Tag Archives: Matt

News

Warning: This content generated by AI (An Idiot)

I don’t suppose anyone has said this to you yet, but happy new year! My guess is that you are as ecstatic as we are to unlock the wonders of 2025. So much to look forward to, it says here.

We’ve been busy with the process of acclimating ourselves to an actual winter. Brother Matt has been slogging through the snow up at the farm, feeding creatures furry and feathered while steeling himself against sub-zero temperatures like we haven’t seen in probably five years. Me? I’m flying in my taxi, taking tips and getting stoned. (Did I say that?)

Content questions abound

We don’t get a lot of inquiries here at Big Green, but if we did, I’m sure they would center on our promised new album. What kinds of songs will it feature, and how many? What will the cover look like? Will it be available in stores? Will it include discount coupons for romaine lettuce? That kind of stuff, I imagine.

The most challenging questions, however, are those that cut to the core of the creative process. For instance, why do we, in this day and age, bother to write, arrange, record, mix, and master an album when we can just drop the right prompts into an AI engine and have it spit out the finished product in minutes if not seconds?

Good question. Our answer might be something like … how do you know we DIDN’T do that? How, indeed.

A picture is worth a thousand prompts

Take the header image on this very post (please!). I can tell you right now, that photo was generated by AI. Given the input criteria we provided, only an idiot could come up with something that random and asinine. Hey … that’s the same process we follow when we produce an album. We generate ideas in our tiny minds, and after about two years, out pops an album, for better or worse.

Is that as fast as the other, more well-known A.I. (artificial intelligence)? God, no. But (and this is important) it takes a lot less energy to produce, and it doesn’t sound anything like what this looks like:

Craziness

Good thing? Bad thing? You decide.

Anticipated dimensions of said object

To return to the more pedestrian questions I imagine an interested party might pose to us, here’s what we got. Yes, the new album is nearing completion (currently in the mastering phase). We have a title. There will be 24 tracks, so it’s more like a double-album, if you will (not that the term means anything anymore). I think we have a running order, but not totally sure.

We don’t have a release date, but I’m sticking to my prediction of a Spring drop for this one. Don’t expect a splash – we may buy a couple of ads, but that’s about it. Word of mouth. (What other kinds of words are there?)

Sadly, there will be no discount coupons for lettuce, romaine or otherwise. Budget is tight, people – such are the times we live in.

Usual Rubbish

Now, where did I leave those Cardboard tubes?

Get Music Here

Man, it’s hot today. Maybe we should make some tea. Like a whole pot of tea. Perfect day for it. Just fill the pot with water, put it on the counter and watch it come to a boil. No problem – lovely pot of tea.

Well, it’s August, and it’s hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum in here, as the sages of Monty Python once said (with a cartoonish Aussie accent). It will come as a surprise to no one that there is no air conditioning here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. In fact, the closest thing we have to air conditioning is some holes in the roof – holes that let the air in. Sometimes the air is cool, sometimes not. It’s conditional, on account of the changing weather …. air conditional.

Things my comic books taught me

Summers like this remind me of my misspent youth. I say “me”, because no one else here remembers my misspent youth. Even Matt, who misspent much of it right alongside me, doesn’t care to remember, and who can blame him? If you remember the 1970s, you probably weren’t there. That said, I remember quite a bit of it, particularly around the middle. Like an Oreo or Hydrox cookie, the ’70s had a creamy center, with crunchy wafers on either side. Ask your mother.

We had a roof over our heads and three squares a day, but not a lot of spending money. So we took to entertaining ourselves the cheap way. You know what kids are like – they’ll whittle a canoe out of an old birch tree. I was like that. Hell, I fashioned a bong out of old cardboard paper towel tubes and tape. Got the plans out of the back of a Zap comic book. It might have been Dr. Atomic or something like that. And yes, it was made of combustibles, but it didn’t catch fire …. right away.

Red sales in the sunset

Another summer tradition: we’re in the red. There’s a lot of reasons for this. One is that we’ve never really been a beach band. I think you could count on one hand the times that we’ve collectively been to the beach for something other than bird watching (Matt) or metal detecting (Anti-Lincoln). In other words, our music is not synonymous with summer fun. We’re never likely to write the big hit of the season, despite all the trying. That’s okay. I’m not sure what we would do with riches at this stage. (Tell me more about those riches …)

Yeah, not really our thing.

You know, it’s a pity comic books aren’t as universal as they used to be. If they were, we could move a lot of music through those suckers. I can see a Big Green ad tucked into the back pages, between the Charles Atlas fitness course and the patented Onion Gum. Just clip out the coupon and mail it in with a nickel taped to the little circle. We’ll send you Big Green’s latest album, plus a publicity photo signed by yours truly. The thing practically writes itself.

Get yours someplace else

Hey, while we’re sweating to the oldies, this is probably a good time to mention that we’re now on BandCamp. We’ve uploaded our first two albums there, will add more in the near future. Check it out, friend us, share our page, throw us a bone, hey will you?

Usual Rubbish

Dictating machine.

Hmmmm…. damn thing won’t upload. Stupid internets! Marvin – are you on the phone again? You’re supposed to wait until I’m done using the web. Stupid phone!

Man, I’ll tell you – it’s not easy living in an abandoned hammer mill. None of the familiar modern conveniences of American life. No wi-fi, no broadband, no blender, no dry ice … I could go on. But we’re used to that sort of thing. As you know, Big Green has always flown pretty low to the ground. That’s why so many of our contemporaries have become famous while we remain in the alt-pop toilet. When we go low, they go high. It’s like a freaking see-saw. (Did you see what I saw?)

Anyhow, people like us, we learn to do without. When Matt and I were piecing together the first iteration of this band, back in the late seventies / early eighties, we had the cheapest equipment any band ever thought of using. Our PA speakers sounded like kazoos. Our guitar and keyboard amps were underpowered and flaccid. Even worse, we never had anything decent to record on. One stereo reel-to-reel deck followed us around for a while, but it was of little use beyond serving as a tape echo. A friend of our early eighties drummer, Phil Ross, gave us his old dictaphone mono take deck, which we used to record demos of songs we might take into the studio if we could get the scratch together (which we did, eventually).

Yeah, that's the shit.It took a couple of years, but at some point we moved up to a Panasonic audio cassette deck, the kind that you would use in a home stereo system. We used that and a couple of mics to record ourselves playing in the living room, etc. (Excerpts of those sessions made it on to Matt’s very early compilation, “The Todd Family Chronicles”.) Matt got a second deck and started bouncing tracks, overdubbing, then around 1985 he bought his first cassette portastudio. That kind of took us to a different place musically, though where that place is, I’m not entirely certain. As we could, we got better gear, but our songwriting and recording process has remained about the same as it was with that first portastudio.

Now we record like everybody else does – on a freaking computer. Fact is, a depiction of pretty much any profession now looks like somebody sitting at a freaking computer.