Category Archives: News

News (and some olds) about Big Green

News

International House without the pancakes

What’s up, Big Green visitors? As previously reported, we’re still at work on our splendid new project (as of yet unnamed), tracking, listening back, swearing, deleting, tracking again … rinse and repeat. You know our process: no process! It’s working as well as ever.

Busy as we are, we are finding some spare time to sort through some old file boxes, clean out the attic, etc. We thought this might be a good time to post our second album, International House, on YouTube. We’ve got a couple of tracks posted to a playlist so far (Welcome To It and For Your Majesty’s Amusement), and we invite you to check it out, subscribe, etc., particularly if you haven’t heard the album before. Give it a spin and tell us what you think!

Okay … back to the slog. Cue up the next song, folks! Roll tape!

News

Notes from the underground: The Basement tapes

Well, Big Green may appear to be having a quiet start to the year, but trust me, we’re hard at work on the next project. No, I’m not talking about the Cutty Sark model I’ve been working on in the dark for the last eight years. I mean our next collection of original songs, straight from the hand of your flophouse favorites. Just the thing for a year like this!

What’s the title? Well, I wanted to go with “Working Title”, but I thought I’d save that for the first album by a band I’ve been contemplating called Various Artists. All I can tell you is, it will have new material. And lots of it.

Let me put it this way: I don’t know how tall the building will be when it’s finished, but as of now the foundation covers ten square blocks. It’s gonna be a big one, folks, so stay tuned. And while you’re waiting, check out our latest posts on YouTube:

News

The (Christmas) Spirit of Ninety-Six

We dug up a Christmas tape from 1996 this week and posted parts of it on the Internets. Hey, it’s Christmas, right? What is the significance of this collection? Well, my friends – this project taps a deep vein in the corpus of Big Green material. These four songs, now on YouTube, represent some firsts, some lasts, and a whole lot of mister in-between.

First things first: I believe this was the first group of songs we recorded on our eight-track DTRS system back in the nineties – the same deck, board, etc., we used a couple of years later to do our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. We got the system in 1995 and did a few test tracks before getting started on this 1996 collection, which was originally eight songs, including two we revamped, remixed, and released under separate cover.

What about last? Well, this was Matt’s last Christmas collection, recorded as a giveaway to family, friends, pets, etc. It was a yearly tradition in Matt-ville, from about the mid-1980s to 1996, covering a body of work that included all of the songs off of 2000 Years To Christmas, plus many, many more (including numbers we featured in our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN.)

There’s more where that came from. Enjoy your holidays!