Big news! I’m releasing my first ever vinyl record. It’s called Better Than Nothing and it’s a compilation of eleven of the more popular Brad Sucks songs I put out from 2003 to 2012. It’ll be released in September via Feedbands (membership not required) and is available for pre-order now here: http://bit.ly/2tfIDid

Info:

• The first ever, limited run Brad Sucks vinyl hand-pressed on a stunning orange to red gradient colored vinyl
• 11 of the most popular Brad Sucks songs in one convenient package
• The first 300 copies will be signed (by me)
• All songs received a full remaster
• Ships September 2017
• Tracklist:

  Side A Making Me Nervous Certain Death Guess Who’s a Mess Dropping Out of School Feel Free! Plastic Surgery! Fixing My Brain

  Side B Bad Sign There’s Something Wrong Borderline Thanks for the Add You’re Not Going Anywhere

And here's that pre-order link again: http://bit.ly/2tfIDid

Thank you!

I’ve been winding down the “real” work (aka hourly, billable, profitable, stable) in favor of doing music full time (aka unlimited hours, not billable, unprofitable & very unstable) which has been slower and harder than I thought. But I’ve been finishing up a few projects and songs and getting ready to crank out new Brad Sucks material all over the place. Here’s what I’ve been up to in the first bit of 2015: Bee & PuppyCat

I’ve written a few things for the awesome Bee & PuppyCat show that I’m excited about. The song I’m finishing this week is sung Felicia Day. I got to direct her via Skype which was a new and cool and frightening experience for me. It was pretty awesome to hear her singing words and a melody I wrote.

Natasha (B&P creator) posted this shot of me on the monitor in the studio while I was handsomely directing Felicia Day from my desk here in Canada:

It’s been really fun working on this, I’d love to do more. If anyone reading this runs like an uh, awesome, successful project that needs… bad music… you know, get in touch.

I Don’t Know What I’m Doing on Vinyl

A while back I asked on Facebook if anyone's interested in a vinyl pressing of I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, which was first manufactured as a real packaged CD in 2005. People seemed enthusiastic so I’ve been moving forward with it.

Honestly, I’m not a person who cares much about vinyl records. I own two: Micheal Jackson's Thriller and Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry and they’re hanging on my wall. I don’t own a turntable. I’ve got more nostalgia for cassette tapes and 128k MP3s downloaded from Audiogalaxy. Pressing (and shipping) vinyl is 'spensive and a big commitment and I’d like to avoid having hundreds of my own old-ass record in my basement, so I’m hesitant (aka scared).

But I have a bunch of vinyl quotes and I’ll figure out the next steps soon and probably re-ask that everyone’s suuuure they want my 100% digitally recorded album in an old, giant, fragile, heavy, noisy, expensive to manufacture and also expensive to ship format.

My friend Bruce’s album

Over the past year I’ve been helping my Texan chef friend Bruce Enloe out with bass playing and some recording and mixing on his new record Unseasonably Cool (soundcloud link). (Tracks 2, 3 and 7 are my faves.) I also played bass at the CD release show last week, which had this cool poster (designed by Mark Ettinger, drummer of the band):

Also there was an article in the big local city paper about Bruce and the record.

That’s it, thanks for reading. More stuff soon. "Always be social media-ing," they told us in Internet school. I update my Twitter and Facebook regularly.

Guess who's got a new album out? That's right, it's this guy. And probably other people. Click the cover art to check it out and possibly buy it:

It's called Guess Who's a Mess. Ten songs of kinda loud uptempo stuff. I think it's about dealing with people's expectations. It should be on iTunes soon.

The CD release party is tonight at Zaphod Beeblebrox in Ottawa. I'll be on CBC radio today at 3 to say some things with my mouth.

Thanks to everybody for their patience and help and support while I struggled through the production of this record and my other records and my whole life. Here's the latest song I posted to Youtube:

Creep me on Twitter if you require further updates.

The new album will be out November 2nd. There'll be a release party:

Here's the info on Facebook.

Welp, the album's off to mastering. What a needlessly awful process that was (spoiler: all my fault). Maybe one day I'll write up all the things I learned but for now my priority is to move on and keep some guilt-free momentum going. I'm excited to not take four years to make my next thing. So there are some shows booked. I'll have an official release date (spoiler: November 2nd) and all that jazz sometime soon. I'm working on new songs and I'm not sure what I'll do with them yet. Slow and steady wins the race.

Also: my buddy JB who runs Songfight! had a 40th birthday recently. A bunch of us did covers of his songs as a birthday surprise. I covered What We Need More of is Science (original is here.)

Hi everyone. I figured I'd jinx myself by saying the album's coming along nicely. A total of eight tracks will be ready for mixing by the end of next week. Right now I'm focusing on how great it will be when I don't have to think about it anymore. Mmmm, that'll be sooo excellent.

I don't know when it'll be out though. I've gotta start thinking about promotion. At this point I'm tempted to just throw the record online, call it a day and move on but everyone says that's unwise. We'll see.

What are you guys working on?

I'm trying out a contest on 99designs.com for Guess Who's a Mess's album art. If you're a designer, feel free to have at it. If you're not, you can still enjoy these goofy photos of me as a kid I included in the design brief:

That was a Michael Jackson Thriller FM transmitter microphone. So you could sing through your stereo. Also an all-black Thriller jacket. The cabbage patch doll was not mine. I had sparkly socks too but I'm not wearing them here.

Atari 2600 and a Texas Instruments 99/4a, my first (borrowed) computer. All I did was type Basic programs into it. I had no cartridges so I'd lose whatever I had typed in when I turned it off.

