I went to Montreal this weekend to see Apples in Stereo and despite the heat and the dodgy sound, it was an awesome show. Their energy and happy songs had me smiling through the whole set. I was introduced to the Apples maybe a year ago by a friend who said their lyrics reminded her of mine. She sent me their album Tone Soul Evolution and I was totally blown away by it and have been kind of obsessed with it ever since.

So after the show I was a bit tongue-tied when I got to meet Robert Schneider, their vocalist, guitarist and main songwriter. He was very friendly and funny and gave me two manly one-armed hugs when I tried to express what an impact that album had on me and pretty much came up retardedly short. I think I excused myself only a moment or two away from asking "so where do you get your ideas from?" so it wasn't a total disaster.

Anyhow, I had a great time. If you get a chance, you should check them out. Their remaining tour dates are here.

itv.com reports on a poll on the top 20 guitar riffs. And here they is:

1. Sweet Child O' Mine - Guns N' Roses
2. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
3. Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin
4. Smoke On The Water - Deep Purple
5. Enter Sandman - Metallica
6. Layla - Derek & The Dominoes/Eric Clapton
7. Master Of Puppets - Metallica
8. Back In Black - AC/DC
9. Voodoo Child (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix
10. Paranoid - Black Sabbath
11. Crazy Train - Ozzy Osbourne
12. All Right Now - Free
13. Plug In Baby - Muse
14. Black Dog - Led Zeppelin
15. Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love - Van Halen
16. Walk This Way - Aerosmith with Run DMC
17. Sunshine Of Your Love - Cream
18. No-One Knows - Queens Of The Stone Age
19. Paradise City - Guns N' Roses
20. Killing In The Name - Rage Against The Machine

I revised this humble weblog a bunch. Things should hopefully be a little easier to navigate and a little tiny bit prettier. There are probably broken and unfinished things kicking around, feel free to point them out, I'll get to them as soon as I can. I gave up on CSS for layout because it's a total pain in the ass. I couldn't get it to do what I wanted in any of the browsers despite the finest minds in the world working 24 hours non-stop on my dumb border problems, so I'm not buying that it's Internet Explorer's fault.

Anyhow, back to trying to be a musician again.

I bought the Cubase SX Complete PDF and it's real nice. All hyperlinked and searchable and indexed and good. I recommend it highly.

Looks like me and my bad CD image made it onto NPR's All Songs Considered. Thanks to Scott for urging people to request me and thanks to any of you fine folks who actually wrote in.

I own the book "Cubase SX Complete" and it's fantastic. You can now buy the PDF of it for $11 US right here. I had been anxiously awaiting "Cubase SX2 Complete" for months and the page says "For a variety of reasons we have decided not to publish this edition." That is a huge drag because the first book was the best Cubase resource I had found on the net or otherwise.

I've been working on a very slight redesign and thorough rewrite of this website. I pretty much want to kick whoever invented CSS in the nuts.

What's weird is seeing a Google ad show up when you search for "brad sucks" on Google.

I'm doing some blogging over at Sellout Central now, which is a new weblog exclusively covering music industry news and opinion. If you're interested in the crazy junk going on in the music industry these days, you might want to check it out and mouth off in the comments. I'm hoping it'll be a more balanced and optimistic look at the changing music business than most of the stuff I read on the web.

I'm not sure how the balance will go between this blog and that one, obviously there's some overlap in content, but we'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll talk about the issues over there but I'll write melodramatic poetry about them over here from now on. "O music industry, why hast thou forsaken me..."

Over at the J-Walk blog, John postulates about the Google Suck Index:

Way back in December, 2002, I invented something I call the Google Suck Index.

This index consists of the number of pages returned for a search query that contains the phrase "xxxx sucks."

The highest ranking results were "Everything Sucks" at 20,000 and "Bush Sucks" at 15,800.

"Brad Sucks" clocks in at 22,000. OWNNNNNNZED.

Scott (who once again is just a plum nice guy) noticed this on NPR's All Songs Considered:

You Play DJ: Got a favorite band nobody's heard of - something you'd love people to know about? Send us an email (allsongs@npr.org) with your favorite unknown artist. Include a CD and song title and a bit about why you love them. We'll compile the best submissions and post them on the Web site.

And Scott says this:

It'd be pretty cool to get some Magnatune artists on this list. I call upon the fearsome distributed power of the Web to push Brad and Williamson into the front ranks. Excelsior!

Thanks for the plug, Scott. I would graciously accept any promoting anyone would like to do on my behalf. I am 100% not too proud to accept it. Feel free to direct link to any of my songs in your emails to NPR as well if you think it'll help your case.

