Had to get one last week-long sickness out of my system before the album release. Ahhh much better.

The pre-orders are all ready to go and will be in the mail this week! Thanks to everyone who's ordered one, it slightly counter-balances the release dread I feel.

Also: everything seems to be happening according to schedule. Crazy!

Welp, my Fake It cliche video project is officially a success. Oh we still don't have enough videos, no no. But this was created:

And by any measure it is now a success.

(But I would very much still like more entries. )

A long time ago I was interviewed for a book called the Indie Band Survival Guide by some nice fellas. It's published and available to buy now. I didn't know what to expect, but I got a copy in the mail the other day and am impressed.

It's real thorough and just the Internet stuff alone would be valuable to any musician trying to wrap their head around this web thing. Plus I run my big mouth off in it.

Well, there were some real good last-minute submissions for the Fake It cliche video project (thank you!). But I think we need more to make a truly cliche video so I'm going to extend the deadline out for another month (September 15th). And I'll try to dream up some way to force more people to submit with my mind powers.

It's been a big couple of days here at Brad Sucks HQ (aka my house). Besides picking up the Out of It CDs (which look SWEET), my songs have been in a condom ad:

Someone sent me this Barack Obama / Work Out Fine mashup which actually works pretty good:

http://www.nevilo.com/content/listen.html (third song down)

I don't like to get involved in American politics really but VOTE FOR OBAMA. VOTE. FOR. OBAMA. VOTEFOROBAMA.

And the hottest new iPhone/iPod Touch app called Simplify Media which allows you to stream your media (and your friends' media) to your iPhone/iPod Touch has my stuff all over its promotional materials:

I don't have an iPhone or iPod Touch but this makes me want one.

This is the stuff I can't really explain to people when they ask me how to promote themselves on the Internet. “Uh, be all slutty with your music and then weird shit will happen?” HOW WILL YOU MONETIZE IT BRAD. “I don't know?”

The CD Release Party for Out of It is booked and officially on September 5^th at Cafe Dekcuf in the city of Ottawa. Times and bands are still TBD, though I am practically guaranteed to be there and drinking heavily. But you are super invited and hey, you could pick up a copy of the CD three days before the release date! What a coincidence that is! This will also likely be the last show as a regular old three piece rock band. It's been super fun, but I can't resist putting a computer in the live show and electronifying things and making us prone to tech problems. Anyway, I hope to see you there.

Holy cow, there's only a week left until the submission deadline for “the most cliche video ever” video for Fake It. So far there are only TWO submissions! Set sail for failure!

I'm not sure if it's apathy or shyness or what. So… I guess we'll see how this last week goes. And maybe I'll try to find my rocker wig.

Well, that was a huge amount of stress about audio junk 99% of humans will never notice or care about. What a world.

The master for Out of It is as done as I can make it be and will be heading into manufacturing tomorrow. After this all I can do is regret. Party time!

Finished up all the Out of It mixes yesterday, moving on to mastering now. Actually I wouldn't say “finished” I'd say more “gave up and decided to move on with my life”. Here's hoping that's close enough.

Album artwork is submitted to the manufacturer, deposit placed on weary credit card. Found out Digipaks take 4-5 weeks instead of 2-3 as I originally thought, though luckily I scheduled out the timeline with a few weeks to spare.

Thanks to everyone who's been pre-ordering, it's nice to know this isn't all for nothing.

Here's a pre-release single off Out of It: Fake It [MP3]

Also: I'm looking for help making the most cliché music video ever for it. Help!

Barring act of god, the second Brad Sucks album -- Out of It -- will be released Monday September 8th, 2008. And then I will explode into dust. It's available for pre-ordering now. There's also a preview with clips from the songs you might want to check out. That's all on the Out of It album page.

I'm pretty nervous about this release. Rather than the long production time solidifying my choices and decisions I think it's made me even less secure than usual. I hope people like it -- OR ELSE I'M DOOMED.

