…and I’m trying to discipline myself into writing here at least every other day. The past month has been overwhelming in a number of different ways, and they are all things I should be writing about here.

I realize that I’ve got tons of mp3s to post before the month is out, and they’re on their way; I’ve spent too much time writing and not enough time demo-ing, thinking that everything I record and release needs to be pristine and perfect, forgetting the charm that a quick four-tracked demo has. Thus I’m currently in the process of getting a lot of these new songs demoed and posted up on this here website.

MEMBERS: There aren’t that many of you, but I need you to know how thankful I am. I apologize deeply that I’m not consistently dropping jamz, but there’s going to be a sizable chunk here in the next couple of weeks (and just in time for Christmas!), and in 2010 I plan on squirting out an mp3 every Friday, a consistent schedule I can follow.

Had a great time last night at Eclipse; those shows tend to be either extremely fun or extremely frustrating, and last night was definitely the former. Many thanks to everyone who showed up and listened; having a great audience is what makes the difference. Sue Scrofa opened, and that set was so good I felt a little intimidated; everything was tight and clean and the sonic palette was broad and interesting, plus them songs are just so damn GOOD… the scruffy little man in the t-shirt with an acoustic guitar and nothing else must pale in direct comparison…

But despite that unexpected sense of intimidation, I felt unusually comfortable. Sometimes I’m able to completely drift off into the world of what I’m doing, where I’m not thinking about the mechanics of playing or singing, or really thinking about anything at all. It’s in this complete distraction-free zone that I feel like I’m my best as a performer, but I almost never get to this point when I’m practicing. It’s only with an attentive audience that I get that weird feeling of leaving my self for a few moments to just inhabit the song. I’ve heard other performers talk about “totally losing themselves” in performance, and had always kind of thought that was corny or contrived or some sort of marketing tool used as a signifier of authenticity, but after I had been performing for a while, I realized that this was actually a real phenomenon, an uncanny feeling not particularly communicable through words. It reminds me a bit of when I was an actor and I would let the character’s emotions flood over and momentarily overwrite my “real self,” ultimately, in some place in my consciousness, forgetting that I was performing and allowing the metaphysical performance space to become my dominant reality. When I’m playing a song, I like to feel like I am no longer myself, but rather a song being played through the esoteric movements of the body I inhabit. Performance shouldn’t elevate the ego; it should dissolve it. It’s a hard thing to do, though, it’s hard not to think “HOW IS THIS PERFORMANCE GOING? HOW ARE MY FACIAL EXPRESSIONS BEING PERCEIVED? DO THEY LIKE ME? WHAT ARE THEIR FACIAL EXPRESSIONS TELLING ME ABOUT HOW MUCH THEY ARE ENJOYING THE SHOW?” These are all clearly ego-centric thoughts that never occur when I feel like I’ve “become” the song. Songs can’t worry or think, they just manifest themselves, and it’s possible, in performance, to allow this manifestation to overwrite one’s sense of self temporarily. I think it’s a feeling I used to get in church when I was a child, the sense of not only some metaphysical Other existing, but being a part of that entity itself. Lately I’ve been able to think of songs as little else than manifestations of aspects of some metaphysical Other, and I’ve found a renewed excitement and enjoyment in the process of writing and performing because of this. I want to be able to lose my sense of self entirely when I perform, because that feeling can transmit itself to the audience, and it becomes a palpable presence in the room, and it’s something beautiful that everyone shares equally. However, how does one hone this skill? How do I practice onstage ego-death? Maybe I just need to play more shows…

This makes me wonder what metaphysical space I’m disappearing into when I lose myself in the Soulja Boy cover.

