busybee fluffy rambles

Album: Misfits

Most of my albums are just like, random collections of Song Fight! stuff that was overdue for a release. This will be another one of those. Most of it will be sidefight things and random songs that I made for random purposes.

Known candidate tracks so far:

• Bipolar Bear
• Wish You Would
• The Road (a song that I wrote for an American Idol contest back in the day)
• Bitter Monday
• Boffo Yux Theme Song
• So Aggravating
• Strictly Speaking
• I Need A Vacation
• Nevada

Album: Recombinant

A lot of my music has gone through various evolutions since the album releases, especially based on how I perform them live. This is going to be a collection of songs reimagined in that context.

Known candidate tracks so far:

• Run Faster
• Baby Be Quiet
• tw3rp
• Birds of Our Own Wait Right Here¹
• Sorry to Inform You (Transitions style)
• Material Change (Transitions style)
• Strangers
• Feed
• You Believed It Yourself
• Sometimes It’s Hard to Keep Yourself Moving
• Husky Youth
• Meat Grinder

Album: Maximum coverage

I’ve done a lot of cover versions of songs for various silly things, and this will be a way of finally releasing those properly. That will also make it an expensive album to release because cover licensing costs a lot, but hopefully it’ll recoup the investment since some of the songs are things that’ll actually be searched on, maybe?

Some of it will be covers I’ve done of other peoples' Song Fight! music (which will be much cheaper/easier to license since generally friends are totally fine with just getting credit + streaming revenue splits) but I have fun covers of Lorde, Courtney Barnett, Beck, Magnetic Fields, Guided by Voices, and a few other things over the years. Some of these are just languishing over on my disused SoundCloud and a lot of them were just part of Song Fight! collections which have since disappeared from the Internet, for better or for worse.

I might also finally do a proper streaming release of my Undertale covers here (as opposed to the pay-what-you-want download-only not-properly-licensed “Tales of the Under” collection I put out some time ago). (And honestly, Heartache could use some major reorchestration now that I have a bit more familiarity with my cinematic scoring instruments.)

Known candidate tracks so far:

• Songs I have already recorded
  • Guided by Voices: Sing It Out
  • John Benjamin Band + Octothorpe: Yellow Lasers
  • Weird Al Yankovic: One More Minute
  • Beck: Salt in the Wound
  • Courtney Barnett: Avant Gardener
  • Magnetic Fields: I Don’t Believe You
  • Raised by Wolves: It’s a Shame My Binoculars Don’t Work at Night
  • Toby Fox: Heartache
  • Spookstep (Toby Fox “Spooktune” remix)
  • Paco del Stinko: Sometimes It’s Hard to Keep Yourself Moving
  • The Dickies: I’m Ok You’re Ok
  • The Beatles: Yes It Is
• Songs I have recorded before but need to rerecord for an actual release
  • Lorde: Royals
  • Britney Spears: Toxic
  • Electric Six: Danger! High Voltage!
  • Creeple Gems (Radiohead: Creep + Rebecca Sugar: We Are the Crystal Gems)
• Songs I have concepts of a cover for
  • Where Is My Primetime (The Pixies: Where Is My Mind + Janelle Monae: Primetime)
  • The Doors: Light My Fire
  • Ken’s Super Duper Band ‘n’ Stuff: Bad Dreams
  • Koji Kondo: Zelda 1 dungeon theme

New website

I’ve talked about this one a lot already, but I’m super tired of my band website just being my Bandcamp site. Originally I had set up a fully-fledged Movable Type site (back when I was using Movable Type for all my blogging) but maintaining that was a chore; then I switched to hand-authored microsites for whatever album I had most recently released, but keeping that up-to-date was a chore too.

The main problems with Bandcamp as a website are:

• No decent blogging functionality, and no RSS feeds
• No control over layout
• No way of organizing albums into “collections” or providing reasonable tag navigation, it’s just a big pile of music that everyone gets overwhelmed by

I have been building a new website using Publ which will solve these issues; Publ has very rich tag filtering support (as you may have seen on this very blog!), and of course it’s built around blogging first and foremost.

I’ve imported most of my data from Bandcamp (and wrote a little Bandcamp-to-Publ importer to make that easier, although it’s pretty piecemeal and hodgepodge) and am about halfway done with tagging my songs for the tag-filtering stuff. I just need to get around to building the actual HTML templates and flipping the site over.

This will also give me a place for a proper portfolio for my commercial clients. Also a proper place for a music blog (and I’ll be migrating a lot of my blog posts here over to it).

I’ll definitely be making my templates (and the janky importer) public as well.