Tag Archives: Ned Trek

Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: February 2019

Audio

Big Green celebrates the new year two months late with a rollicking show that includes a new installment of Ned Trek, eight brand new songs, and some incoherent rambling of the sort you’ve come to expect. Let us begin.

This is Big Green – February 2019. Features: 1) Ned Trek 39: Patterns of Horse, featuring 8 new Big Green songs; 2) Song: Find Yourself a Nazi, by Big Green; 3) Song: Oh, V-2, by Big Green; 4) Song: Now More Than Ever, by Big Green; 5) Song: Nazi Lunch, by Big Green 6) Song: The Nicest Nazi, by Big Green; 7) Song: Can’t Do It Without Nazis, by Big Green; 8) Song: Can’t Go Wrong, by Big Green; 9) Song: Soldier of Fourchan, by Big Green; 10) Put the phone down: Popeye cartoons; 11) Remembering Peter Tork; 12} Jonathan Harris on YouTube; 13) Singing about shutting up; 14) Writing the next Ned Trek; 15) Playing with Dave Barber, back in the day; 16) Who’s all dead; 17) Time to go – a strange medley.

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Usual Rubbish

Tuneless fuckers.

No, there’s nothing wrong with it whatsoever. Since when are you a musical purist? I’m experimenting, man … that’s where it’s at, right? That’s what Big Green is all about. THAT’S WHY WE’RE ABOARD HER …

Oh. sorry … I lapsed into James T. Kirk dialogue for a moment. We were just having a little back and forth over some musical contrivances I’ve been attempting on our latest crop of NED TREK songs.  Last count we’ve got fully eight numbers in the works – an unusually large parcel, though our recording process has taken a bit longer than has been our habit in recent years. As some of you know, we used to take some pains over our albums (e.g. International House, five years in the making). Then when we launched our podcast, we started slapping songs together in hours rather than days or months (e.g. Cowboy Scat, a ridiculously slap-dash effort).

That's ... uh ... real good, Abe.Well, the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direction. I think we’ve put about six months into these songs, and we’re only now at the mixing stage. Mind you, we have just a few hours a week to do anything on this at all, then it’s back to the salt mines. Still, taking time allows us to experiment a bit more, which is what Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was calling me out for just then. Not sure when he graduated from Julliard, but apparently the sight of me playing a coronet with a violin bow blew a few breakers in that little brass noggin of his. It’s called innovation, Marvin. Deal with it.

The unfortunate side effect of taking longer on these songs is that we go through longer periods of posting no new songs. That makes us tuneless fuckers for a good portion of the year. But don’t let our silence fool you – there’s a lot of music going on in this drafty old hammer mill. Why just the other day Antimatter Lincoln pulled out his banjo and started plucking. Now, there aren’t a lot of things that even Anti-Lincoln does worse than I do, but plunking on a banjo is one of them. And I’m freaking awful on that instrument. That’s why I took up the coronet. Though I’m thinking an accordion bellows would help that horn dramatically. We’ll see. Back to the lab!

Usual Rubbish

Inside December (2018).

It’s called snow, Marvin. The white stuff, falling from the sky? That’s not hard rain, it’s freaking snow. What the hell kind of weather station are you, anyway?

Oh, hi. Well … we’re getting into that time of year when larger mammals hibernate. That’s not how we roll, of course, but we do get a little more sedentary (if that can be imagined) as the winter months wear on. Fortunately, we have our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN to keep us hopping this December. Here’s what we’ve packed inside this hollow tree:

Ned Trek 38: The Squire of Mara Lagos. Our new installment of Ned Trek is a takeoff on the classic Star Trek episode entitled “The Squire of Gothos” and features me doing really, really poor imitations of both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Perle turns out to be a compulsive gambler this week in a Lost in Space-style plot twist. See what you think … and feel free to play it back at 125% speed.

Put The Phone Down. Matt and I begin our yak session with a rendition of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, which maybe goes on a bit too long (we are joined by a Dalek after a few choruses). A little later on we go into dueling Sagan mode, give a nod to talking like a chimp, discuss the merits and demerits of the Ned Trek episode, and take a closer look at Matt’s various medals.

Marvin: It's 37 degrees. Me: Wrong.Song: Christmas is Over Here. I mentioned that we included some warmed-over holiday numbers in this episode – this isn’t one of them. This is just the two of us making up a ridiculous song that has never been sung before and likely will never be sung again. Ain’t that Christmas?

Song: Up North. One of Matt’s very first Christmas songs. This recording is, I think, from the late 1980s, a cassette 4-track master, and one of probably 4 versions of this song we’ve recorded over the decades. We include this one because of the ape-like backing vocals towards the end. Not to be missed.

Song: Quantum Christmas. This is an outtake from the sessions that resulted in our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, back in 1999. We did the mix then decided to leave it off the final collection. Matt wrote this, of course, and it plays with the observer’s paradox in quantum physics as a metaphor for avoiding your relatives.

Song: Dark Christmas. Another outtake from the 2000 Years To Christmas album. It think we thought it was just too long to fit on what was already a longish album, but … there were likely other reasons as well. This kind of sounds like what we sounded like back then as a band, so give it a go.

Song: Ornament. This is another 4-track cassette recording, this from Matt’s 1990 Christmas collection (among my all-time favorites) that he gave to family and friends that year. We did a version of this for 2000 Years To Christmas that didn’t end up on the album, but I much prefer this one.

Enjoy it, folks. Now … back to tracking the weather.