Tonight's my first show since the crappy Denver one in November and my first since breaking up the previous live band. As I've mentioned, the last band setup was super fun and a great learning experience, but I got a lot of comments/complaints that it didn't sound much like my albums (it was a harder rock sound) and I wasn't sure what to do about that.

After taking a break, I decided to simplify and hooked up with a local guitar wizard named Ben and I've been pretty happy with the sound in rehearsals. It's the laptop doing bass/drums/noise, Ben on acoustic/electric guitar and background vocals and myself on electric guitar and vocals.

I've been pretty bummed out about a lot of the sound and technical issues at the last batch of shows I did, so I'm hopeful doing a show in my little hometown will be a nice baby step. We will see!

Update: It all went well technically, was a bit awkward. I'm trying not to be too demoralized.

Bunch of things coming up:

• February 11th - Harvard University [Cambridge, MA] - Q&A and a few songs.
• February 12th - The Middle East [Cambridge, MA] - Full show
• March 7th - Canadian Music Week [Toronto, ON] - Speaking.

Hope to see you there.

Just an FYI: through some mix-up which was not at all my fault, the Brad Sucks gig on December 17th has been cancelled. Total drag.

We've also got a Halloween show coming up on the 29th where I am totally dressing up.

Any show that's preceded by me locking my keys in my car (while it's running, even) is dead to me. The locksmith showed up in about ten minutes though so that was all right. $53 later and half an hour later I made it there in time for sound check. Other than that, we had a pretty good show last night, though I was in a bad mood about my dumbness.

Hey there's a Brad Sucks show tonight at the Rainbow starting at 9:30. Jacquie in the Kitchen are opening for us and they're totally sweet.

I put up ceiling drywall in our rehearsal space (aka my parents' garage) all weekend so I think I might just lie down on the floor real still with for the whole show. Requests will be honored for any massage therapists or acupuncturists in the audience.

I mused about concerts in Second Life and it looks like my arch-nemesis Jonathan Coulton beat me to it. He's going to be playing on the 14th at 8pm EST at Menorca (I think). I'm gonna try and be there.

I went out there to take a few snaps of the venue as my alter-ego "Brad Susenko":

Looks pretty swanky. I've always wanted to play in half a dome.

Here's the view from the stage.

Various clickable posters around. Here's one of a Creative Commons license.

And here's one of the Creative Commons front page.

Very neat. I still need a better computer or video card to run this thing on, but I'll be interested to see how well the audio works.

Things I learned from the show last night:

• Jägermeister tastes like cough medicine and I don't understand why people drink it
• You can't bribe an audience to dance with Canadian Tire money for any respectable length of time

Anyway it was an all right show for a Monday night. Thanks to Dave Norris, De'Mos and Jacquie in the Kitchen for keeping it real and also thanks to everyone who came out to have confusing yelly bar conversations with me. Those are the conversations I treasure the most.

Hey, we're at Zaphod Beeblebrox's tomorrow night. Dave Norris, De'Mos and Jacquie in the Kitchen are playing and then we're on at 10:30pm. Hopefully no amps will be destroyed.

Our next gig is at The Rainbow on Wednesday, August 30th. Sojourn are opening for us. Feel like plastering Ottawa in posters this weekend?

Here's a PDF for easy printing. And here's one without the falling guy in case you need it.

Now this is more my style -- I've been reading about it for a while, but Wired has a good musicians-in-Second Life overview called Second Life Rocks (Literally).

For those who don't know, Second Life is an online virtual world. Kind of a giant 3D chat room. I've popped in there a couple of times and it was sort of chaotic, but the music angle is interesting and appeals to the lazy person in me.

Suzanne Vega has already gigged in Second Life and Duran Duran will be performing on their own island -- which had better be called Duran Duranistan.

Even the front page of secondlife.com has this on it:

I think I may need to call a Brad Sucks Live meeting to suggest that our live show could benefit from an increased heavily armed robot and minotaur presence. 

According to the article there are lots of gigs going on all the time, I guess I'll try to check one out. Any recommendations?

Riverpalooza was fun. The stage was ten feet high and the wobbliest I've ever been on. I'm basically as tired as can be.

We'll be playing Riverpalooza next Saturday (August 12th). I'm not sure what time we'll actually be going on yet so you'll just have to chill and white water raft or something until the magic happens.