SETLIST 11/14/09

Warm for a While
No One’s Listening
Cricket Girl
Catapult-Rocket
Crank That (Soulja Boy)
A Neat Disaster
Radio Hit Musical
Ordinary Girl
Rubbing Arms and Setting Fires
Dangerous Drugs
Making Faces in the Mirror
Violets
Balloons and Confetti
I’m A Dog (Gucci Mane cover)
Coming Apart at the Seams
Sinister Magic
Les Enfants Dorment
I’ll Be Your Elevator

Vomiting : food poisoning :: Recording power-pop songs : loneliness
_______________________

“No One’s Listening”

Fluid and graceful, she grew out of your waist, threw her hands on your earlobes, those half-formed fingers spoke through a bear made of stars pulling sisters from her heart, laid upon the Earth to hold your camera, beautify the memes you hand her, resonate the places she can find / Stupid and hateful, a self defined in pain wasting day after day in an existential play, till the Earth, made of art, burrowed tunnels in your heart, and uncomfortable, you shake your body, steer it where the feeling started, feeding from some loaned, endearing mind / Here I am to hold your camera, beautify the memes I’m handed, resonating every piece I find / And then the stars sing ‘hello hello hello,’ though no one’s listening, ‘hello hello hello.’

________

Playing what might be my last solo show for a while with Sue Scrofa tomorrow night (SATURDAY the 14th) at Eclipse Coffee and Books in Montevallo. Smokers, bring your nicotine patches, ‘cuz you ain’t gonna wanna miss a moment.

Sorry posts have been so sparse lately; I’m probably going to start journaling my daily insanity in this blog, so stay tuned…

And here it is, boys and girls, the release date of the Actual EP.

Members can download it now over in the ol’ Members’ Area. Non-members can purchase both a digital and hard copy by joining the website and sending me their address at realfrogs@gmail.com – that’s right; for a limited time only, all new memberships to real-frogs.com come with a free physical copy of the Actual EP.

This is mainly because I haven’t figured out how to integrate my shopping cart into WordPress, so the offer ends when I figure that out. So if you’re thinking about joining, boy howdy, now’s the time.

I realized that there are no images of me, the actual person, on here, so this morning I did a little self-photography, and was reminded how much I loathe taking pictures of myself. I managed to fire a few short bursts while looking around the room so that I wouldn’t make a face when I pressed the shutter, and managed a few decent shots (DECENT):

Warm for a While

After several days of rigorous and maddening recording, writing, and layering in an uncomfortable, steaming hot attic, I finally have something to show for my work. I’m still tweaking the mix here and there, and I may hear some things that will get changed before the final version, but there it is. You can also stream it from the player on the sidebar, or go to the download area if for some reason you want your link surrounded by different text.

I have uploaded 33 mp3s to the members’ area, and some of these are going to be gone eventually, ‘cuz they’re just early rough demos and some of them are mildly embarrassing, but I gotta give you early subscribers something a little bit extra. It’s five bucks for 33 mp3s (and at least 15 new ones over the next three months, though that’s a minimum that will be exceeded) and half off physical merchandise when it becomes available. Presuming the music is any good, that ain’t that bad, is it?

It’s such a strange, nervous feeling to send this out into the world. I’ve put a lot of myself into this material, and it’s so weird and exciting to try to disperse it as widely as possible. I’ve been writing and recording for almost twelve years now, and have never really tried to bring any attention to myself. I’m terrible at self-promotion. But now I’m trying to change that, so here we go…

If you like what I’m doing, please join and tell your friends, tweet this, social-bookmark it, help me get word out, if you think word deserves to get out. If I can make even part of my living doing this, then my time gets devoted to music, and when my time gets devoted to music, I write and record a lot of it. That’s the ultimate goal here. And that means a lot of music for you.

Well, my internet got disconnected for a little while, which has turned out to be a good thing, because now the EP is very very close to being finished, and this website is set to be fully operational on Friday.

Over the week I’ll be uploading preview tracks as I’m finishing them, and I’ll also be uploading the first chunk of goods to the members’ area, which will be some mp3s that will probably only be here for a little bit – old crusty demos and old mixes and the like.

Hopefully I’ll be uploading an early mix of the lead track from the ACTUAL EP tomorrow…