Years after I probably should have released them, here are all the instrumentals from I Don't Know What I'm Doing: [60mb ZIP]

I've been getting a lot of requests lately (even though the full source is available) so I finally rendered them all out.

Update: Fixed the link (I'm a dummy).

Server outages bring out the doodler in me. Gig poster for the show on Friday:

(Here's the PDF [3mb].)

Did you know: 60% of the bands playing Friday start their names with "the".

Also I was asked to deface a t-shirt with my signature and lyrics from Dirtbag:

Spot the errors, I'm an idiot.

The data center the bradsucks server's in I guess had a big-ass explosion, which is why it's been offline for the past couple of days.

As they work out backup power I expect service will be spotty for a while, so if you want to read me complaining about it you can follow me on Twitter.

Also: if you emailed me in the past couple days, you may want to re-send.

Update: I guess their backup generator exploded resulting in another day of downtime. Man, what a shitty week for the bradernet.

Here's what my next CD will look like:

The entire design is in ANSI art by Fredrik Olsson.

Since I've been going geo-crazy lately, here are some data pictures (wheee!!):

subscriber locations

Red markers for anyone who subscribed and entered their location in the past couple of days.

album sale locations

Blue markers for a couple years of album sale data.

subscribers and album sale locations

Not shown: Antarctica -- not big fans of mine apparently.

If you want to stand up and be counted, you can sign up on the Live page.

Now, if you would like to, you can mark down your location on the Brad Sucks Live page so I can hassle you if I happen to be playing in your area (scroll down to the map).

It's something I've been wanting to build for a while -- a replacement/alternative for Eventful.com and it was pretty easy with Google Maps.

Eventful's nice and I'll continue to use it, but since it doesn't give the artists access to their subscriber's email addresses it's a lock-in bullshit proposition and I can't fully trust it.

I'm now also asking new mailing list subscribers to mark down their location and will be doing so for new BFF members as soon as I get around to it. It's all optional of course -- I know giving out locations creeps some people out, but think about how traveling to another city and nobody coming to my show creeps me out.

In preparation for the new album release I've re-vamped all the music/store sections on the site. I'll spare you the boring tech details but it was A LOT OF WORK. Here's some of the new stuff:

• Affected pages are music, I Don't Know What I'm Doing, I Don't Know What I'm Doing Remixed, Outside the Inbox and the store.
• I tried to roll buying and listening together in a non-obnoxious way. Anywhere you can listen to the albums you can also buy them and vice versa.
• Combined physical and digital buying instead of having two separate stores.
• Every album has a flash player on it now for quick listening.
• Variable prices for I Don't Know What I'm Doing. MP3s go for any price including. CDs have a $5 minimum.
• Paid downloads come off the ultra-reliable Amazon S3 servers and free downloads come off my clunky junkbox.
• Buying a CD gets you instant access to digital downloads of that album.
• OGG format is gone, bye bye, hardly anyone bought you!
• Lossless FLAC format is gone (but might come back?) It was more popular than OGG but not by tons and the bandwidth considerations make it rough to give away for free.

There are probably plenty of bugs (please let me know) but good lord am I glad that's over with. Did Prince have to write his own storefronts?

I get this sort of message all the time on MySpace:

Making Me Nervous won't play when I add it to my profile :( I just discovered you (thanks pandora. com!!!) and I want my friends to hear how awesome this song is. I see from your comments other people have had the same problem... can you fix it?

I searched all over and I can see lots of people successfully have added my songs to their pages and couldn't find any info on why it might be failing in some cases. Does anyone know what the issue is?

A while back I asked for some backing vocals to put on the title track of my next album. The mix is just about done and here are the folks whose vocals got included:

SexyJosh, Eric Peterson, Badcactus, Jeff Fal, Jonathan Coulton, Katherine Glover, Anti-M and Justin Bacon.

I'll be trying to track you down soon for your real name and/or address for the liner notes and album shipping but if you happen to see this, please drop me a line. Thanks to everyone for participating!