Tag Archives: Ned Trek

News

Which album comes next? we Would love to know.

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This just in from Big Green Central: nothing new to report. Check again next month. Hah! Just kidding … about the “next month” thing. Yes, we have nothing new to report, but that just means that havoc and mayhem are nothing new to us. And who doesn’t want to hear about havoc and mayhem, right? Nobody – that’s who.

What’s the controversy this month? So glad you asked. The thing is, we’re working on an album of new material, and it’s taking the usual forever for us. Of course, avid Big Green followers will know that we also have a packet of older songs that haven’t been gathered into an album. Those are the songs from Ned Trek, a feature on our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN, which has been on an extended hiatus for … what … three years? Jesus Christmas.

Tale of Two Records

We’ve been talking about releasing a Ned Trek album for probably as long as Ned Trek has been a thing. It would essentially be our second podcast album, the first being Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick from back in 2013 – in other words, another collection of songs written mostly for laughs, recorded in kind of a hurry under pressure of a deadline. We did, however, put a little more work into the Ned Trek songs, and our recording technology improved marginally through the course of the series … which is why we’re still thinking about doing a release.

But here’s the rub: which album comes first? The Ned Trek songs are mostly done, they just need some polishing … but there’s also about 80 of them! There’s probably less of the new material, maybe 50 songs, but the recordings are still under construction. If we’re spending time recording the latter, we have no time to polish and curate the former. See what I mean?

Kicking the Can

We could settle this the way we settle other important questions – kick the can down the road. Not the metaphor … I mean, write “Ned Trek” on one end of the can, “new songs” on the other side, then kick it down the road a set number of times and see which side it lands on. Isn’t that how everyone makes important decisions?

Hey, look … when we decide which comes first, you’ll be the first to know. In the meantime, you can listen to all three of our released albums for free on YouTube – just visit https://www.youtube.com/@biggreenband and hit play. AND subscribe! (While you’re there, check out the live tracks and some of the other junk we’ve posted.)

Luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

If you’re built upside-down, walk on the ceiling

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Get Music Here

Hmmm. That’s kind of catchy. How about this one? Right …. nothing on the applause meter. Okay, your turn. That’s just goddamned awesome. Now let me try one. Sucks. WHY WAS I BORN?

Oh, hi. Yes, we’re working. As one of those performing rock/pop groups that composes its own material, we, of course, need an editorial process. You just walked in on one of our markup meetings. Here’s how it works: we write out a lyric on a big sheet of white paper, then hang it up on the wall. Everyone gets a chance to cross words out and add words in. We decide with a roll of the dice who goes first. If the winner of the dice roll is Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I have to put a bucket on my head. Then Matt is invited to draw a face on the bucket with magic marker. Got all that?

Sausage making 101

I’ve written about our creative process many times on this blog. Think of my posts as helpful tips for songwriting, especially for those who aspire to be as commercially unsuccessful as we’ve been. Now, let me just say right here and now that not everyone is cut out to reach that lofty goal. It takes a certain special something to be this big of a flop. You either got it or you don’t, as the saying goes. And baby, we got it.

How do you write a massively non-commercial song that almost no one will be able to relate to, except perhaps your neighbor’s dog? Well, it’s not as hard as it sounds. You start with subject matter – something real niche-y, like the history of cardboard. We, for example, chose Rick Perry for one of our albums. Now that may seem like a crass attempt at capitalizing on someone else’s fame, drafting behind them as they sail along. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, it’s so far from the truth, it circled the globe and bumped into the truth from the other side.

The ballad of Cousin Rick

Look – if you’re going to be as unpopular as Big Green, you need to pick something to write about that’s even more unpopular. Rick Perry was low hanging fruit in that regard (see Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick). So Matt wrote a boatload of songs about him, and I wrote a handful. That’s our usual ratio. You could say I’m more careful when I write, but that would be a lie. I rely on found words, forced rhymes, and a bottle of tempera paint so that I can squeeze it all over my lyric sheet when I decide it’s garbage. It’s cathartic, trust me – just give it a try.

Does this look convincing enough?

Thing is, as a band we’re kind of built upside-down. I mean, Big Green started out with the weird songs. You know what I’m talking about – Sweet Treason, The Milkman Lives, Going To Andromeda, all that stuff, then those umpteen million Christmas songs. After that, it was International House weirdness, then Cowboy Scat, and finally, Ned Trek. Now we’ve got a boatload of songs about … wait for it …. interpersonal relationships. You know – the stuff that most bands start with before they go all weird and shit. We’re like freaking Benjamin Button, except that I hate that stupid movie.

