My brief thoughts on SOPA/PIPA

Posted by Joe on January 18, 2012

I took my time before speaking out about SOPA/PIPA. As an artist and a defender of individual rights, including intellectual property rights, I really had to look into this before deciding what I thought. I think these are abhorrent bills that attempt to protect intellectual property by stomping individual rights.

I’m not too much of a networking guy, so I’ll let others argue the technical consequences (fractured Internet), but I’ll stick to the principled argument: that this is an enormous infringement of individual rights and that you can’t protect one individual right (intellectual property) by demolishing that which it presupposes (freedom of expression).

Google’s petition makes it easy to oppose, and if you go to Wikipedia today they’ll also help by giving you phone numbers for your representatives (and links to web contact forms, which some of us prefer). If you value individual rights, and want this staggering act of censorship to be stopped, take a few minutes today and make your voice heard.

Google Petition

Wikipedia page about individual rights (try it today [01/18/12] and you’ll see)

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CDs at shows!

Posted by Joe on January 10, 2012

I recently realized that with all the music I’ve recorded, and released online, I’ve never sold any actual CDs of my tunes. This has to change! I’m really excited to announce that CDs will be available at my upcoming shows, and here’s what they’ll be:

For the CD project I’m going to do a re-release of some material that’s been available online, but this time as a coherent set of what I consider to be my best songs. The songs I’m most proud of. The songs that I want to represent myself as an artist and writer.

Of course, since I’m an artist and writer, I don’t have a truckload of money to throw at the project, so I’m going to be doing the classic musician thing, getting resourceful, and putting together a funky, unique, and artistic package. This means a bunch of cool stuff: recycled card stock CD wallets, hand-stamped artwork, y’know, real artsy fartsy stuff along those lines. And I’m psyched for it.

I’ll put up another post with the tracklist and a photo of the actual product soon enough, but for now, head over to the tour page and mark your calendar, cuz there will be CDs for sale at my upcoming shows!

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Idea #2: Studio album

Posted by Joe on December 19, 2011

The other idea I’ve been mulling over lately is that of doing a full-blown studio album. A short studio album, but a studio album none the less. For a while I’ve felt like I’ve pretty much hit the limit on the production quality I’m able to achieve on my own, and for some of my most polished songs, I just feel like they deserve the full treatment. That is, booking time in a legit recording studio (you know, with a professional engineer, picking a select few (say, 6-8) songs, poring tirelessly of the instrumentation and arrangements, and shelling out the big bucks for that current, clean, radio-ready, just-compressed-enough sound.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But somehow, it just doesn’t have the folklore allure of the river house album idea. But maybe that’s just me defaulting back to my DIY indie-to-the-core ways.

What would you prefer to hear?

Do you think I’ve been lacking the luster of a professionally-produced recording?

I’ve got some more developed concepts for the studio idea (album name, tentative track list, cover art concept, etc), but I’ve got to keep something waiting in the wings. ;-)

But for now, what’s your overall impression of this idea as it relates to my character as an artist?

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Video mixed bag #1

Posted by Joe on December 18, 2011

I lead a disorganized digital existence. That’s the nice way of putting it. The more accurate way would be that my projects and files are spread among so many different computers, drives, servers, directories, etc that I feel like I never know where the hell anything is.

Well, this weekend I threw down the gauntlet: I decided to scour every corner of my technological space to find all the nifty video footage that I knew I had, but felt nearly hopeless to find.

It turned out pretty well, actually. I found about 25 clips that I thought would be worth sharing, and got most of them uploaded. I’ll be releasing them over the next couple weeks (call that pre-loading my promotional work for the holidays), and here’s the first batch. Continue reading →

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