Howling Feedback from the Mouthpiece of James

Oh, MAN. It's OVER. I've FINISHED it:

Day 30. Your favorite song at this time last year

Well, a 40 year old's preferences generally don't change that much over the course of a puny little year. My favorite song still would've been the one I put for Day 01... but looking back at my EllJay a year ago, I was kinda, well, pissed. And I was listening to a fair bit of Shellac:



So there you go.

Day 01. Your favourite song - New Radiant Storm King, Subway Token (Save My Soul)
Day 02. Your least favourite song - George Harrison's cover of "Set On You."
Day 03. A song that makes you happy - Guided By Voices, The Best Of Jill Hives
Day 04. A song that makes you sad - Genesis, Supper's Ready
Day 05. A song that reminds you of someone - The Sugar Cubes, Birthday
Day 06. A song that reminds you of somewhere - Sonic Youth, Washing Machine
Day 07. A song that reminds you of a certain event - Scotland the Brave (Graduation day.)
Day 08. A song that you know all the words to - Pavement, Give It A Day
Day 09. A song that you can dance to - Dead Kennedys, Holiday in Cambodia
Day 10. A song that makes you fall asleep - Brian Eno, Music for Airports
Day 11. A song from your favorite band - Mission of Burma, Dirt
Day 12. A song from a band you hate - Linkin Park, Crawling
Day 13. A song that is a guilty pleasure - Red Hot Chili Peppers,Freaky Styley
Day 14. A song that no one would expect you to love - A Tribe Called Quest, I Left My Wallet In El Segundo
Day 15. A song that describes you - The Mountain Goats, No Children
Day 16. A song that you used to love but now hate - Weather Report, Black Market
Day 17. A song that you hear often on the radio - System of a Down, Toxicity
Day 18. A song that you wish you heard on the radio - James William Roy, Paper Valentines
Day 19. A song from your favorite album - Minutemen, Corona (Double Nickels on the Dime)
Day 20. A song that you listen to when you’re angry - Future Of The Left, adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood & The Hope That House Built
Day 21. A song that you listen to when you’re happy - Beastie Boys, Sureshot
Day 22. A song that you listen to when you’re sad - Wilco, Poor Places
Day 23. A song that you want to play at your wedding - Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, My Pink Half of the Drainpipe
Day 24. A song that you want to play at your funeral, Serge Gainsbourg - Requiem pour un Con
Day 25. A song that makes you laugh - The Dismemberment Plan, The Ice Of Boston Madonna vs. The Sex Pistols, "Ray Of Gob"
Day 26. A song that you can play on an instrument - Sugar, Gee Angel
Day 27. A song that you wish you could play - fIREHOSE, Brave Captain
Day 28. A song that makes you feel guilty - Peter Gabriel, Home Sweet Home
Day 29. A song from your childhood - Tom Lehrer, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park
Day 30. Your favorite song at this time last year - Shellac, Watch Song

Not like I ever shop at Sam's Club or Walmart, ever. But my aunt works at Sam's Club, and has for something like decades. OOPS, I mean USED to work there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/business/25walmart.html?ref=business

Yeah. They're outsourcing her job along with 11,000 others. Just chucking them out like pallets of expired goods.

Nobody try and justify this to me, okay? You'll summarily had your head bitten off and unfriended. There is NO justification for treating employees this way. You got a few underperforming? Retrain them or fire them. Fine. But replacing a whole class of employee, indiscriminately? Hateful. Dictionary definition of what's wrong with the big box stores. Fuck 'em all.

The thing with Rock Band is it's SO accurate. My hair is TOTALLY like this guy's, and I totally do the headband thing (it's what comes of being introduced to pop music by early-period Duran Duran.) Also, check the cuties in the band: It's UNCANNY, because in real life my band actually IS A Bunch Of Girls. But dig it: the band members give it away by singing backup: THEY'RE ACTUALLY ALL MEN.

Really, mekkasimian's awesome.

For those of you (ketina!!! Heads UP!) who are down, here's the version with the charts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeoAZG7T4VU

Eventually I'll shut up about this stuff.

***

I'm going to Miami Thursday and will be there until ass AM Monday for the Miami International Map Fair. Anyone going to be around? Holler.

mekkasimian is way awesome: his steadfast labors have brought Paper Valentines safely through review: Now, we can but wait for the Rock Band Network to go full-live, and release the RBN songs for sale.

Very happy 'bout this.

Don't know if any of you might be signed on as reviewer/creators at the RBN, but if you are, you can see Paper Valentines and the others by visiting here:
http://creators.rockband.com/song/detail/311

I'm in good company. Kristin Hersh has a song up! As does BILL BRUFORD - for which the vocals are actually SAXOPHONE and the drums will make players cry.

Paper Valentines won't make anyone cry, I think: MEK made it an easy play - the thing is to get the song out there.

Thanks, MEK!

Paper Valentines is 75% through peer review! WHOO!

Share! Tweet! Retweet! Whee!

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And one of my clients who has some behavior thanked me for the beautiful maps I sold her. So that's nice!

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I've got a Replacements tune in my head, but the earworm has the words wrong.