Where next?

I don’t know, man …. we’ve got some recording to do. Lots of songs, damn it. There’s certainly at least one album’s worth of unreleased material, and maybe even a box set. That’s right – we could record all the songs, put them in a cardboard box, set the box out into the middle of the road, and hope our fans chance upon it. That’s called “marketing”, kids. Ask your mother.

Usual Rubbish

Even the colonel gets more mail than us

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Get Music Here

Did the mail come in yet? Oh, right. Looks like bills and solicitations. Again. Not a single handwritten missive in the entire pile. What was the name of that short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? “No One Writes to the Colonel”, or something like that? Well, somebody best tell the colonel that we’ve got him beat. When it comes to postal neglect, we’re number one, amigo.

Hey, you know what they say, right? Every complaint is really about something else. So if we’re complaining about our lack of fan (or hate) mail, what we’re REALLY complaining about is the heat or somebody’s sore toe or the price of sorghum in Madagascar. The sorry fact is, we wouldn’t know what to do with fan mail if it was dropped on us via helicopter. It’s been so long since we opened the mail bag, I doubt that any of our current readers even remember that that was a thing. Hey, newbies – that was a thing!

First tune, then play … the tune.

Part of what makes people cranky around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is the lack of creature comforts. The furniture in this joint is literally either made of bricks or fashioned crudely from surplus hammer handles. Looking to get comfy? Just stuff an old burlap sack full of grass and you’ve got yourself a pillow, dude. And when it gets hot here in upstate New York, well, you just open up a window. Or wave a fan or two. (You see? You knew I would steer it back around to fans again, didn’t you?)

That said, we have our tasks at hand. One of them is keeping Marvin (my personal robot assistant) from setting the mill on fire with his greasy cooking. The other is rehearsing for our next album, which we are doing remotely through one of those Zoom-for-music apps. That’s right – Matt’s on one end of the hammer mill, I’m on the other, and we jam over the internets. (You gotta problem with that, huh? HUH?) It’s mostly a process of Matt showing me a half dozen more tunes that he wrote since the last time we talked. Me? I’m chipping away at one, maybe two.

Subject matter experts

The thing with Big Green, you see, is that we get onto these jags. This is particularly true of my illustrious brother, Matthew. I’ve written before about his tendency to deeply explore a topic through the medium of pop song. Hell, he wrote about eighty songs on the subject of Christmas, probably a hundred about Ned Trek, at least 25 about Rick Perry. Now he’s on to human interrelationships, so it’s relatively unbroken ground. I mean, who can you think of who has written songs about human emotions? Hell, no one I know.

I don't think that's the colonel Garcia Marquez was talking about.

Anyway, I’ve got a notebook full of handwritten chord charts that say we’ve got an album on the way. Though, as with the Ned Trek material, it may actually be more than one collection. You musicians know what we’re grappling with. Do you make three mediocre albums, or one really, really, really bad album? Such a hard creative choice to make. We probably need a focus group to help us untie this knot. Where the hell is Frank Luntz when you need him? Having a sandwich? Okay …. don’t bother him, then.

Right, but when the hell …

Okay, so if we actually DID get fan mail, one of the first questions would probably be something like, WHAT THE HELL IS TAKING YOU SO LONG WITH THIS STUPID ALBUM? Well, dear fake reader, I know it’s been nine years since our last release. And I know that release was really lame. But bear in mind – our technology is from the stone age, carving music from living rock. We’ll keep chipping away at it until we’ve knocked off everything that doesn’t look like a new album.

Usual Rubbish

There’s no business like no business (I know)

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Get Music Here

I spy with my little eye …. a table! No, that’s a chair. No, that’s Mitch Macaphee’s experimental water bong. Yes, yes, finally …. that’s a table. It’s only the last object in the room, for crying out loud. Jesus. Do you know any OTHER games?

Here’s the problem with personal robot assistants: they don’t have deep cultural knowledge about what it’s like to be a human being. I mean, Marvin isn’t even programmed to play I Spy. What the hell was Mitch Macaphee thinking when he left that tidbit out of the poor bastard’s memory bank? Beats me how he can be expected to make his way through the world without knowing classic parlor games or learning how to square dance. (And no, Marvin doesn’t know how to doe – see – doe.)

