Tag Archives: holiday

Usual Rubbish

Holiday table.

It can’t be morning yet, right? It’s still freaking dark outside. What? Oh, right. My night mask. I’ll just pull it off and … OH MY GOD … IT’S MORNING!

Well, that’s my revelation for today. What have you got? Hope you’re having a great holiday season, whether or not you celebrate any of the various commemorative feast-days that fall sometime around now. Like Trump in the White House, we’ve been staked out here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York (a.k.a. that farm upstate that every alt band goes to eventually) waiting for someone to tell us it’s safe to venture outside without proper shoes. That’s right – our shoes are a disgrace, my friends. No bones about it. And when you’ve got substandard shoes, Spring can’t come soon enough.

And while we’ve been cooped up in this drafty old barn, we’ve tried to busy ourselves with some low-budget Kringle-ing, sending out some old recordings via social media to our gaggle of patient friends, attempting to make up for the fact that we have nothing new finished … our latest batch is still in the oven, barely even browning at this point. Slow going, to be sure. Fortunately, we have an archive to keep us warm – the fruit of more than 30 years’ effort in the vineyards of no-budget songwriting, gigging, and music production. We’ve got everything from 1/4 inch reel to cassette to DAT tape to hard drives packed with ramblings, false starts, and even some complete songs. You never know what we’ll toss up next.

Okay, Marvin ... What have we got?Or maybe you will. Either way, that’s what we’re dropping on the holiday table under the tree. For a sampling, check our Twitter feed or visit our Soundcloud page and click play on any random upload. It is a mixed bag, I will admit, curated by Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a tin ear … actually, two tin ears and an aluminum voicebox.  Our posts thus far have been mostly Christmas themed selections, including outtakes from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and some live takes previously featured on our YouTube page or on our Live from Neptune EP.  These are all full-rez .wav files, and a couple of the live tracks have been remastered, so give it a listen and let me know how much they suck … I mean, what you think.

Whoa, is that the time? Back to bed with me!

Usual Rubbish

Target: clue.

Bloody hell … my mirror cracked. No, I didn’t smash it with a hammer … I just looked into it, trying to freaking shave. Jesus, I’m old. Hey .. can I use your mirror?

Yeah, we’re cracking mirrors around here, no doubt about it. Looking back on about 30 years of making music under the same moniker, and it’s a little stupefying, frankly. True fact: Big Green was founded in 1986 and it’s still kind of rolling, give or take a few members. But regardless of the lineup, we still have the same DNA. The clueless core has remained intact … it hasn’t gone sub-critical yet. That’s ’cause we’re blood, man. Blood brothers, inseparable. (Particularly so, since Matt does most of the work.)

As we continue working on the next raft of songs, I’ve been taking a few minutes here and there to listen to our previous releases, for context if nothing else. Actually, part of it is taking note of stuff that I hate so that I can resolve not to make the same bonehead plays again and again. (Hey … how about that as a name for the next album: Bonehead Plays? Anyone?) Then there’s the stylistic question: what pigeonhole will we be placed in? And will the pigeon charge us rent? I don’t know about you, but my experience tells me that pigeons are lousy landlords. When something goes funky, like a leaking faucet or a broken mirror, they never send a proper workman … just some brother-in-law pigeon who owes them a favor.

We're type-cast ... and it's all Abe's faultOkay, I digress. Here’s the thing. Our first album had a holiday (i.e. Christmas) theme. The second was more of a straight rock record. The third was a mock country album. And yet, when you look us up in any of the music services, we tend to get chucked into “Holiday” or “Seasonal” categories, no matter what genre we assign to the album when we post it. The collection we’re working on rolls all over the stylistic map, starting in Alaska and ending up in Madagascar. Some pretty crazy shit, man. Look for it under “Holiday”.

Prisoners of our past, in search of a clue. That’s the glory of … that’s the story of Big Green. Happy 30th anniversary, kids.

Usual Rubbish

Interim report.

Not a lot to say this week. Been kind of busy. Don’t know where to start. Stopped using personal nominative pronouns. Don’t know why.

Yeah, it was a week spent in hospitals, rehab centers, etc., etc. – suffice to say that there were no terrible outcomes, but it was an engrossing and exhausting experience, nonetheless. I hope to be posting the holiday episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN in the coming days, though I did get derailed this week, I will admit. We had a few mixes left to do, but Matt and I did them tonight and recorded the pointless voice track for the podcast, so …. it could happen. Miracles do happen.

Anyway, keep your eyes open and leave some room in the stocking. Something tells me there’ll be a podcast episode with your name on it dropping down the chimney. Or something. (I’ll probably do a political rant as well, just because they’re pissing me off so much lately.)

More later, people.