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Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: February 2017



Big Green celebrates the holidays two months late, with a new Ned Trek Christmas Special, five new Big Green songs, and some uncontrollable silliness. Hot holiday leftovers, coming right up.

This is Big Green – February 2017.

Features: 1) Ned Trek 31: It’s A Profitable Life – A Big Green Holiday Special, featuring 5 new Big Green Songs; 2) Song: You Can’t Do Anything, by Big Green; 3) Song: You Asked Me How, by Big Green; 4) Song: Fountainhead, by Big Green; 5) Song: Christmas Without You, by Big Green; 6) Song: Christmas Pearls, by Big Green; 7) Put The Phone Down: Serial apologies for the lateness of the holiday; 8) Lamenting the passing of John Hurt and others; 9) Which Jane Eyre?; 10) Life in the Turkey House; 11) Special kind of exit.

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Usual Rubbish

Song farm.

Where’s Matt this morning? Where he always is – trudging across the landscape like Ewan McTeagle, writing crazy-ass song poems in his head and putting them to music … also in his head. And feeding the beavers. Curious fellow!

As we’re patching together the next episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, featuring our holiday (yes, holiday!) installment of Ned Trek, it’s beginning to dawn on me just how many Ned Trek songs we have recorded over the last three years. If you piled them up, the resulting stack would be taller than the Empire State Building. (That’s assuming, of course, each song is about 1/50th the height of the Empire State Building.) But spacial relationships aside, we’ve got a big backlog of songs that are just screaming “Put me in an album!” Marvin (my personal robot assistant) tried to be helpful by picking up a photo album down at the corner drug store, but of course, that kind of album is a whole ‘nother thing. But semantic considerations aside …

Yep. About that tall, man.Okay, well … 50 songs is a lot for an album, even one of ours. Here’s where both the spacial and the semantic relationships actually come into play. What the hell is an album, right? It used to be an LP with a limited capacity; then a cassette, same deal; CD, same deal. In the digital music age, those limitations have vanished. No more four-disc box sets, right? It’s just a big virtual bag of MP3 or .wav files. So both the semantic and the spacial constraints are history, man. That means the only constraints on what to include in our next album are those pertaining to aesthetics and good judgment. (In our world, that means no freaking constraints at all!)

The truth is, we haven’t completed a new album because we’ve been taken up with writing and recording new songs for the podcast. When we finish a bunch, we start on the next one. And when I say “finish”, I mean our typical fast-mixdown …. not finished in any kind of releasable way. That takes time and care, much care. Marvin has to lay down a coat of shellac. Then we get Anti-Lincoln started on the hand-carved details. And that’s just for the box it comes in!

Many’s the time I’ve thought, there must be an easier way. But even thinking about that seems way too hard.

 

 

Usual Rubbish

It’s about time.

I don’t know, I’m thinking it’s time. What do you think? Not sure? Okay. When do you think you’ll have an answer? I don’t know about you, but … I’m thinking it’s time.

Okay, well … I’ll be frank with you. (Just call me “Frank” from now on.) We are grasping at straws here in Big Green land, now that our interstellar tour has been scuttled. And here it is, the holidays. We were thinking that we’d be traversing interstellar space when Christmas week came, but no dice. Trouble is, that was going to be our excuse for not getting anyone presents – sorry folks, we’re headed to a big gig on planet KIC 8462852. No time to shop! Well, THAT’S out the window. Any other good ideas for cheapskates?

Marvin (my personal robot assistant) humbly suggested we hand out signed copies of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, which appropriately follows a theme somewhat tangentially related to the holidays. Of course, we’ve resorted to that tactic before – it’s been a full 17 years since we put the sucker out, so everyone we know (and quite a few people we don’t know) has a copy. By this point, they’re stacking them under broken table legs and using them for drink coasters. I saw one of our friends re-purposing the jewel cases. Talk about a post-apocalyptic music hell-scape – people are mining our album like it’s a natural resource. (And it’s anything but natural.)

Give them discsThe gift of music is always an early resort for us. That’s basically how 2000 Years To Christmas was born – Matt writing songs as holiday gifts, back in the day. Then there’s the gift of podcasting. There, we have some good news and some bad news. The GOOD news is that we are working on another Christmas pageant as we speak – a Ned Trek holiday classic that will have some new songs embedded in it. The BAD news is that … at the rate we’re going, it likely won’t be finished until AFTER Christmas, so … hot holiday leftovers are coming your way.

For the holiday week itself, we may put out a rerun podcast with some additional “members only” elements. (Oh, right – we don’t have membership levels. Scratch that.) Back to the grind, boys!