Stories of the Road, issue 30: Invading Mennonite territory

Thanks to everyone who made our party a rousing success!  Pam's piñata was a smash hit (ha!) and we damn near drank the place dry.  Also, we raised $55 in donations for my autism walk this May!

The party kicked off an insane 48 hours for me.  After going to bed around 5 AM on Sunday morning, I woke up at 9 to start working - as in work working.  I left the house at 2:30 Sunday afternoon to fly to Morris, MN, which is about a 3-hour drive west of Minneapolis.  After arriving at the hotel at midnight, I proceeded to pull my second-ever work-related all-nighter - the day after our party, mind you - and showed up at the customer's office at 6:30 Monday morning for a sales presentation.  Which, miraculously, I nailed.

After that I flew straight to Atlanta, where it was 70 degrees and sunny all week long.  One coworker was upgraded to convertible for free.  None of us know why.

 

 

Somehow, Lucy's ukelele love song to me (which I also linked to in a previous blog) was one of the featured videos on YouTube's home page last week.  In a two-day stretch, the video pulled in 700,000 views, 5,000 comments, and was favorited about 4,000 times.  How do you follow that up?  With another awesome ukelele love song video, of course!  I am crushed with adorableness.

 

To try and prove that all of the talent in this relationship didn't end up on one side, I put a new song up on the Tiger Stance MySpace page.  You can download it there or listen to it here:

share your files at box.net

New songs! Ahh!

After a consistent two weeks of too much stress and not enough sleep, my body decided that it was going on strike.  I woke up Friday morning aching from head to toe and I've barely left my bedroom since.  Luckily, I've used what little strength I could muster up to post a new set of songs on my MySpace page!  Say hello to the new Tiger Stance EP, Bee Dances.  All of the songs can be downloaded using the links on the MySpace player.  There are a lot of stereo parts that will sound better with headphones on and since most computer speakers sound like cheap garbage I would encourage you to listen to the mp3s on your portable media player of choice.  All of the new songs were made in Ableton Live, and I have to say that Mike Una and Mike Doughty are right: Live is the fucking bomb.  My upgrade to Live 7 showed up on my doorstep last week and you can be damn sure I'll be taking it for a spin once I'm back at full strength.

The old songs have been moved to my Box.net account and will remain there available for download.  If anyone knows of a better service for posting music, I'd love to hear about it.

quickies

Just a few quick updates from Johnny HQ.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, there are already multiple bands named Sub Rosa including one local to Chicago, so I've decided to change my band name. From now on I'll be putting up music under the name Tiger Stance, which appears to be a unique band name after a little bit of Googling and MySpace searching. I just changed the name of my Sub Rosa profile so there will be no re-friending involved.

Also, I'm trying to put the finishing touches on a new batch of songs to post on the MySpace page, which means I'll have to take the old songs down. The songs are all available for download from the page and I'd love it if you all grabbed copies. I just uploaded the mp3 files again with all of the ID3 tag information populated, meaning that when they are imported into iTunes or any other music program they will have the artist information, album info, and even album art all filled in.

I started a new project this week working with Microsoft at their office in downtown Chicago. There are some very smart dudes & ladies working there. It's intimidating.

Soon to come: a blog about good ideas that fail. In the meantime, please enjoy this video of a "real" air guitar that debuted at CES this week.