Time on our hands

Now, the more industrious amongst you will no doubt surmise that, if we are playing parlor games, we have little better to do. As nasty and condescending as that claim obviously is, it’s also just as obviously true. Yes, damn it, aside from the odd game of chance, we’re just sitting on our hands here in the Cheney Hammer Mill, hoping for salvation to pour down us like milk onto cornflakes. And man, what I wouldn’t give for a nice bowl of cornflakes just about now! (Focus, damn it, focus!)

The trouble is, there just isn’t a lot of work out there for aging indie bands that have zero reputation, zero following, and zero sales potential. Employment opportunities abound in just about every industry save local-circuit live music, and what work exists is dominated by kids (as it should be – it’s their turn, after all). I hired anti-Lincoln to sit by the phone and wait for the offers to come rolling in, and thus far, no potato. In fact, he’s grown a beard waiting for that phone to ring. (It’s the beard he already had, of course, but …. the point is, he’s been sitting there a long time.)

Making lemons out of lemonade

What is there for a bunch of wash-outs to do? Make an album, of course. Hey, look – if we waited around for people to like us before we did anything useful, we would do nothing but wait around for people to… like … us …. Okay, that’s kind of circular. What I’m trying to say is, we’ve made albums before in the midst of unpopularity. Why not do it again?

We have the material. And I’m not talking about Big Green’s lost generation of Ned Trek songs – more than 80 recordings just begging to be finished and committed to some kind of collection. Sure, that album will happen one of these days, years, etc. I’m talking about a whole raft of new songs by Matt and a handful by yours truly. Brand new material, just plucked from the Big Green tree. We’re in preliminary rehearsals right now, via JamKazam, but I expect we’ll start tracking these pretty soon. I mean, what ELSE is there to do around this dump?

See what fun they're having?

Yeah, but how do you … you know …?

There’s very likely someone out there saying, but wait a minute – Big Green no longer has a corporate label. How are you going to distribute said project, eh? WHERE YA GONNA GET THE MONEY?

Right, well … first off, don’t yell! Second, we’ve opened up a Big Green site on Band Camp. It’s got our first two albums posted on it, more on the way. Third, I don’t know … see number one. I’ve got some parlor games to finish.

Usual Rubbish

The fate of Ned Trek: A Mystery

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Get Music Here

Where is it? Well, I can’t tell you. I was looking at it. I was looking right at it, and then it just wasn’t there! Stupid Internets!

Ever have one of those days when you keep losing track of things? Yeah, well I’m having one of those weeks. First I couldn’t find my shoes. Then my bag of marbles went missing. (That’s right – I lost my marbles.) Next it was my reading glasses. I couldn’t even look for those because my distance glasses were missing too, and I can’t see my reading glasses without my distance glasses. And then there was the bank deposit, but never mind – you can read about that in the papers.

These are all trifles when you come down to it. The big thing that’s missing is a web site. The Ned Trek web site, that is – it disappeared without a trace last week. Of course, so did last week. I mean, last week is gone for good, right? And sadly, it has taken Ned Trek with it.

Home for wayward clowns

Some of you may know Ned Trek as an occasional segment on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. We would gab a bit, maybe play a stupid song or two, then play an episode of Ned Trek and call it a night. Of course, the show was buried in a lot of even more inane nonsense, and we felt that people needed an easier path to the oasis that is Ned Trek. After all, some might only want to hear bad imitations of vaguely famous people and a seasoned naturalist imitating a sit-com horse from the nineteen sixties. (There ARE people like that, you know.)

With that in mind, we built a separate site for Ned Trek. (Here’s the cached version of the site on the Wayback Machine.) There we just posted the shows, gave a little explainer about the premise, etc., and put up some ridiculous pictures that drove people mad. Every other episode of Ned Trek was a musical, so we had a separate WordPress post category for those. It was a whole thing, and it got tens and tens of visitors until …. well, until earlier this year.

Who the hell would ever hack THIS masterpiece?

Things that go boom

You’ve heard the not-so-old saying, “boom goes the dynamite”, right? Well, this is a case of boom goes the web site. I went there one day, nothing better to do, and I got the white screen of death. I tried all the patented WordPress hacks to resurrect it, but it was no good. But I think the real issue is …. what the hell happened? Did we get hacked by Captured by Robots or someone?

