So I spent February writing and recording an album from scratch. It’s done and available for listening downloading:

Go check out Inchoatery!

I’ve also written up a bit about the challenges of pretending to be a whole rock band as a solo musician, in a blog post over on the music site titled The Lonely Iterator.

Over on music.joshmillard.com, I’ve just posted ten demo recordings I made yesterday for the album I’m writing and recording this month.

Check ‘em out!

I’ve just launched a long-overdue new site dedicated specifically to archiving and blogging about my musical output:

Josh Millard, Musician

I’ve collected several hundred songs and recordings of same from the last fifteen years or so in one place, organized for easy browsing and quick listening via embedded mp3 players. It’s a work in process as I continue to do writeups about individual songs and collections, and I’ll be making music-oriented blog entries over there as well.

Metafilter turns ten years old today. There’s no site on the web I love more, and I couldn’t imagine a better place to work.

I celebrate by recycling, so here’s two (among several) songs I’ve written about the place over the years:

Happy [8th] Birthday, Metafilter, from a couple years back, and
Metafilter’s Down, from our long dark downtime of the soul earlier this year.

I played a not-very-thoroughly-rehearsed show with my friend Brian Rozendal last night, at the Ash Street Saloon downtown. It was a good time. And there was a drunken, harmless heckler keeping the crowd amused between songs, so, bonus.

Here’s the audio from the show, in nine convenient mp3s.

Warning: camcorder mic + lots of room noise = far from sterling recordings. But if you feel like soldiering through, you can hear me play ukulele, mandolin, banjo, and two different harmonicas in the course of the set. And that poor drunk guy makes a couple cameos as well.

I’ve crossed a round-number threshold, and got a ukulele to help me through it. So I wrote a song on the uke, and made a cheesy webcam recording of it, and stuck it on youtube, and embedded that in this blog post, and then described the whole thing. Ta da!

Because sometimes you need more happy.

One of the things that I sometimes think I don’t do enough of with my blog is make tiny posts just to say things like, you know:

Check out this Beatles cover because it has a really great fucking keytar solo.

I didn’t record enough music last year, and I hope to do better this year.  But I did do some recording, and I’ve decided to just round it all up right here.  Maybe this should be a yearly thing?

• Fidelity, a Regina Spektor cover.
• Take On Me, a ridiculous and terrible a capella cover.
• Bad First Song, a Garageband + internal macbook mic test.
• True Love Will Find You In the End, a Daniel Johnston cover.
• Young Devin Funck, to lyrics by Astro Zombie.
• Mansion on the Hill v4, my contribution to an ad hoc collaborative songwriting effort.
• The Dangers of Buying an Older House, a moody instrumental composition — unusual for me.
• Stay the Fuck in Line, an election song.
• Wheel in the Sky, a bluegrass/oldtimey cover of the Journey song.
• I’ll Stab You, a parodic take on a Stevie Wonder song.  Words by robocop is bleeding.
• Next Year’s Gotta Be Better Than This One, a NYE rocker lament.

Eleven songs isn’t terible, but it isn’t much.  More music this year.  Covers are fun, but I need to get back to focusing on original music, too; only four of those are from-scratch originals.

I’m a better musician and songwriter than I was when I was 18, but the songs sure came easier back then.

A loud song for optimistic pessimists:

Next Year’s Gotta Be Better Than This One

Sometimes this creativity thing just happens.  I like it when it does, and I should try to make it happen more often in 2009.