Tag Archives: This Is Big Green

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

Just holler.

Delays, delays, delays. Frankly, production is a pain in the ass. That said, what do I do for a living? I’m a producer, damn it. I should have been a janitor. (Though on Sundays, I’m that, too.)

Yes, friends … the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast wagon has hit a few bumps in the road. Is it because our Ned Trek productions have become too elaborate and costly? God, no. It’s STILL the most cheap-ass podcast on the planet. (We still have that trophy somewhere. I think Anti-Lincoln is using it for an ashtray.) No, it’s not complication, it’s … well … the OTHER kind of complication. Frankly, I need six hands. I could also use a third leg. One ass is enough, of course. The point being, we are spread kind of thin here in Big Green land.

Sure, if we were any other band-focused podcast, we would be content with just hollering randomly into the mic every week and dropping that onto iTunes. But if you’re Big Green (and we are), the quality goes in before the name goes on. (Note to lawyers: we make no claim of ownership over the preceding slogan, and it does not in any way reflect the character of our organization.) Of course, the term “quality” is, in fact, value-neutral: things can be of good quality, bad quality, etc. But that’s not the point. Every episode has some kind of “quality”, and until we insert that value-neutral substance into the file, it ain’t going nowhere. Short answer: we’re running behind … again. But THIS IS BIG GREEN is still a thing, and it will return.

Are the 80s over yet?Okay, I’m not going to dip into one of those “things were simpler in the old days” reveries, but what I’m describing are both first-world problems and 21st Century foibles of a type that would have baffled us back when we started this moth-eaten music collective known as Big Green. When we first started using that moniker in 1986-7, we were working with people out around Albany, NY. Matt was writing songs like a mad man, just as he does today. Only there was no internet, no smartphones, no simple way of getting your music out there other than standing on a stage or hawking home-made cassette tapes at the local record shop. Kids these days!

Usual Rubbish

Ice days.

Man oh man. Put another log in the furnace, Anti-Lincoln. Drafty old barn of a place. Are you sure we weren’t somehow transported overnight to one of those Kuiper Belt planetoids? I’m freezing my ass off in here.

Oh, hi. Yes, we’re in the midst of another cold snap here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Our local gas an electric company discontinued service here years ago, as you might suspect. The hammer forge has been pretty quiet since the 1940s. You might think, well … burn the furniture, right? Well, we did that YEARS ago. I’m sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and no, I’m not burning that. (We’re always looking for kindling. After almost twenty winters of this, the mansized tuber is looking pretty nervous.)

Okay, so we have to break the ice in the bathroom sink every morning – is that anything to complain about? We have a roof over our heads … or most of a roof, anyway. More importantly, we have a floor beneath our feet. I say that because, if you’ll recall, we went on a “Journey to the Center of the Earth” tour some years back, and I for one never want to make THAT journey again. You haven’t had a tough audience until you’ve played for Morlocks. And those talking rock creatures! What’s that, Marvin? You don’t say. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has just told me that there were no talking rock creatures. This one club owner just had a novelty landline telephone, that’s all.

Oh, right. I remember these guys.I suppose we, like so many other upstaters, should find some way of monetizing this freezing cold weather. I don’t know, like … exporting ice or something. We could turn this place into the abandoned Cheney Ice Mill, start shipping ice all over the country. We could pack it in dry ice, or sawdust, or … something. Iron filings, perhaps. (There’s a lot of those in the hammer mill basement.) It’s just a damn shame that you can’t bottle this weather and sell it in the summer. Hey ….. Nah, forget it.

Well, we’ve got one thing to keep us warm: Our Christmas episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, still in production. Likely to be a little late this year, friends – my apologies. I will post something around the holiday as a placeholder then drop the new episode when it’s good and ready. (Well … ready, anyway. If I hold out for “good” , we may be talking about NEXT Christmas.)