Status update: I’m still doing music full time in 2016! I’ve got some things I’m excited for you to hear/see but they ain’t ready yet. So here’s other stuff:

I’ve got a live show coming up on April 16. Details over on Facebook. If you’re near the place where it’s happening on the date and at the time that it happens, you should come inside the place and see a music show. 

I was on a couple podcasts recently if you wanna hear me talk with my dumb mouth. One of ‘em’s short and serious and the other’s long and wacky:

The Passionative Podcast [iTunes]

In this episode, I interviewed Brad Sucks, the OG of crowdfunding your album and one of the first people to give away his music for free online. Brad and I talk about how to trust yourself and your art, stop worrying about things being perfect and focusing on building a fan base instead.

The Crapshoot [iTunes]

We’re thrilled to welcome Brad back to the show for a deep dive on Stardew Valley. On the way, we also touch on Moshow the Cat Rapper, Stovokor, Axl Rose, Bee and Puppycat, Kickstarter entitlement syndrome, Undertale disruption, Josh’s impending spin-off podcast Quarter Quorner, John Campbell, blind-fire delivering psychology services, a series of tweets that Jesse never got over, veterinary rackets, Andre Agassi, getting involved in an ass tattoo, signatures versus Signature signatures, living in the formative and evolutionary age of video games, and what kind of murderer you would be.

Also I have a note here reminding myself that I’m way, way overdue on sending out my mailing list, so sign up for that if you want to get in on that.

I think that’s all for now. Thanks for reading. I enjoyed 10 Cloverfield Lane. 

When I was in Portland a few weeks ago for XOXO I sat down with Josh Millard and Jesse Holden and a bunch of delicious beers and recorded this podcast interview.

Hey, just found out UFC women's champ Ronda Rousey likes my song:

Crazy! Also in other MMA-related news some Brad Sucks songs will be on the Co Main Event Podcast next week, which is my favorite podcast.

Well, I made it to episode 30 of Sellout Central. That's 30 weeks, 210 days. And I think I'm going to take a little break. It's been fun but a surprising amount of work to do -- the podcast script I wrote made assembling the episodes easy, but the real work of course was in tracking down new music. Which is great on one hand as it forced me to go out and find stuff I liked, but on the other hand it's exhausting. I got shit to do.

It was also an experiment to see what would happen if I kept at a regular podcast week after week so it was reliable. 30 weeks later, it's clear: the audience peaked early on and has slowly declined, so I'm not feeling it's the best use of my time. But I'll let the episodes sit around for a while and maybe I'll get back to it after a while.

I tried doing a podcast a few years ago and failed. I just wanted to share some music I was into but compiling the podcasts was time-consuming enough that it got pushed aside almost immediately. So I've started another podcast on Sellout Central which I'm planning to put out every Monday.

This time though I've spent some of my vacation time figuring out how to automate most of the process.

The nerdy details:

Using sox, flite, lame and a bash script, all I have to do is export a playlist from Foobar2000 and run a script. Sox crossfades the songs and compiles them into one big WAV file, flite generates the speech synthesis for the intros and outros and then lame compresses them into an MP3 with appropriate ID3 tags. So basically, I export the WAVs and then run:

./podcastit.sh [episode #] [# of songs]

And get back a shiny podcastable MP3. Whether anyone will like the songs I like is a whole different matter.

If you want the script, let me know and I can package it up.

Update: and here is the script all packaged up.