No, I can’t hang upside down. Not for three hours, for chrissake… from a helicopter. Why don’t you just turn the camera upside down? Never thought of THAT, did you? (You did… ?)
Oh, hi. Just walked in on another acrimonious production meeting here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. We keep a tight production schedule around here, let me tell you, averaging as many as one music video a year (sometimes more). Yes, breakneck speed rivaling our audio production schedule. Punishing! Matt is our director, though he sometimes puts Mitch Macaphee in charge of the second unit. Video production does not come naturally to our mad science advisor, I’m the first to say. He tends to confuse special effects with reality. (I can’t quite bring myself to ask him how he faked that exploding building in our last video…. too afraid of the truth.)
Okay, so… we’re releasing a single. A goofy little number called “One Small Step”. All I can say about it is that it attempts to explain the unexplainable, namely the moon landing, Armstrong’s flubbed first words from the cratered surface of Luna, and the severe mental and metaphysical consequences of that flubbing. The video? Well…. it features cameos by two ex presidents (both deceased) – one puts in a screaming sax solo. It features spectacular (or spectacularly dumb) depictions of interplanetary travel. And… well, what else can I say but watch it and judge for 
yourself.
“One Small Step” is one of those songs that has been sitting around for a time, waiting to be finished, begging to be released. They’re like errant children, you know? You make them, they start to grow, and next thing you know – before they even think about striking out on their own – they’re giving you a massive pain in the ass. “One Small Step” hung around for a while; we redid it, remixed it, changed it up…. then just threw our hands in the air. It was never going to be a doctor, a lawyer, or even a tailor or dry cleaner. So it’s just a song; Matt gave it a fittingly bizarre video, and the rest is history. (Or will be history, once it’s past.)
Here’s hoping you enjoy this modest little number. Now if you’ll excuse me, my helicopter awaits.
It is winter in the northeast, after all. (This just in.) And Big Green, being made up of at least 40% sentient life forms, 35% mammalians, tends to be a tad sensitive to the extreme cold. We experience this on our space voyages, of course. Deadly cold in outer space! Just go there and see for yourself. (Bring a jacket… and some oxygen.) It’s a real problem for our friends and spokesvegetable, the mansized tuber, whose sap has a decidedly higher freezing point than our own human blood. That means he needs to stay close to the fire… but not TOO close. It’s a delicate balance for tubey, let me tell you.
How am I wasting my time? Well… usually it’s my job to waste OTHER people’s time. But this week, bored, I opted to do a little video New Year’s greeting for all you folks out there. Just a brief tour of the Cheney Hammer Mill basement, a little look inside our “creative process” – what it looks like when we’re making the sausage we call “music” – and so on. I have posted same for your edification on our YouTube site and other internet haunts bearing our likenesses. Marvin was of some help, though…. his attention was divided, as per usual.