Turn it down a little more. Little more. Okay. Good. Can’t hear that at all. Yeah, that’s right – nothing. Much better. And… hey! Don’t throw things at me!
Sensitive artists, these cohorts of ours. Take Marvin (my personal robot assistant)…. please. He’s been playing the pipe organ on our latest recordings, and, well… a little goes a long way, let’s put it that way. Ouch! Stop chucking stuff, man! Very sensitive. We’ve been asking him to go a little easy on the organ, and he treats that like an insult. (It does sound vaguely obscene, come to think of it.) So it looks like our patented arranging method of starting with every imaginable instrument and subtracting them one by one… that’s not working so good. Thus far, we’ve only managed to eject the glockenspiel, the tin drum, the specially-tuned half-sticks of dynamite, the kazoo, and hell, we’ve got a long, long way to go before we get down to what’s typically needed for a Big Green album. Even sFshzenKlyrn is losing patience with these sessions, and he has a life-span (or half-life) of 57 million Earth years.
We’ll get it done, never fear. In the mean time, how are our current releases doing? Well, let’s check in on a few 
listener responses to our last single, “High Horse“. Here’s one from a guy who calls himself “UncleOutrage”:
I Hate To Be The Villian, But…..I can’t quite tell if this song is supposed to be funny or not, but I’m sorry to say that I don’t like it in either case. Honestly much of it has to do with the genre, I’m really not a fan of honky-tonk country music in the least. But even as song writing goes, this was VERY repetitive and I might go as far to say annoying. I’m REALLY sorry, I hate to be negative as far as judging someone else’s work, but I just have to be honest. There was nothing I liked in this track at all.
Well, “Uncle” – glad you enjoyed that. If you want to hear it again (and again and again), just drop by our Web site at www.big-green.net/highhorse. There’s even a ludicrous video. Go wild, son!
Here’s a Garageband review from someone who calls him/herself “SkelingtonBoot”:
ughI’m sorry this is just not for me. I don’t think this is indie rock, this is one of those red warning label genres like Country Rock or Comedy. Singer has a sturdy voice and given a willing spirit I reckon he could get you singing along to your granny’s armpits and the melody – very country – is very compelling in a very cheesy way. The lyrics are … ? I can’t talk about the lyrics. Overall the song sounds very proficiently performed and I do believe that humour belongs in music … but, that’s not a carte blanche!
Gosh, “Skelington”, not sure where to begin! Thanks for the kudos on the “willing spirit”, though you should know we eliminated all the “granny’s armpit” sounds kind of early on in the production process. We’ll definitely take your “humour… not a carte blanche” comment to heart, though. From now on, we’ll start editing ourselves more judiciously. We’re going to get all serious, now. Totally. No, seriously.
Well, that’s probably enough fun for this week, kids. We’ve got to interrupt the man-sized tuber’s monologue before people start getting too happy in the studio. Music is a serious business, you know. No time for all this hee-hee and yuk-yuk.
Policemen killed in Afghanistan, along with many others (including U.S. military people). Another unmanned drone attack in Pakistan, killing Lord knows who (sometimes the policy – like our weapons – seems to be on autopilot). And in Israel, chilling testimony from Israeli soldiers confirming the worst allegations about their attack on Gaza (euphemistically referred to by our media as a “war”), with stories of arbitrary, even random killings of Palestinian civilians, various acts of gratuitous brutality, a fanatical head chaplain from the settlements urging holy war. Pretty ugly stuff, all in all… though nothing all that surprising for the I.D.F. Despite their claims about “purity of arms”, they have a history of oppressive behavior dating back to the 1948 war. And now it seems likely their next foreign minister will be a patent racist who has toyed with the notion of expulsion of Israeli Arabs. Paging George Mitchell! You’ve got your work cut out for you, old boy.
like Hezbollah, the Israeli military seems best suited to attacking captive civilian populations in areas they already effectively control – civilians who have no effective means of defense. For our own part, we have become so used to the idea of civilian casualties that they are almost never deemed worthy of media coverage unless they occur in the double digits. The fact that we leave crucial life-or-death action to pilotless drones illustrates how profoundly we have separated ourselves from any sense of responsibility to the people subject to our military force. The very experience of war and occupation is now limited to the relatively small number of families whose members volunteer for service, our collective knowledge of its horrors growing more and more remote as the conscripts of 20th Century conflicts grow old and pass away.
Give me an A. Okay… how about a lower one. Yeah, that’s good. Now, give me a D. No, no…. that’s an H. There ain’t no H, so try D. That’s more like it.
light-years away. How does he do this, you may ask? (And well you may ask.) Well… he uses the Zenite equivalent of broadband. It’s kind of like a beam of high-energy particles that slices through space faster than grease lightning. He just adjusts it to a particular frequency, points it at the Earth (or as many of us call it, the “oyt”), and the sound starts emitting from one of our abandoned speaker cabinets. It’s quite amazing. There is a slight latency problem – he actually has to start playing a note sometime last year in order for it to sync up with our performance. Fortunately, 
trombone, anti-Lincoln gets a pipe organ, and so on. We literally fill the studio with noise, everyone playing at the same time, as many notes as they can squeeze in. Then we start to edit it down. You know – maybe a little less tuba in the chorus… not a constant stream of noise, but just a few notes… perhaps (preferably) none at all. We just keep slashing away at it until it gets close to something listenable. Funny… in the end, we always seem to end up with the three (or four) of us playing the instruments we usually play. So, I guess this whole arranging process is kind of a waste of time. Hmmm…. must re-evaluate. Bear with me, now.