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Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: February 2015

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Big Green rings in the New Year a month late and several dollars short with a new episode of Ned Trek, six new songs, some pointless conversation, and more. Dig it.

This is Big Green – February 2015. Features: 1) Ned Trek 22: Mitt’s Brain; 2) Song: Brain, What is Brain? by Big Green; 3) Song: Whatever Romney Knows, by Big Green; 4) Song: Lost Your Mind, by Big Green; 5) Song: Send in Some Advisors, by Big Green; 6) Song: Nixon Action, by Big Green; 7) Song: Two Lines, by Big Green; 8) Put the Phone Down: Woodens balls; 9) The cold and its consequences; 10) Jeb’s advisors; 11) The songs, explained; 12) Time for us to go.

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Usual Rubbish

Song mill.

You looking for a song about the Crab Nebula? Yeah, we got that. How about one that mentions the Green Nematode? Uh-huh. You betcha.

There was a day when the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill used to churn out, well … hammers, day in and day out, first with steam power, then electricity. Now it’s an assembly line for weird songs about Green Nematodes and other stuff – a row of songwriting machines, powered by trail mix, bug juice, and pizza. No, you can’t build a house with these songs. You can’t drive a carpenter’s nail into a 2 by 4. You can’t tack up some dry wall in your uncle’s unfinished attic. In fact, the songs are pretty much useless … but they’re free. Free as a freaking bird.

Sorry for running on at the mouth. I always get like this when we’re finishing out a new batch. This week we’re mixing six new songs for the next Ned Trek episode, all of which are content-focused on the human brain and its many failings, particularly that singular example of the thinking organ that resides in the skull of Willard Mitt Romney, captain of the Free Enterprise. Most of the songs are written on that theme, anyhow. That’s a lot of brain music!

Here comes another song.Of course, we’re building them stick by stick, using the usual bailing wire, string, tape, toothpaste, and whatever else is handy. And, well … they sound it. These are homespun recordings, my friend. We’re not riding over to the Record Plant and laying down some serious tracks. No, sir … we march straight down to the hammer mill basement and bang on those pots and pans. We tune up the tired old strings on Matt’s Rickenbacher bass and start thumping along, hollering into distressed old condenser mics, cupping my superannuated headphones to our ears. Not a lot of nuances, friends. Not hardly.

So what the hell … when are you going to hear these numbers? Patience, my friends, patience. We are working as we speak. Watch this space!

Usual Rubbish

Yule be sorry.

Marvin (my personal robot assistant)! Can you come in here for a few minutes and vacuum up all these fragments? No, not with your mouth! Use your upholstery attachment. Silly robot.

I don't know about this, Lincoln.Lots to do around the holidays, as you well know. Some tasks are more challenging than others. I’ve always found bending candy canes particularly difficult. A lot of breakage. There’s got to be a better way! (Matt is thinking about taking a correspondence course in pretzel-bending, so maybe some of those skills will be transferable. We shall see.)

As I was saying last week, we have some holiday traditions that we try to observe on a yearly basis. Some of them could be described as strange; others, just a little off the beaten path. Occasionally we try out a new “tradition” and see if it sticks, like that year we put the man-sized tuber on an upside-down wash basin and decorated him like a Christmas tree. I think that was Anti-Lincoln’s idea. Anyway, it lacked that kind of stickiness I was referring to earlier. (Tubey still isn’t talking to Anti-Lincoln … not that tubey talks all that much ordinarily.)

Probably our best-known tradition is writing, recording, and releasing a parcel of Christmas songs – that is, Christmas-themed pop songs. That stretches way back to the late 1980s when brother Matt used to hand out cassette tapes to all and sundry on Christmas eve. Our first album, 2000 Years to Christmas, was a collection of some of our favorites from those ancient tapes – 13 songs drawn from what was easily a catalog of about 60 to 75 songs in total over eight years or so. (That was a large component of Matt’s musical output, though by far not the majority of songs he wrote over that period.)

Now we put them out on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Some of the ones we’ve put out in recent years are additional selections from Matt’s cassette tape holiday basket, re-recorded in our basement studio. Others are more recent concoctions.

So, look under your tree this Christmas for another parcel of holiday cheer from Big Green. Got a laptop and wi-fi? Plunk it under the tree and point your browser to big-green.net/pod. It’s that simple. Santa works in mysterious ways.