Maybe it was Desilu, in retaliation for lifting their show concept. Or maybe it was Desilu in retaliation for murdering their show concept. Fortunately, the show files are still there, so we set up a temporary page until we can figure out what the hell is going on. (Did I hear Trump just now?) Then there was that one-armed man spotted leaving the scene. We’ve got to find him before Richards does! (Damn it. Now I’m mixing up my bad sixties television shows.)

Calling all engineers

Hey … if you’re an engineer (i.e. not someone who drives a train) and you know something about WordPress, do me a favor. Call up WordPress central and tell them that their bloody platform just dumped years worth of pointless activity … I mean, backbreaking work. We demand restitution!

Usual Rubbish

The worst of all possible universes

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2000 Years to Christmas

Just give me a minute, man. I’m changing the strings on my superannuated cheap-ass guitar. And yes, I’m using new strings. Don’t ask me where I got them. Lets’ just say that someone’s Christmas stocking is going to be a little light this year.

Oh, hi, blog visitors. It’s you’re old pal Joe. Yeah, I’ve made the momentous decision to restring my guitar because I don’t want to even attempt to deliver a Christmas concert on those rusty old cables I’ve been twanging on. And when I say twanging, I mean just what I say. Just give a listen to my recent nano concert on YouTube and you’ll get the picture. And the picture has sound, by the way.

Holiday Tide … I mean, Cheer

Of course, I’ve always been terrible at marketing things. (That’s precisely why I went into advertising, but I digress.) Given that it’s the holiday season, you’d think I’d be hawking our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, like a maniac. But the fact is, those songs are just the tip of the Christmas iceberg here in Big Green land. There’s plenty more where those came from. You’ll see!

Some of those songs are from Matt’s early period, when he recorded Christmas songs on his 4-track cassette deck and distributed them as low-rent, labor-intensive gifts. And then there are some songs from the Ned Trek period, which covers the second half of the 2010s and, technically, is still underway. Many songs in this latter group feature funny voices and bizarre ass lyrics. Oh, and many in the former group, as well.

All about the wormhole

I wish I could say that everyone is looking forward to the holiday season. Fact is, I squat with a bunch of sad sacks. Take Mitch Macaphee (please!). Our Mad Science advisor has spent the past three weeks laughing up his sleeve at Mark Zuckerberg. The reason for that is simple – Mitch has been conjuring wormholes into alternate universes since long before Zuck was a tike. The notion of someone creating a fake universe seems hilariously redundant to him.

Okay, so here’s my question: what if Mitch finds out you can make money at that Zuck scam? Will he borrow Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine and rip open the fabric of space/time? Will he then charge punters fifty bucks a head to step through and shake hands with purple protozoa-men from the fourth dimension? And last, but perhaps most importantly, will he share the proceeds with us? THAT’s what keeps ME up at night.

So, is this your answer to the Metaverse?

The reason for the seizin’

In any case, our Christmas season is starting out like all the rest of them have: fighting off the bailiffs. As you know, we’ve been squatting in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of two decades (or, perhaps, the worst part). The local authorities, bless their hearts, have been trying to evict us for most of that time. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without an eviction notice!

Thus far, we have let our nasty upstairs neighbors answer the door when the cops come calling. Frankly, I think they’ve forgotten we still live down here. And truth be told, I am in no mood to remind them.

Usual Rubbish

You heard it here first (and last).

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2000 Years to Christmas

Note: The following is a partial transcript from an interview with Big Green co-founder Joe Perry. The interviewer was conducted by Marvin (my personal robot assistant).

Part one: The first part

Marvin: In your early years, Big Green lived in not one, but TWO houses on the same street in Castleton-On-Hudson, NY. WTF were you thinking?

JP: Glad you asked me this question, Marvin. (Which is to say, I’m glad I asked your inventor, Mitch Macaphee, to program this question into your tiny brass skull.) The answer is, I haven’t a freaking clue. All I know is that the two houses were next door to one another. One of them had a claw-foot tub. The other had holes in the porch roof. Am I getting warmer?

Marvin: We all are getting warmer, due to climate change. Moving on. Big Green has released three studio albums thus far, the most recent being Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (2013). And though all three are of questionable value, Cowboy Scat is by far the sketchiest. And so, again, I say, WTF were you thinking?

JP: Thanks for that question, Marvin. That was clearly inserted into your memory banks just to piss me off. I admit that we tossed Cowboy Scat together in a hurry. It’s a collection of songs written and recorded for our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN.

