What are you going to do, play on garbage cans? That works for some songs, but how long can it possibly hold up? We need a more permanent solution to our problem. (Did I say that?)
Okay, so … this will come as no surprise to any long time followers of Big Green, but we make recordings using technology roughly equivalent to stone knives and bear skins, as the late Leonard Nimoy once put it. (My guess is that he had 1000 times the resources when he cut “Mr. Spock’s Songs from Outer Space,” but I digress.) We are plagued by technical glitches and the spotty performance of superannuated recording equipment, including a first generation digital workstation with no practical means of exporting song data or sound files (namely a Roland VS-2480 from the year 2001). It is choked with projects and ready to keel over.
Now, don’t get me wrong … we have invested in newer technology. Mitch picked up a new blender last week. Great for daiquiris (I hate daiquiris!) and it makes a nice whine on high. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) installed a new oscillator the other day. THAT cost a packet. Seems like when it comes around to music gear, the well runs dry. Not freaking fair, I say. But then, I’m liable to say anything by this point in the day, or perhaps just build sentences using words that Android suggests (Android:) the same time as the most important …
Yeah, see? This machine doesn’t know how to make sense. Give me a rudimentary non-verbal robot assistant any day. Still, with our grueling production schedule – 20 songs a year, sometimes 50, sometimes umpteen thousand – we need to come up with a way of plugging these suckers together, like widgets on an assembly line. I’m sure this is the type of problem all songwriting teams have encountered since the beginning of recorded music. The difference between them and us is, well, we’re not paid. But it’s the mission that matters! Huzzah!
What is our mission again? Oh, right. Finish the songs.
So what happened to the March podcast? Well, as you’ve guessed if you follow our various pointless postings in cyberspace, we have moved to a bi-monthly format, given the production demands of Ned Trek, particularly the musical episodes. We’re currently producing five or six songs for what will ultimately be the June episode, and we should be recording the April episode in a week or so. So … production is moving forward, but like Issa’s snail climbing Mount Fuji, it is proceeding “slowly … slowly.”
I guess I could blame our slowness on the cold, like everyone else, but hell, we were born into this frozen hellscape, raised in its nurturing embrace, and will likely finish out our days frozen to the ground from whence we rose. In other words, yeah, hell … it’s sure cold outside!
Well, right or wrong, I like to think that you’ve been wondering about a couple of things with regard to the band Big Green, denizens of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill and the alien intelligence behind this skimpy little blog. One is, well, when the hell are we going to release another album? I mean, it’s been nearly 18 months since we put out 
Tonight Matt and I will return to tracking the new songs we’ve been working on these long, frigid winter weeks. Mostly working on vocals now, though that effort often descends into strange hooting sounds and choruses of background harmonies that incorporate the words “banana boat” in some fashion. I had the temerity to attempt a guitar part the other day … an ELECTRIC guitar part … but thought better of it. Mostly confining myself to keys lately. House keys … and car keys. Now where did I leave that kazoo … ?
This time out we have, let’s see …. six new songs, maybe? I’ve lost count. It’s become this blur of recording parts onto different projects, a piano here, a horn section there, a beery-sounding horse voice on this one, some fucked-up swabbies on that one. That’s the only way I know how to work – just keep chipping away at the mammoth rock until it looks a hell of a lot more like Lincoln. That’s how Mount Rushmore was made. That and driving native people off the land (we don’t include that in our creative process).
Anyhow, we’re not just in business to cause people trouble. Matt and I are recording the next episode of Star Trek this very evening. We have been working on six or seven songs to accompany the episode, which will be included in the next installment of 
It’s not all fun and games, you understand. Matt and I have been hard at work on another crop of songs that will be featured in the next episode of Ned Trek, the Star Trek parody we include in our 
Then there’s sFshzenKlyrn, our occasional sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon. It seems sFshzenKlyrn has gotten back together with his old band, “The Pillars of Creation”. I didn’t actually find that out from him directly. They apparently did another photo shoot with NASA, using the Hubble Space Telescope. (I hear they’re doing a promo spread in Sky and Telescope). If you look closely, you can see how sFshzenKlyrn has changed over the past couple of years. A little older, a little wiser, a little cloudier, perhaps.