Love Song Lecture

I’ve just been pointed in the direction of an amazing lecture by Nick Cave on Love Songs. You can see it here:

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=800055

Thanks to Richard for letting me know about it.

A wee gig

My friend Don MacLennan is playing tonight at The Bothy, upstairs in Hootanannys in Inverness. He’s asked me to play a couple of songs to break up his set, so look out for me sometime between 11pm and midnight.

Man, I wish gigs were in the morning rather than last thing at night. I’m normally in bed by 10pm - it’s a miracle I’ve never fallen asleep on stage.

Daytrotter

I’ve just discovered, by way of Pitchfork, a cool site with loads of free and exclusive tracks by some great bands, including - David Bazan, Low, Emma Pollock, Nina Nastasia, Elf Power and John Vanderslice. It’s called Daytrotter.com. No doubt I’m seriously behind the times in finding out about it.

Fantastic stuff. And speaking of free mp3’s, the new Nine Inch Nails album (first 9 tracks are free, you pay for the rest) and the AmpLive Radiohead remix album are both great.

You can hear my own free music here.

Sergeant Howie’s Holy Stamina Test

DOWNLOAD NOW AS ZIP FILE with artwork (19MB)

This is a collection of 4 songs I wrote and recorded in one day in 2005. These tracks were originally put on the website one at a time over a few months in 2006 but they’ve been off the radar for a while. Here they are now, remastered and available to download for free, with artwork, as a collection. Enjoy!

My New Favourite Band…

…is The Books. Amazing stuff. I’ve been listening to their album ‘Thought for Food‘ tons lately - and hey, it only took me 6 years to hear about it. If anyone ever asked me to compile an end-of-year best albums list, it would probably contain no albums at all from that year. Most stuff I get is either from a charity shop or the bargain bin in Borders when everything goes down to £1.

How did I hear about The Books? My friend David gave me a DVD with loads of mp3s on it and the prospect of listening to them all to find stuff that I like was too overwhelming, so I just ignored it for a while. That’s the problem I find with too much free music - I haven’t invested anything in it and so I feel no connection with it and it holds no value for me. So anyway…then I read about The Books in TapeOp and loved the look of their shack-like studio in the middle of nowhere, had an inkling some of their stuff was on the DVD I’d been given and so it was. Hopefully I’ll actually buy some of their stuff soon so as to support them properly and stop myself feeling too guilty.