Demand JoCo

posted by jack at 03:36 CET in / music

I've told you before about Jonathan Coulton and why you must love him and give him your money. Lately Jonathan has been extending the range of his touring outside the U.S. with a recent show in England, and he's thinking about coming to Europe again and wonders where his fans are. He's even set himself up on Eventful to figure it out.

Obviously it's time to rouse the Nuthole Army out of its slumber. Arise, Nutholios, and commence with the clicking!

Click here to demand Jonathan Coulton in Stockholm!

Of course you could probably click through there and demand him for some other city instead. But I won't help you there.

New Apple Logic Studio: Bigger but smaller

posted by jack at 21:01 CET in / music

Yesterday I installed Apple's new Logic Studio. The system I was installing it on was already crowded, with the first four Jam Packs among other things, and I only had about 11 gigs free. To top it off, the Jam Packs weren't properly installed; I had manually copied them from an older machine, but in a slightly non-standard location, without the .pkg files etc, so the Logic Studio installer couldn't see them and wanted to do a fresh install of the new versions included with Logic Studio.

So I figured I'd wipe out the old Jam Packs manually, and let Logic reinstall them, and hope I'd have room for all the parts of Logic I wanted. I stumbled across this thread on Apple's support site, which mentioned that the new versions of the Jam Packs in Logic Studio now have audio saved in compressed (but lossless) format, so they're a bit smaller. Cool!

So, I wiped out my old Jam Packs, and installed most of Logic Studio, including all software and all 5 Jam Packs, but not the new extra audio content (which as far as I can tell seems to be intended mostly for soundtrack use). After installing all that, I ended up with 17 gigs of free space! Installing the new version, with more stuff, saved me 6 gigs! Woot!

Hoffburger

posted by jack at 09:55 CET in / music

Hot on the heels of the release of Your Myspace Page, we at Band of None have now released yet another single, Hoffburger. Download the mp3 with the clicking action here, or use the fun thingy below to listen to it immediately:

Hoffburger is inspired, as you may imagine, by David Hasselhoff's drunken hamburger-eating escapade, captured on video by his daughter and reported widely throughout all media. Band of None considers it an honor (and a duty) to take that feel-bad viral video of the late spring and turn it into the feel-good hit of the summer.

Sing it with me! Hoffburger with extra cheese!

Your Myspace Page

posted by jack at 08:18 CET in / music

After much hemming and hawing, the second single from Band of None is hereby foisted upon the world. It's called Your Myspace Page, and you can download it here or listen to it with the following gadget:

This is a pretty big departure from the previous single. I don't know what, if anything, this implies about Band of None's "musical direction", but time will tell. Meanwhile, comments are welcome!

nothing about the iPhone

posted by jack at 23:20 CET in / music

I'm going to resist the urge to blog about the iPhone by instead blogging about a man named Jonathan Coulton, who could just as well be me in an alternate universe. Jonathan has a burgeoning career as an internet troubadour going on, with an impressive online song catalog, most of which turned up during a one-year period from September 2005 to September 2006, in which time he recorded a song a week, every week. Some people sure do have spare time!

I just heard about JoCo (as his fans call him) from my old friend and collaborator Paul Hagstrom about a week ago, and I have to tell you that the nuthole household has been revolutionized by the power of JoCo's music. Finally, music that both my children, my wife, and I all think is entertaining, catchy, and rewarding to listen to! JoCo's songs wander across all sorts of genres, and many of them are obvious homages to one well-known group or another; most of them are also very, very funny. Some of my personal faves:

• Code Monkey
• Tom Cruise Crazy
• Soft Rocked By Me
• Curl
• Chiron Beta Prime
• Shop Vac
• The Town Crotch
• Skullcrusher Mountain
• Ikea
• Millionaire Girlfriend
• First of May
• A Laptop Like You

And those are just the best 50% or so of what I've listened to SO FAR! I'm sure by the time I've listened to all the songs, I'll have over 30 "faves". Oh well.

So, why do I think that JoCo is actually an alternate version of myself? For one thing, similar dashing good looks:

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separated at birth?

Then, there are the startling similarities in our musical histories. A little background info is in order. Consider this narrative, which I did not write but which pretty well describes a chunk of my teen years:

I played quad drums in the high school marching band, which was fun, but did not attract any girls (even when I played my tender quad arrangement of "Flight of the Bumblebee"). I switched to guitar and wrote a series of sweet and sad songs about being a teenager and having a vague feeling of overwhelming sadness and sweetness. This worked only marginally better.

Now consider this direct quote from Jonathan's bio page:

I played snare drum in the high school marching band, which was fun, but did not attract any girls (even when I played my tender snare drum arrangement of "You've Got a Friend"). I switched to guitar and wrote a series of sweet and sad songs about being a teenager and having a vague feeling of overwhelming sadness and sweetness. This worked only marginally better.

The discerning reader may notice a number of similarities between these two life stories.

In any case, I hereby declare Jonathon Coulton an honorary Nuthole Boltmaster (the first ever!) and send the rest of you off on your way to pay tribute.

OK, obligatory bloggage about yesterday's big product announcement. I'll just say that iWant an iPhone. That's all I have to say about that for now.