All posts by Joseph

News

It’s the most wonderful time of the year (or not)

Well, here we go again – it’s the holiday season, and Christmas is upon us once more. What will Santa bring this year? A steaming pile of wombat droppings? More bricks of surplus cheese? He’s full of surprises, that old man. Kind of amazing that he’s made it this far in life without changing jobs. (Actually … we haven’t changed jobs either, so who am I to criticize?)

What someone is saying somewhere

It’s often been said (and still remains said-able) that no band keeps Christmas in quite the same way as Big Green. I don’t know who exactly is saying that, but no matter – we are extremely possessive when it comes to the Yuletide, and we’re not giving it up under any circumstances. It’s MINE, you hear … MINE!! YOU CAN’T HAVE IT!

Ahem …. uh … so, what would Christmas be without Big Green? Pretty much the same. And that fact that we latched on to it early on makes no difference to just about anyone. Though I will say that this is an ideal time of the year to listen to our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, which you can tap on Spotify, on The Orchard, on YouTube even … pretty much any freaking where. A bit of easy listening to get you through those difficult moments around the dinner table with relatives you’re fortunate to see only once a year. (If they start talking about the perils of critical race theory, crank up the volume!)

A little stocking stuffer

Which leads me to the point of this whole dumb-ass post. As I explained last month, we’re still tracking our next album, and it’s slow-going. And while I don’t have any genuine new content for you this year, I do have some hot holiday leftovers to share.

Back when we recorded 2000 Years To Christmas in the late 1990s, we started with a list of about 18 songs. We started 17 on the DTRS system we were using in those days, 16 of which were completed. The final disc had 13 tracks, so we left three of them off for quality control reasons (that’s the corporate-speak way of saying we weren’t super happy with how they came out). One of those tracks was kind of a borderline case. It’s called Dark Christmas, and we thought it was high time it got tossed out there for folks to hear. So we remastered it and threw it up on our YouTube channel – here it is:

Dark Christmas, by Big Green

So there you have it – a little stocking stuffer, just in time for the holidays. And no, this is not some kind of AI-driven confabulation – I think one listen will tell you that it couldn’t be anything other than us, back in the day. So enjoy, share, add it to your playlists, etc. And cheer up … or not, depending on your preference.

See you in the new year!

News, Recording

In the studio with America’s most obscure band

Dad always told us, be the best in the world at something. Actually, I don’t think it was dad who said that – probably some random stranger passing us on the street. Doesn’t matter. Find something to be best at, he said, and we went and did it. Someone had to be the most obscure band in America, we thought. Why not us?

Well, the nearly forty-year-old unknown quantity known as Big Green is back in its makeshift studio again. Another project, another album … call it what you like. We’ve got a heap of songs to record, once again, and we’re doing it the only way we know how – under the radar.

By The Numbers

So how’s the new project going? It’s going, as the old saying goes. It’s hard to qualify our progress, so I will try to quantify it for you. Here are the numbers we’re working with. And bear in mind, none of us are even amateur mathematicians.

80-plus – That’s the rough number of songs we started out with as potentially being part of this album. The vast, vast majority were written by Matt, and a handful by me (a.k.a. Joe).

40-plus – Another imprecise number, this one representing the number of recordings we’ve started since we began this project last year. This doesn’t include a couple of early demos we did prior to 2022.

24 – Finally, a solid number! This is the number of recordings we’ve concentrated on – songs that include substantially more than a reference guitar track.

20 – This is how many recordings have keyboard parts, mostly piano. Some are midi parts, some d.i. from my Korg SV-1. Coincidentally, this is also the number with main vocal tracks, 8 with backup vocals.

18 – The current number of songs with a bass track. (We’ve been furiously adding them in recent weeks.)

17 – That’s the number of tracks that have fully programmed drum parts. This is typically something that happens in pre-production, but we don’t do that. That would be preposterous.

Name That Album

When does this whole thing come to a conclusion? No man can say. We don’t even have a working title for the album. Call it Splunge or something, just for the time being. If we had a different name, the album title might suggest itself. For instance, if the name of our band was “Choosy Mothers”, the album title would almost have to be “Jif”. The name Big Green doesn’t suggest anything to me at all.

Mistaken Identity

Then there are those times when we get confused with artists that actually have a following. It’s usually the result of a coincidence in song titles. Here’s one right now:

Volcano Man, by Big Green
News

In the shop for a little tune-up.

1 Comment

Mother ship, this is Central New York calling – we need repairs … like, right now. Oh, and one more thing … HAAAAALP!

It will surprise exactly none of you that Big Green doesn’t have tech support in-house. That’s largely because, well, we don’t even have the “in-house” part. But hey, there’s a lesson embedded in every misfortune. And so when I tried to upgrade our recording platform – in the middle of an album project – I discovered that our corporate overlords had made this impossible. The lesson? “Right to Repair” is a thing, it turns out. And the manufacturer of our computer at some point decided that I was wrong to repair. Very wrong, indeed.

Tech for the technically challenged

Now, I’m not great with tools. I get screwdrivers mixed up with other drinks. Nevertheless, I started clawing away at my laptop computer and soon discovered that the likes of me could not open the effer. That’s when I put the tools away and called the repair shop. What we really need is something like bicycle repair man, from that old Monty Python script. In a perfect world, we could resort to such things. But alas.

How’s the project going, aside from our various technical foibles? So good of you to ask. It’s like chipping away at a mountain, actually. You just keep lopping off every piece of it that doesn’t look like your next album. We started about 40 or 45 songs, and we seem to be concentrating on maybe half of them. Matt’s adding bass parts; I’m randomly adding keyboards, voice, etc. It could use some yeast, certainly, and maybe a pinch of nutmeg. None of my bunt pans are big enough to accommodate …. oh, wait; that’s the Madison county bake-off, not the album. Apologies. Always get those mixed up in my tiny brain.

Bitter legacy

We’re working off an old legacy platform that can’t be updated, and we’re at least three versions behind on our multi-track workstation software (Cubase 9). This is a good time, it seems, to upgrade. So we bought the computer, we bought the software, we put the two things together, and … bupkis. That’s when I started working away on the computer with various screwdrivers, Allen wrenches, and the like.

Now, I suppose we could just hike up the street a few blocks and record at Big Blue North, but hey … that would take money. It may surprise you that we haven’t been given an advance on royalties by our corporate label. (If so, you must be one of the legions who have never heard of Big Green. And to you I say, welcome!)

Oh, well … we’ll manage. You’ll see. And if you want to pre-order a copy of Big Green’s next album, I would strongly advise you to wait. We’ve still got some managing to do, you see.

luv u,

jp