Math tells me I'm eight years old here. Update: ken and my mom disagree. I was seven and the eighth candle was "one to grow on". Embarrassing.

Sulking at my sister's birthday party (reason: too much attention for her, not enough attention for me.)

A few years later. Lanpar IBM PC, my first official computer. It had a 20 meg hard drive and ran at 4mhz. Later I found out it had a "turbo" mode which doubled the speed to 8mhz.

Also visible: terrible, boxy first mouse, Gravis Joystick, collection of Sierra games and my entire California Raisins collection.

Update: Contest's over. Unfortunately it was not a success. There were lots of entries but nothing I could actually see using so I'm still on the hunt. Thanks to everyone who entered, sorry I'm so picky.

2011 was kinda bananas. I think the original plan was to kick ass and make a lot of progress on this dusty old music career of mine but that hasn't really happened so much. People have been asking me about my record and I really appreciate that you guys are looking forward to it despite all the radio silence from me. Honestly I'm still struggling with it, getting the songs how I want them while not going all Chinese Democracy. It's a tough balance.

But it's moving forward now and I'm optimistic I'll be able to wrap it up soon. Thanks for your patience and support. Have a sweet 2012.

Hey everybody. I accidentally did a show a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty informal. A nice person came all the way from Hungary to see it which was a little nerve-wracking. It went fine though, thank you for coming (if you did). I've been just plain working on my album. Growing a beard. Trying to drink sensibly. Also:  playing some video games here and there. Arkham City comes out next week. I might be too busy to play it, how sad is that. Seriously how sad for me are you right now tell me.

I keep thinking of writing about recording the album because they say you should keep your 'online presence' going but that's so fucking boring. Does anyone really want to read that? "I've been re-recording all the basslines." Oh kick ass, Brad. "I'm enjoying playing bass more." Awesome, awesome! I'd rather talk about my awesome dog Rufus:

Just look at that fuckin' guy. What a dude.

But I'm getting restless, which I think is a nice sign. I really want the album to be done so I can move on. I have all these fantasies about how creative I'm going to be when this is over and I'm not working on the same batch of songs anymore. How I shouldn't wait so long between albums anymore. That all my fussing is really only mildly improving the songs. I should be more spontaneous! I should be more like Prince!

But I also want to obsess over every part of it forever until the end of time. I know that my restlessness will overcome my perfectionism soon though and that, my friends, is how babies are born.

[My new nephew Crue (as in Motley).]

You don't get asked to be made an uncle, someone just makes you one.

September demo: Feel Free! Plastic Surgery! [5 MB]

It'll be track #4 on Guess Who's a Mess.

Tomorrow I'm going to be putting all the demo instrumentals and vocals online on that page so anyone can mess with them before I'm done. Stay tuned, etc.

July demo: Waste of TV [5 MB]

This is track #7 on the little album I've been slowly putting demos up for. Also as a bonus experiment, there's an album page and a tentative title for it now: Guess Who's a Mess.

I'm not sure what else to do with that page, anyone have any ideas?

The obvious one everyone suggests to me is funding/donations or pre-orders. I'm iffy on that. Mostly I don't want to owe anyone anything creatively (aka I may flake out). And the money I'd get isn't going to make or break the production so it feels pointless.

So what's left? Attention and collaboration/contributions?

Here's what my next CD will look like:

The entire design is in ANSI art by Fredrik Olsson.

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!

Crunch time. Here's what I've been up to:

Mixing the album. Did a mixing meeting with Rob and am back on track with the album. Actually excited about getting it out, which is strange for me. It's really taking an embarrassing amount of time. You would think this would result in exponential improvements and new material and awesomeness and you would be wrong. Just a lot of coordination and logistic delays.

I've been reading a lot about the album being dead and all I can think is: THANK GOD. I'm not sure I ever want to do this again. But what to do instead?

Getting ready for Harvard + the show in Cambridge. Looks like there'll be a Metafilter meet before and during (and after?) the show on the 12th. I think I've got my show pretty much down, new Firewire card = improved stability, blah nerd blah.

The big thing lately has been packing all my gear to get down there. Do you know what a custom guitar flight case costs? I will tell you: around $500. That's five HUNDRED dollars. It would be cheaper for me to fly to Boston, buy a $250 guitar and throw it in the garbage on my way home. I honestly haven't ruled that out but for now I've ordered an SKB Freedom case which apparently "smells" (read the reviews) but works good.

If my guitar is shattered on the way there, I'll buy a cheap one for the shows and give it to a homeless person before I leave.

Getting the website ready for the new album. I've been re-jiggering all my store stuff for the new album and beyond and that should go live in the next week I hope. Due to lack of sales I've decided to drop the OGG format and limit it to MP3 and FLAC. Simpler for everyone. OGG fans can always get the FLAC and convert it as it's lossless after all. I want to support open formats but I'd rather it not feel like a waste of time, energy and resources.

The double CD ccMixter Brad Sucks remix compilation is finally out! Links: CD 1, CD 2.

ccMixter is a website where artists can upload source files under Creative Commons licenses so that other artists can remix them free of legal worries. Their community has been very kind to me.

Like everything I seem to do, this compilation took way too long to put together but it has somehow struggled its way into daylight.

Thanks of course to all the talented remixers, Magnatune, ccMixter, Victor Stone in particular for his help and Katie Sekelsky for the awesome album art.

This isn't the first remix album for I Don't Know What I'm Doing, but it'll be the last I work on. Other I Don't Know What I'm Doing remix albums that I know of:

• I Don't Know What I'm Doing Remixed
• I Don't Know What I'm Doing Either (MC Jack in the Box vs. Brad Sucks)

I know there are a few other full-album remix projects out there in various states of completion so let me know if I'm missing anything.