Well, the polyester heart is still beating, even though vital signs have been flickering at best over the last while.  We'll be at the Cameron House in August.  I'll talk about that a little more in another post.  

So what's been going on?  Well, other than a last minute show we played with Peirson Ross in June, not much as far as public places are concerned.  By the way, thanks Peirson for having us.   The Painted Lady is actually a pretty cool place to play.  I'd like to play there again – though it is a bit close to the Press Club, and I don't want the Hickey Bros thinking we're cheating on them.

So really, what's been going on?  Well, I've spent much of my creative energy over the last 5 months or so writing a folk-rock opera.  Snicker away.  And yes, as it turns out, I'm thinking it might be a lame idea after all.  We'll see if it ever sees the light of day.  As luck would have it for any of you that fear the second coming of Queensryche, this egg will probably never hatch.

Since I'm letting go of this, I'll at least indulge by saying I had what I thought was a pretty cool concept for a musical play.  The story had all the stuff you'd want; drunk protagonist plans ill-fated heist and ultimately meets death by car crash in a stirring scene documenting his last 20 seconds of life before drowing.  There was other stuff in there too.  The obligatory love story...the obligatory villain...the obligatory starry eyed idealism foiled by the tragic truths of the cruel world.  Yep, all good stuff.  Well, maybe not.

The good news is that the process spawned a bunch of tunes.  Some of them decent, I think.  I'm actually kind of partial to the one that documents the death scene.  It's called “The Last 20 Seconds”.  There's another one that captures our heros in the hours leading up to the unfortunate crescendo of the whole thing.  I recorded a demo of it (badly) on a rain day here in my basement.  It's currently on my myspace page, and it's called In My Back Pocket