music

These links are also available on the videos page. I’ll have some songs up on the downloads page up soon.

Singularity, live, Last Chance Saloon, Manhattan, Kansas, 18 October 2008

Getting Over You Again, live, Last Chance Saloon, Manhattan, Kansas, 18 October 2008

I’m sitting in the Phoggy Dog in Lawrence listening to my friend Blaine Younger play. I’m beginning to realize that Blaine and I have very different approaches to playing.

Blaine has fun. You can see it in his performance and the kind of songs he plays. The crowd responds well.

I have fun by not showing it. I have an agenda. Bleu Edmondson told me once in Hays that the secret was to force eight originals “down their throats”, give them a cover, and then play 10 more originals. Bleu may not be the biggest alt-country artist, but I’ll put his latest release “Lost Boy” up against any offering from the movement and give you a spread.

The covers I choose have always been songs I respect for pith or because they’re cryptic in a way I admire. My rule of thumb has been if the crowd responds positively that means I have a mandate to depart farther from mainstream into the obscurity I enjoy. After all, if they wanted to hear Kenny Chesney they could have stayed home, played CDs and continued watching NASCAR while flipping through Anti-science Weekly.

Maybe I’ll change. Maybe I won’t. While I like my musical-masochism, I enjoy Blaine’s approach and may begin experimenting with something like that again. We’ll see. Until then, go listen to some Lucero and Old 97s. And vote for Obama and Biden for a mature America.

As James McMurtry says in Choctaw Bingo, “We’re going to have ourselves a time.”

Right on James. I can’t wait to be back in town tomorrow.

I can safely speak for the ATB to say we are all thrilled about opening for Brandon Jenkins and having another opportunity to play at Longhorns.

Personally, I couldn’t be more excited. I have liked Jenkins’ music for as long as I have known about Red Dirt Country (whatever the heck that is).

While he may be most widely known as the guy who wrote several hit songs for Stoney LaRue and Bleu Edmondson (”Feet Don’t Touch the Ground,” “Down in Flames,” “Finger on the Trigger,” etc.), alone, that tag doesn’t do him justice. The guy is great guitar player, songwriter, and has a rocking little combo out of Austin. I sincerely hope people in the Manhattan area turnout for his show–the last time I saw him the crowd was disappointing.

Hope everyone has a great day and is ready to “have themsevles a time” tomorrow night.

g

We had a great show at Bobby T’s on Friday. Thanks so much to everyone who tuned in to the broadcast. Thanks to Ty and Rob, our friends from San Francisco, who called in with credit cards to buy us rounds of drinks from several states away.

Thus ends the three-day weekend of relaxation. Today was the best day by far. Erica ate with us this morning and when I dropped her off she ended up with both of my cell phones. There is an unexplainable sense of peace that accompanies the knowledge that nobody can contact you.

It’s weird having Erica here and Megan gone. My sisters are quite similar and yet quite different. I’m excited to get to know her as I got to know Megan.

I’m watching Chelsea Lately with Lucas and Diane and plugging away at finishing the new shows section of the website. My mother was in town all day Saturday and never contacted me because she thought I was in Omaha because that’s what my website said. We had booked a show there and when I Twittered regarding its cancellation I never got around to updating the convoluted event calendar that was nailed on top of Wordpress. That’s all fixed now, as the new shows section now includes all shows, both upcoming and past - all the way back to the first launch of the site when Trevor Burgess and I were playing at Fats.

I’m typing away on my Apple slim aluminum keyboard. It’s the one I poured nearly a full cup of coffee into a couple weeks ago. I dried it, wet it, dried it again and when it wouldn’t work I’d left it for dead. A week passed and I tried it one more time and it’s been working well ever since. I guess I bought a pair to have a spare. With all the damn computers around here, I guess it will get plenty of use.

I’m selling my Cloudbook at Thursday’s auction. I couldn’t ever get the wireless to work as well as I wanted, though it seems I’m not the only one. The graphics always seemed weak, though VIA just released an open source driver for it.

I’m currently rocking the ASUS EeePC 900. It’s quite possibly the finest piece of equipment on which I’ve ever laid my hands. I turned it on long enough to hit restart on the Knoppix distribution of Linux so that I could install Ubuntu. I had good luck with Ubuntu-eee as opposed to Eee-Ubuntu. Everything worked pretty much right away. I had to load a different kernel to get the microphone working so I could play with Skype with Diane.

I got Diane an Acer Aspire One as an early birthday present. It’s slightly bigger than my Eee, but the difference in the keyboard size is pretty huge. It also runs Windows XP, which is pretty much a must for her iPod Touch. It was also crazy-cheap, weighing in at $349 at Best Buy.

It seems like John McCain’s Eskimo running mate’s daughter is knocked up. How fun.

We had a great show. I removed the video stream from the post now that it’s no longer active.

Looks like we’ll be playing a show in Minneapolis this weekend. Come drink with us.

Maddy and I are sitting here, alternating single-scotch with the bottles of beer, watching this girl digging Russell Lovenstein. We’re playing the Goat Bash on Saturday with a ton of beer and friends. Sunday at Bobby T’s. Here’s Lucas to see how he does with a Treo log…

Maddy here now…thinking that the goat bash and sixteen kegs of beer may have legitimate claim as a ton of beer…research to follow…

20 minutes later…

2560 lbs of beer. That’s assuming a 160 lbs keg..they range from 155 to 165, so light beer, which contains less alcohol, which weighs less than water, actually has more water..so light beer is heavier…who would have thought.

10 minutes later…

Aaron now. We just had a discussion about beer, its alcohol and sugar and what makes light beer light. We decided we don’t know, but that 16 kegs is a metric-fuck-ton of beer

Lucas: So we agreed to jointly blow it out our ass.

Aaron: My foot is asleep

Lucas:and my beer is warm.

From Bobby T’s in Manhattan, Kansas, on 29 March, 2008, this video of Aaron Traffas Band playing Archipelago features Aaron Traffas, Mason Powell, Chris Goering and Lucas Maddy.

For more YouTube goodness, view this gem. Rob told me about it the other day. It’s for all you asshole racists out there. This shows how smart you sound.

Today I received two copies of Kansas English: The Journal of the Kansas Association of Teachers of English. The twice-yearly-published compendium includes poems, song lyrics and essays from a range of authors in Kansas. This issue featured “Red Dirt Farm” on page 65. Thanks for G to getting it listed and sending me copies.

ATS finished up yesterday. A very successful endeavor, the class generated positive feedback that hopefully will encourage others to take it in the future.

What a show last night was the Counting Crows in Lawrence! I haven’t blown out my voice from yelling in years, but I did last night. My favorite quote was when Adam Duritz said something about getting ready to play an old song, then remarked “at this point, anything before this album is pretty fucking old.” He’s right. The last studio album was 2002’s Hard Candy. It was a great disc, but six years is a long time between fresh material. Sure, they put out a compilation, a live CD and remastered their first CD August and Everything After, but six years is just too long to wait. Maybe that’s why the moved from what is now Verizon Amphitheater, where I last saw them in 2000, to Liberty Hall.