You know how I've been yammering on and on about the Rock Band Thing, and my song on it? It looks like Peer Review is proceeding - 58% done when I last checked - and so I've some hopes that Paper Valentines will be live and available prior to the Very Topical Date of February 14th. Once it comes out, I'd surely like people to actually buy it - mekkasimian has sweated on it, and we both would love to see some pin money come in off it; also, if the Rockbandification of Paper Valentines proves successful it occurs to me that he could conceivably make some real scratch charting other bands' songs. As for me, every pair of ears hearing one of my songs is a good thing. I'm in it for fame, baby.

To help push things along, I'm making Paper Valentines free, at least for a while. If it's tacky, it's tacky. I want as many ears on this as I can possibly get, and I want to spread it as far as I can. I'll be twittering it tomorrow morning.

So please, SHARE it. Post it forward. Hotlink to it all you like! Here's the link:
http://www.thejamesrocket.com/thejamesrocket_files/paper_valentines_09.mp3

It'd be cool if you included a link to my Amie Street page as well - it'd be nice to get some action there on my other songs. (Incidentally, Paper Valentines costs all of 29 cents there, and will.)
http://amiestreet.com/music/james-william-roy/

There's the link to the demo of the Rock Bandified "Pape" on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIsURGTiGsM

And there's the site for the Rock Band Network itself, though the song isn't accessible to anyone but reviewers yet:
http://creators.rockband.com/

***

Maybe I'll have something else to post about one of these days. I sold a map today!

So, Penny Arcade has noted the coming of the Rock Band Network!


mekkasimian tells me not to worry, that Paper Valentines is halfway through review, and that it's going fast: but I still fret, because it's really out of my hands now.

***

I really wish I were not starting to get sick, again.

I sent a fella at a wee indie label the Paper Valentines ep. Says he:

"I am thoroughly flattened. I really am loving Paper Valentines. Even my friend... who has the most snobby indie taste of anyone I know (and who I use to set the bar) was blown away."

Always nice to hear, no?

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I'm also excited about this: http://creators.rockband.com/ The beta goes live today: thanks to the copious monkeysweat of mekkasimian, Paper Valentines is in peer review and, Screaming Empty Void willing*, will be part of the initial release.

(in case you missed me yammering on about it before, this is what I'm on about)


I'm hoping that'll bring some kind of attention to my music that's online now, in particular the Amie Street stuff, which has been dead as a doornail for the past two months. Releasing another EP there might cause a flutter, but I don't think a significant one: when I put up the Ampeater single it barely got noticed. What's required is getting reviewed, in as many places online as possible, and that's no mean feat for an unknown who doesn't tour. If the dude's enthusiasm up top infects anyone, though, that might mean something.

Bah. I gotta sell a few maps.

*I stole this from MLW. I've always thought it pretty clever.

1) MLW has been studying Muay Thai, and she loves loves loves it. (She's also getting ridiculously fit. I have to get cracking - I'm really not keeping up.) Friday night, we went to see some fights, two of which included people from her gym as competitors. One, Deb Liao, commanded her whole fight - really great, crisp form, positively seething with focused power. Her opponent couldn't do anything but clinch, because whenever they were out in the ring, Deb took her apart. The other fellow from MLW's gym, Greg, didn't have it so good. He fought a good fight, but his opponent had the edge on him all three rounds. About three quarters of the way through the final round, the other guy launched a positively terrifying combination: came at him with a flying kick, which was successfully blocked, followed by one or two punches with LOTS of momentum behind them. Greg got caught with his chin up. Lights out.

I'd never seen a knockout in person before. He rocked back on the ropes, then fell like a marionette whose strings have been suddenly cut.

He was revived, and is fine. But it was pretty scary to watch, I gotta say. And the thought has occurred to me that within perhaps a year or so I might actually be watching MLW in the ring. (She tells me that she's old to compete, but really, if she wants it enough it'll happen somehow.)

Eeep.

That said, we're totally going again. It was a fun night.

2) Had a really great time yesterday playing music with one of my oldest friends, Kamran, and one of his oldest friends. His pal played drums, and Kamran and I both played guitar. First time we'd done that in a long while, and it was really fun. Much more improvisational than anything else I'm doing nowadays - Kamran and I have a really great sense of how the other plays, so we can spar back and forth and things tend to just develop freely. One cool thing was it wasn't particularly loud: we both used tiny little amps, and the drummer wasn't as much of a heavy hitter as I'm accustomed to, so everything stayed at a very human level: again, different from the assault that A Bunch Of Girls generally cranks out. He's in Boston, but comes to NYC pretty regularly (on account of his girlfriend being here) so I'm hopeful that we'll be able to do this again.

3) I've been doing this twitter thing, posting a link to one of The James Rocket songs every day: On the one hand, I think most of the couple dozen people following me there already know about all the songs on the site - but my hope is that re-tweeting is so simple that if just one of my followers bumps a song along, I'll get a significant bump of exposure. It hasn't happened yet, apart from the Hover Bacon thing, but it's virtually no effort at all to tweet out a link, so why the hell not I figure.

4) Amie Street has become the Cutout Bin of the Internet.

www.marriedtothesea.com

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Oh, on the other hand, that bloody real estate salesman is showing up in my googles again. BASTARD.

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Decided to take the "AmpEater single" off Amie Street: It's doing nothing, really, but clutter up the space. They're being slow about it. I like them less for it.