Our show at Pier 21 went well, the sound was probably the best we've had thanks to our friend and sound tech Jamie. Words such as "tight" and "hardly drunk" were used to describe us. If only there had been more witnesses. We've got another show this Saturday night at Marshy's in Nepean (117 Centrepoint Drive), going on around 10:15-10:30. It's a charity thing for "Team Diabetes" so I'll try not to eat ice cream on the stage as I'm fond of doing.

Looks like we're playing Pier 21 this Tuesday (July 11th). We go on around 9:30-10pm and will deliver 40 consecutive minutes of rock (with a break in there somewhere). Unfortunately my blue guitar will not be ready by then.

Canadian Music Week (the one day of it I experienced at least) was fun. I went there, they had cancelled my hotel room, I wound up getting upgraded to a deluxe room which was hella swank with the double TVs and lounge area and walk-in closet and so on. I went to the panel and none of the moderators showed up and once we were on I felt I was mildly to relatively obnoxious which I consider a personal victory. I recommended that a woman violate the Alzheimer Society of Canada's copyright, said the word "bullshit", drank a lot of complimentary water and made a suggestive comment about Jeff Price, the CEO of Tunecore.

The panel actually went quite well, our impromptu moderator Jay Moonah did an excellent job especially considering he was only told he was moderating about five minutes before we went on. There was a decent crowd but an hour really wasn't long enough to get into answering everyone's questions about RSS, online radio, file-sharing, podcasting, promoting music online, copyright, remixes, blogs, digital distribution, generating buzz, Myspace and more. I felt we only scratched the surface and could have gone a lot longer but that's conference life I guess.

The main gist of my message whenever I opened my big mouth I think was that new artists need to rely on the internet to spread their music for them, that it takes crowds of people sending your songs around to come even close to competing with what the major labels do with millions of dollars, promotion-wise. I told the story of the recent Toy Story 2 Requiem mashup trailer that's been going around with an Israeli remix of my music on it and how that would never have been possible had I been tight-assed about my music rights and had a "media" section with 30 second clips rather than mp3s and slutty rights.

My fellow panelists were a real interesting and friendly group and it was great to meet them. They were all extremely knowledgeable and from different internet paths, which was fun. There was Jeff Price from spinArt Records and Tunecore (a service I'll be looking into more in the next week as it promises an even better artist cut than CD Baby for digital distribution), Dan Beirne from the mp3 blog Said the Gramaphone, Eric de Fontenay from Musicdish, Joe Gallagher from mvyradio.com and Will Evans from Soul Atomic (whose website doesn't seem to be working right now.)

After the panel I was thinking about going to check out some bands but instead got taken to an adult clown show called Lunacy Cabaret. Various clowns (and clown burlesque) and five dollar Bohemian beers. Very fun. Unfortunately I was too tired after the show to head out to the bar across the street for clown karaoke, which may be a decision I regret for the rest of my life.

Well, I'm off to Toronto for the Blogrolling panel at Canadian Music Week tomorrow morning. I'm not sure how much of CMW I'll actually wind up attending as we're like the second last event. Regardless, I will lay down the bomb knowledge and the dope secrets. I'm getting lots of spam from bands that are showcasing there so I might try to check out some of the more belligerent ones and pretend I'm someone important. "I can tell by the five press releases you've sent me in the past week that you kids got moxy."

If I had my new laptop I'd probably try and blog it or something nerdy like that, but I don't so I'll just drink.

The gig on Saturday night went all right, the roads were snowy as hell and not too many people were there, but it was a nice second full-length show despite all our colds. Thanks to the folks that did come out and said kind things. I broke my A string on the second last song ("We're Not Friends") and decided not to play guitar for the finale (a cover of "Search and Destroy" by The Stooges) instead of re-stringing for one song. Then while I sang without playing my hands got bored and I pulled on the broken A string and I guess cut my finger open and I saw a pretty decent amount of blood coming out of my hand.

Anyway, it was probably the most rock and roll thing in the history of me and it all ended when I was given a band-aid after the show. I'm sure Iggy Pop would have done the same.

Brad Sucks is opening for Just this Saturday night at Greenfields Pub. I think we go on at 9pm. We've practiced a lot but we may all have colds. Rocking will be attempted nonetheless.