Well, there’s absolutely no doubt about it. A song is a thing. I think we can all agree on that. And I can also say, without fear of contradiction, that every song, no matter how insipid, is about some thing. That’s a no-brainer.

With that in mind, what’s the best way to make an album based on the melodramatic story arc of what can be described as a spacebound horse opera? Simple – break out the thingmaker! What is that, a hot plate, right? Anybody out there on the internets old enough to remember thingmakers? Sure … you plug the thing in, heat it up, pour goop into a mold, cook the mold on the hot plate, then chew on the plastic junk you create or electrocute yourself by pouring the cooling reservoir water on the thingmaker. Great fun.

Anyway … what we do is not that dissimilar from playing with a thingmaker. Let’s say that our overactive idiotic imaginations are the “goop”, if you will. I suppose the “mold” is the usual genres we work within, mostly rock, some bogus country, some other weird stuff we can’t define. Then of course, there’s the thingmaker itself, our superannuated recording system – a Roland VS-2480 deck we bought fifteen years ago to replace my now shipwrecked Tascam DTRS DA-88 deck. And let’s face it, that sucker is not that far removed from a thingmaker.

We’ve started to use Cubase a bit over the last two years, just out of necessity, but we’re kind of locked into the thingmaker, despite the fact that it’s got a beastly 486 processor and a primitive proprietary “closed” operating system – and I do mean closed! There’s literally one way to get data out of that thing other than via analog audio outputs, and that’s through the coaxial digital outputs. There is no system that currently supports Roland’s (again) proprietary R-Bus data ports. The only other bus is SCSI, which of course is toast. The CD burner doesn’t work. The optical audio outs don’t appear to work either. Thingmaker.

Hey … that’s what Big Green is all about, right? Making something from nothing. With nothing. And for nothing. It’s what we do.