We were posting the podcast every month, and we would rush to complete at least one or two songs for the show. At the end of a year or so, we decided to make an album out of them. So we patched about 21 of them together with tape and dropped them into the internet. Like everything else we’ve ever done, it’s been a drug on the market (that’s an antiquated term that means we haven’t sold many). But hell … we’re crappy capitalists. So what’s new?

If Big Green does it, it's a flop.

Part two: Looking ahead

Marvin: Okay, so does that mean your next album will be a bunch of songs from some random podcast?

JP: No, not some random podcast – OUR podcast segment known as Ned Trek, which we recorded from 2014 to 2018. Why are you so damned belligerent?

Marvin: That does not compute.

JP: Well, then COMPUTE HARDER.

Okay, so it’s very likely that at least one of our future projects will involve pulling together some of the more than 100 songs we wrote and recorded for Ned Trek. Though they are, indeed, podcast songs, we spent a bit more time on them than the Cowboy Scat numbers. Does that mean they’re better? Well ….. I’m a poor judge of that. The only thing I can practically guarantee is that our next album(s) will be a total commercial flop. That is OUR promise to YOU, Big Green listeners!

Okay, what else you got? I’ve got some time wasting to catch up on.

And lastly, the last … part

Marvin: Where did you leave that jar of paraffin chutney I bought? That stuff is damned expensive!

JP: What the …. ? Damn it, Mitch – stop dropping your questions into my interview! I don’t know where your fucking chutney is! It’s bloody inedible, for one thing. And for another thing …. fuck you!

Marvin: Anything you’d like to add that might interest our listeners?

JP: Sure. There’s an abandoned car just up the block. If you know anything about AMC Pacers, this might be just the vehicle for you. There are some raccoons living in it, but they’re pretty nice – I’m sure they wouldn’t mind sharing the car.

Usual Rubbish

Social media killed the radio star.

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2000 Years to Christmas

I spy with my little eye … a chair! Right, that’s the one. Now your turn. Well now … you can’t say chair, because I just did and there’s only one in the room. Pick something else, damn it!

Sheesh – that’s the trouble with playing parlor games here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. For one thing, there’s no parlor. Even worse, it seems no one in our entourage has ever played a game before. Not even Parcheesi! We are creatures of the road, my friends, driven by eternal wanderlust. Except, of course, for most of the last twenty-five years, during which we’ve been nailed in one spot.

Sure, I know – if we’ve got all this time on our hands, why the hell aren’t we recording? Why aren’t we putting out new episodes of THIS IS BIG GREEN or NED TREK? Well, that’s a good question. I would add that to our list of Freakishly Unanswerable Questions, but then that dude would call me a “dink” again, and then I couldn’t show my face in my fifth grade classroom should 1970 ever return.

Turn it down, the radio

They say video killed the radio star. Well, we never were radio stars, but we got killed none the less – not by video, though. No, sir – social media killed us. It wore us down to a nub. Just look at what it did to Marvin (my personal robot assistant)! His hands are mere claws. And the mansized tuber – he is now a helpless Facebook addict, scrolling and scrolling his life away. Pathetic!

Not like that, you idiot! Use the hockey stick.

As official spokesperson for Big Green, I do spend a little time on Facebook, Twitter, and … uh …. some other stuff. But I’m not living on that shit. And frankly, it’s the podcasts that took it out of us. At its peak, THIS IS BIG GREEN was posting 12 shows a year, half of them musicals, which meant five, six, sometimes eight new songs recorded and finished in time to post, along with an hour-long episode of Ned Trek. Holy mother – I get tired just THINKING about it.

Hammock time, geezers

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we’re retiring. For one thing, we can’t afford to. For another thing, we’ve barely even started. We’re like the Elias Sandoval of indie music. “We could have made this planet into a garden!” (It’s from classic Star Trek. Ask your mother. Or better yet, you’re moron father.)

Will we do more episodes of TIBG? Probably, but we are definitely on hiatus. Those buzzards circling over the mill, they’re just waiting on a friend. Then it’s off to the rookery. As for us, we should probably switch to backgammon. I think even Marvin could figure THAT out.

Usual Rubbish

Late to the party.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Here comes another one, hot off the presses. Just in time for the presidential election. Wait, what? When did that happen? Five months ago? I’ll be damned.

