Headed to dinner last night with the fam, this song comes on (Deep Waves I think?) and my oldest says "oh, this song". Michelle, cutely, starts looking for something to like about it. I, predictably, do the opposite.

So here's the observation -

Basically all pop music these days is made exclusively on computers. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but what's missing is the accidental interactivity that happens when you have a group of people playing instruments and giving each...

I was listening to Taylor Swift yesterday - Everything Has Changed from her new version of the album. There's this bit in the bridge at about 2:30 where the backgrounds do this "haaaa, ahhhh, ahhhh" thing that's so wonderfully out of tune and everybody involved in the making of this album had the courage to leave it.

Nobody does that anymore. I started thinking about how auto-tune has really enabled the elimination of musical talent as a condition for creating music, and made it that much...

So much to say, so much to say..

Some day I'll write a memoir, but that day is not this day my friends. The most outwardly memorable thing I've done so far this summer is fly out to Oregon to the String Summit to cover for Mike Devol of Greensky. Mike had a baby a few days before, and back in the winter he called me up to see if I might be interested in covering for him on some summer festival shows. Duh, yes.

So I had several months to prepare, but not prepare so much that I got...

And I wonder - will you miss your old friends once you've proven what you're worth? And I wonder - when you're a big star, will you miss the Earth?

I heard some news this weekend that really shook me up - that one of my old musician acquiantances and his wife of several years had recently split up.

He's a young dude and his band is killing it, and I know first-hand how rough that is on a relationship, so it was not suprising at all. Yet somehow it was also simultaneously...

• Episode 01 - Sharam_s Mix.m4a
• Episode 02 - Sultan_s Mix.m4a
• Episode 03 - Dean Coleman_s Mix.m4a
• Episode 04 - Cedric Gervais_ Mix.m4a
• Episode 05 - Prompt_s Mix.m4a
• Episode 06 - David Tort_s Mix.m4a
• Episode 07 - Miss Nine_s Mix.m4a
• Episode 08 - Ned Shepard_s Mix.m4a
• Episode 09 - D-Unity_s Mix.m4a
• Episode 10 - Pig & Dan_s Mix.m4a
• Episode 11 - DJ Simi_s Mix.m4a
• Episode 12 - 16 Bit Lolitas_ Mix.m4a
• Episode 13 - Kamisshake_s Mix.mp3
• Episode 14 - Cocodrills_ Mix.m4a
• Episode 15 - The Flash...

Prologue

I have a lot of friends in successful working bands that all have one thing in common - a fairly useless website. Pretty much every band I know, with a very few exceptions, treats their website as a tour poster. Most of them have some kind of "store", but frequently they're stocked with leftovers from last year's road merch. You often have to go through PayPal to checkout. I don't know of anyone short of Radiohead that actually lets you download digital goods directly from...

I didn't remember mixing this but it must've been some time last year. This was the gig that Vince Herman opened up and Phil Lesh pulled up in his Ferrari out front and helped us level the joint for the second set. Strangely, there were no tapers present whatsoever, so no tapes showed up on the Archive. This was, however, one of the tours that we were taping for Elko, so we were running a 24 track rig that evening. I remember it being a challenge to get everyone down to 24 inputs, and...

Did Telluride last year. 'Twas a blissfully awesome return, particularly since a year earlier I thought my music career was over.

So they pick all us rockstars up at the Montrose airport. I waited around for a bit because the other dude that was getting picked up (who turned out to be Michael Daves) got in about 30 minutes after I did. He showed up and I was getting ready to walk out of the airport when somebody called my name. I turned around to see an old neighbor of mine from Boone, who...

It's a toy I've been wanting to build for a while. I stole the domain name from Book fair and square, and have been quietly honing the skills to actually build it.

What I'd ultimately like to have is a site that is basically a collection of all current, working bluegrass bands. When you come to the front page, you get a list of bluegrass shows happening in your area. It does this by roughly guessing via your IP address. It has a list of shows in the database that it scrapes from...

