it probably sounds more like we actually sounded as a performing band than any song on that album. It’s a bit of a dirge, but it’s got some crunch to it, and there’s nothing I like more around Christmas time than a little crunch.

What’s new for the New Year?

Well, it’s coming down fast, isn’t it? In 2026 we should be starting production on our next collection of songs, most of which have been written but not tracked. We plan to release a new single sometime early in the year – I’ll be posting about that in the coming weeks. Until then, keep the cards, letters, emails, posts, and rocks coming, have a safe and happy holiday, and don’t forget to tip the wait staff – they work effing hard and deserve every cent.

Joe offers a fine holiday howdy

PEACE OUT, PEOPLE!