Oh, hey there. Just plying our usual trade here in Big Green land. (For those of you listening to an audio version of this blog, I don’t mean Greenland’s big sister; I mean the land of Big Green, the indie rock combo from space. Or from time. From somewhere not here and now, suffice to say.)

I’m guessing more than a few of you think we just while away the hours, conversing with the flowers here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where flowers grow up through the cracks in the shop floor. Well, I hate to disillusion any of our legions of followers, but we are far more industrious than that, my friends – far more. (Someone on the internet once claimed we were the laziest band in music. I almost fell out of my string hammock when I heard that one.)

Long-time listeners know that Big Green’s most recent material is mostly topical, ripped-from-the-headlines kind of stuff. And when I say “headlines”, I don’t mean today’s paper. More like last month’s paper … or last year’s. You see, the thing is, whatever the political situation may be at any given time, when things go septic, we start writing songs about it.

That’s the genesis of our second album, International House, which was basically our document on the Bush II administration. Then there was Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, which was made up of songs about the life and times of 2012 presidential candidate Rick Perry, our honorary cousin. Since then, we’ve written and recorded scores of songs for our podcast feature Ned Trek, many of which were about right-wing politicians in general and Trump in particular.

Huh. I guess it's time to release our song about that awesome blimp.

Okay, so you get the topical part. Now here’s the rest of the story – we’re always freaking late to the party. We released International House in the waning days of the Bush Administration – like, the last couple of months. And when did we release Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick? In 2013, a year after Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race! So in keeping with our long tradition of being far, far behind the curve, we are just now in the process of pulling together some songs from our Ned Trek collection, including a number that focus on Trump, months after the fucker left office. As Mr. Ned himself would say, “What the hell!”

In any case, we’ll keep you posted on any new releases from Big Green over the next year or so. In the meantime, we’re looking at posting International House on our YouTube channel, as that’s the only one of our albums that is not available on the YT. Look for the latest on our Twitter feed or our Facebook page. (There, Marvin – I’ve name checked all of our social media properties. Are you happy now?)

Usual Rubbish

Burning Verses.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Got the toaster plugged in? No, not THAT toaster. I mean the kind that pops up CDRs. Yes, it needs juice – what the hell century are you living in? Jesus Christ on toast. No, that WASN’T my breakfast order!

There are times, my friends, when it feels like I speak an entirely different language from my flopmates. And this is one of those times. Now that the nice weather has returned to upstate New York, you might think that we would venture forth from the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-house, and enjoy the five minutes of sunshine we get each year, whether we need it or not. Well, you would be wrong to think that. God, no – Big Green is still cooped up inside this dump, trying to decide how to slice and dice the mountain of makeshift recordings we’ve done over the past five years under the rubric of Ned Trek. Now, is that any way to spend your summer? (All five minutes of it?)

What’s the urgency? Well, I can’t answer that, except that there appears to be some line of code in Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s programming that requires him to do an exhaustive inventory of our work product every seven months. That’s all well and good, except that we are – as you likely know – the most disorganized band in the history of music, so our efforts to accommodate this half-crazed automaton fall more than a little bit short. Story of our lives, right, people? We just write ’em, play ’em, and record ’em. What happens after that is not our department. So as a consequence, we’ve got songs lying around the mill, knee-deep in parts, jumbled together in a hap-hazard fashion – an auditor’s nightmare, to put it succinctly. Every seven months, it makes smoke come out of Marvin’s brass head. (Note to audience: that’s NOT supposed to happen. Marvin is battery operated – no emissions, period.)

Slave driver!

Take Ned Trek (please!). We had something like 40 episodes of the show, posted as a feature on our long-running podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, with a “rebroadcast” on a separate feed as simply Ned Trek. Something like half of these shows were musicals, which means that they included five or more original songs – sometimes as many as 8 in a single episode. After five years of production, more or less, we have about 100 Ned Trek songs in total. Marvin wants us to funnel them all into disc-length (80 minute) albums, like we did with Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (another product of THIS IS BIG GREEN technology). That sets us up for a conundrum – do we (a) put all of the songs onto multiple discs, or (b) cherry pick the ones we like best (or hate least) and consolidate them on maybe two discs? Just a preliminary sort brings us to five or six discs total – that’s just nuts. Even Marvin can’t count THAT high.

Well, whatever we decide to do, the next thing we’ll need to do is try to find people who still listen to CDs. (We save that hardest shit for last.)