I dunno. I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say yet, but I’ll give it a whirl.

There’s a really interesting conversation going on right now, initially spearheaded by Pandolfi, but now spilling out into the wider stream. The whole “what is bluegrass” conversation, and it’s almost certain that it’s always been going on but just never showed up on my radar.

I’ve been, in the most nominal sense, a bluegrass musician for close to 10 years now. Jeremy from the Dusters...

It occurred to me over cooking lunch for my boys just a minute ago that, a week before my 33rd birthday, I've been in the music business for half of my life. I'd like to share a couple of things that I've come up with.

First of all, to get anywhere in this business, to get anywhere sustainably that is, takes a really long time. There is no short circuiting this process, short of selling your soul to the devil. Even bands like the Black Eyed Peas who are on top of the world right now in...

Well unsurprisingly, even after several minutes of Google searching I'm unable to dig into the real article on this one, only countless verbatim reposts on countless web-scraping sites.

Anyway, here's an example. I don't hate on Jon Bon Jovi, but I do hate on the misrepresentation of facts. Steve Jobs didn't kill the music industry, the music industry killed the music industry. Here's how.

Some time in the early 80s record companies and stereo manufacturers (then known as HiFi) found...

#3 Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

I've never listened to these guys before. I'd been getting my indie rock fix from Death Cab and the Decemberists for the last couple of years and had never felt the urge to get any of their previous albums, but when their web video for "We Used To Wait" came out I couldn't stop watching it. It's one of the most amazing things I've seen done with the internet so far, and the tune behind the video was really good, too.

After a couple of weeks I bought the whole...

I was having this conversation on Saturday...

I'm hanging with my new musical buddy George Kilby. He's decided to upgrade his website so we're doing a consult to get a feel for what direction we're going to move him in (pardon my grammar). He said something at one point about a friend of his who'd decided to totally forgo having their own website in favor of just managing their presence through Facebook and a couple of other social sites.

I'm kicking myself for not having a canned...

#4 - John Digweed

So this one's might need a little explaining. I've said it here before, but it's likely that you weren't here for that - I went through a phase in college where I traveled all over the southeast going to see shows. I didn't go to Phish shows except for a few times, and String Cheese was a bit after my time. I and my buddies went to go see DJs. This was the golden age of Keoki, Rabbit in the Moon, Simply Jeff, the Dubtribe Soundsystem, Scott Hardkiss.. My first party...

Well, here we are. It was a tortuous migration, but IgnoredByDinosaurs (the blog) has reached version 5. I think it's version 5, let's see there was Blogger, then WP, then Drupal, then back to WP, then back to Drupal, and now this bad boy, so I guess you would call this one 6.0.

This blog is now run by a system called Jekyll, a "site generator" that's written in Ruby. What it does is take a bunch of text posts and runs them through a couple of different templates and spits out a full...

So Eminem's old producers sued Universal over royalties. For those of you who have never been signed to a record contract, they are shadier (pardon the pun) than you probably imagine. The whole point of getting a record deal is to try and make some money off of selling your recording, right? Well, over the last decades, the industry (and by industry, I mean the lawyers and label heads in charge of finding ever more inventive ways of scamming inattentive rock stars (which is generally...

Now, this part won't be any news to anyone, but will mainly serve to help organize the thoughts in my brain. First, the old way:

The old way involved the "record industry". The record industry used to exist because recording was very expensive. It was expensive to record a song, it was expensive to reproduce the recording of the song, and it was really expensive to warehouse, distribute, and sell the recording of that song. Thus a whole industry cropped up to take advantage of the...

When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters...

When in the course of your bands business, it becomes necessary to cast off your old, crappy website and the confusing, unnavigable interface which you present to the world as your first impression, and to assume the powers of PHP, CSS, XML, RoR, and other technologies not yet invented in the pursuit of a highly compelling online experience, a more meaningful dialogue with your fanbase, and the glorious rewards of possibly higher merch sales, a decent respect to the opinions of webmasters...