The death of the album is an article by Ken Napzok of Tiny Mix Tapes about how the album is dying. I actually started out assuming that the album was dead with the ol' Brad Sucks here. I mean if I'm posting all my songs as I do them, why bother putting everything into an album? But then I decided to jam an album together and people were all excited about it and had a different impression of me altogether. I was a dude with some songs before and then I was a guy with an album. Also people gave me money for it, which is A-OK.

I'm not really one for music theory, but here's an interesting discussion on Ask Metafilter about key. Particularly good is the post by chrismear that's very in-depth and also has audio examples. I still don't understand key but now I'm pretty sure I thoroughly don't understand it.

Saw The Stills and The Miniatures Saturday night. It was an okay show I guess. The Miniatures had great energy and The Stills were interesting, but nothing really rocked me too much. I found it funny when The Stills' frontman ranted against the American government and said Ottawa was a very cool country's capital, all the while the bassist was violating our no-smoking bylaws.

Webjay is one of those ideas I've been sitting around hoping would happen. It's a tool that helps you listen to and publish web playlists. Here's a Wired article that describes it and gives some back-story. It seems a bit cluttered and difficult to navigate right now, but I think the potential is enormous.

Now I just have to get off my ass and cram my music in there. Crammity cram.

I had been hearing about them for a few days here and there but Scott Andrew's endorsement finally got me to download the Beatallica albums. They're pretty hilarious and fun and well worth checking out. They do a fantastic job of the Metallica/Beatles crossover thing. Great free Internet stuff.

How I stopped buying CDs and started loving music, a pretty down to earth weblog entry about Jeffrey Veen's experiences with downloading music. Here is the end:

Could it be possible that we may not need the labels? That maybe music fans and artists can find their own ways of connecting with each other? And maybe, instead of a few hundred millionaires, we might have thousands and thousands of musicians making a decent living? Could that be possible?

There are a lot of really interesting replies as well, if you're into that sort of thing.

I tried to start a Songfight! suicide pact tonight based on the sales of ex-American Idol William Hung's debut CD Inspiration (ie. too many sales we all die) but nobody was man enough.

1 person recommended So You've Ruined Your Life instead of Inspiration (includes Bonus DVD)

Today I got to wondering what was up with Al Jourgensen, the man behind many of my favorite bands as a teenager such as Ministry, the Revolting Cocks and Lard. I did a search for some interviews and found some fun and interesting stuff. Like this email interview where he replies to everything in all in caps. Some clips:

R: You and Paul (Barker) recorded almost all of the music on the new album without the help of many other guest musicians. Was this a conscious effort, to strip down the music and not muddy it with guest musicians, or was it just something that happened?

A: WE JUST DIDN'T WANT TO SHARE OUR DELI TRAY WITH ANYONE ELSE THIS TIME. DAMN, THOSE BBQ CHICKEN WINGS ARE TASTY.

R: What is the most important thing you've learned by working in the music industry?

A: DON'T DRINK WINE WITHOUT A CORK!!!!!!!!!

R: In what ways would you say Ministry has grown and changed since its beginning?

A: WE STARTED OUT BOYS, AND BECAME MARINES

There's a more serious one over on KNAC.com:

KNAC.COM: Do you think rock and roll is even dangerous anymore? Can it be? JOURGENSEN: I see people getting sick of it. Like I said, I was proud to be an American that day in San Fransisco. In Chicago and places like that where people stick up for themselves, I see a relevant punk rock movement coming on.

KNAC.COM: A real one? JOURGENSEN: Yeah, I?m talking about a movement that will utilize the Internet, and instead of garage bands, you will have Internet bands. When people realize that the Internet is not just a home shopping club, I think there will be a lot more people doing things for themselves.

I've been kinda out of the loop for a while because the Internet has been filled with lies, so here is some possibly totally old news: Metafilter had the best discussion on the anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide, in that it seems to cover every possible reaction pretty neatly. What's interesting to me is how most people who are vocal one way or another about the subject tend to be reacting more to his style and image more than the actual music.

Bob Dylan appears in a television commercial for Victoria's Secret. Various people are shocked and upset about this, feeling he has betrayed his public image. I read an interview with Dylan in a book called Songwriters on Songwriting a month or two ago and he was a total weirdo space cadet and I don't seem to be able to take anything he does seriously.

Prince signs with Sony. Selling out twice is the new selling out once.

Paul Anka swearing at his band. "Don't make a fucking maniac out of me!" is my new slogan and if I ever have a band, I will say it to them often.