Category: News

Royce, Nate, and I gave “Not One Person Left Out” the mini-LPLP treatment; listen below or on your favorite podcast platform here.

Pre-order “Not One Person Left Out” here, it comes out Feb. 1!

What a fantastic year for new music. My list is twice as long as usual.

I added over two hundred albums to my collection this year, and have listened to almost all of them since early November to try and the best. “Best” in this context means having double extra special sparkle sauce; absolute lightning in a bottle. “Honorable mention” is no dishonor; records in that group are truly outstanding as well.

In random order, the best music I heard in 2022 –

Elzhi & Georgia Anne Muldrow, “Zhigeist” (2022) – A beautiful meeting of polymathematical minds, hiking through history with vision and verve.

Amber Mark, “Three Dimensions Deep” (2022) – Everything that smart, modern R&B-pop should be, with bonus points for Afrofuturism.

Stik Figa & Conductor Williams, “Valley of Dry Bones” (2022) – Intentionally short, and undeniable. Conductor warps his samples right up to the point of over-sickness, and Stik continues to drop heartfelt truths in plain but striking language.

Beth Orton, “Weather Alive” (2022) – Orton braved the emotional wilderness to bring us back this collection of meditations, performed by an absolutely cracking band.

Kendrick Lamar, “Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers” (2022) – Uneven on early listens, but the great tracks are *so great.* I think “Mr. Morale…” will age incredibly well.

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Three minutes of noise drone testing two inputs and one output of the MR MTX MXR.

On the 13th I had an unusually creative day, and I talked about it, among other things, with Cory.

What I didn’t get around to saying in the pod was that Sunday wasn’t just about conceptualizing a new h&s project that ties together some of the old “hiplife” ideas and new dream/404 songs; Sunday was also about the way that that breakthrough cascaded through my other folders and playlists of demos and made other projects snap into place as well. Dreaming up the h&s party/hiplife LP freed up some marginally-h&s guitar songs for a M/S Ride guitar album that mixes Tom Petty / tremolo riffs with Smashing Pumpkins / Small Stone ideas, it might have pulled a couple odd songs out of “Orbital Debris vol. 2” and solidified that as more of an electro project in line with vol. 1, etc.

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Cooky

I was wrong, you were right, you can spell it how you like
Common sense be damned, full speed ahead
Conventions never were your thing
Type those pretty thoughts into the night
Talking hard
I used “proscribe,” you called me out
You know I love to argue, babe
I don’t take prisoners but I’ll fight you fair
Maybe I’m the lunatic you’re looking for

I don’t need to win, don’t ever walk away from an honest debate
Hey, it doesn’t matter, doesn’t mean a thing
When did we stop having fun in here?
My heart, I’m yours
And your sketchy spelling doesn’t change a thing about us
Trust me when I tell you

She doesn’t know your name, I didn’t tell her who was
Talking like a cookbook from the fifties
I just said you were a friend
Anonymous as ever at my job, slacking off
Can we sharpen wits without it being hurtful?
God, I hope so
Kid, I need to feel we’re cool with repartee
Holding back holds us apart

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I was on KKFI 90.1 Kansas City Community Radio this morning with Mark Manning and the Wednesday MidDay Medley! You can listen to the show here but only for the next couple weeks, they don’t maintain a full archive, so click now. My part starts at about 1:02:00.

We also covered Fight Songs on The Long Play Listening Party. Part 1 is in your podcast feed now, or you can watch here.

Plus hear one more song, “The Last Last Time” featuring Cory over at Bandcamp!

A little coda for Only Mostly Dead, these were recorded in the basement after I tore down the OMD setup. They were still done in single takes with no edits or overdubs, though I used a looper pedal for “Stuck On You” (the intro is the loop, and it comes back at the end).