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Category: Personal
Friday, 17 September 2021
On the radio
I dropped by Chapel Hill hyper-local radio station WCHL 97.9 studio last month to chat with Aaron Keck about #Coronadrops, how those turned into making a proper record, and my summer of fun recovery from surprise heart surgery. We even spun (do we still say that about digital files?) three as-yet-unreleased songs from the new record, provisionally titled The Pains That Come With Age.
This will take approximately 25 minutes from your life. Enjoy!
Wednesday, 14 April 2021
Temp Track
I finally got around to putting up a music-oriented landing page at danbryk.com with a built-in player and links to streaming sites (where I get paid for listens. well, in theory.)
Sunday, 31 January 2021
Love, Actually
It’s great to hear the songs for this album becoming an actual album. With an actual title. And actual performances from a bunch of great musicians –– some you whom you may already know and love from my other records, and a few lovely new contributors on board this time, and still some late game assists as yet to arrive in ye olde droppe box.
Despite the largely remote-recorded nature of this record, it hangs together surprisingly well, almost… well… live sounding. My singing is as great as ever. </rimshot> But seriously, everyone on their press tour usually says “This is my greatest work to date/these are my greatest songs/I am the greatest blah blah blah” and they mean it, but the odds are against them or else they wouldn’t have former glories great enough for them to end up on a press tour, amiright? Bottom line: As of this moment I am the least ambivalent I have ever been about making music, and for me that’s saying a lot. So thanks for your continued enthusiasm and patience. Hope to see you again sometime soon.
Thursday, 31 December 2020
Coronadrops. All of them.
Here are five full weeks of the deluge of unreleased songs I released daily at the outset of lockdown. Most were old and unfinished, performance and/or production-wise, but there hopefully are a couple of bangers in there.
They are free to download as individual tracks, but when you download them as paid ”albums“ I get to buy Bakugan and Beyblades for my ten year old.
Thursday, 16 April 2020
The Drops Keep On Comin’
Here is a master page of #coronadrops: a whimsically-chosen series of previously unreleased songs—released daily(!)—until the quarantine is over, or until i run out of decent previously unreleased tracks, or quite possibly even die of this thing.
I explain why I’m doing this in a little more detail here.
Or you could read this lengthier article that touches on the project.
All of these tracks have explanatory notes in the individual song pages, as most are straight out of the archives warts and all and may require a little justification, although I have tarted up a few things when possible. There are even a couple of fairly recent things amongst the detritus.
Looks like we made it… to our fifth week. And things are starting to sound a little too ratty to air publicly (to my ears at least). But like the kids say, the songs are still mad decent.*
Week Five: (and a couple of post-facto stragglers)
you are welcome to play and download week five as individual tracks for free over here
Week Four: (“covers week” apparently)
you are welcome to play and download week four as individual tracks for free over here
Continue Reading
Tuesday, 14 April 2020
Well, this is neat!
Monday, 6 April 2020
Lordy, there are tapes
As some of you probably know, I have Brontë lungs already weakened by a double-smoking-parent childhood followed a half-life of evenings spent in smoky clubs. Little known fact: I am also the wiktionary definition of the word sedentary. So I must confess I have sorta kinda been keeping an eye on this whole Coronavirus business.
For the past two decades I have oscillated between writing some pretty good pop songs, recording them in various contexts, generally hating said recordings and/or my performances, and then not releasing, or occasionally banishing said songs from my thoughts. Self-deprecation and insecurity are hardly unique amongst songwriters (or artists, in general) but I had somehow managed to turn it into a ridiculous, crippling trail of unfinished business.
But then I lost a songwriter friend to the Trump Virus. On Tuesday I heard he was on a ventilator. Wednesday, he was gone. And I couldn’t help but feel that there was still this constellation of ideas, melodies, hooks, words there in his mind and suddenly they were GONE just like that, in an instant.
And also kind of like that, I realized that I need to stop taking this stuff quite so seriously. I need to stop needing things to be perfect or great (or as close as I ever get to that, though that’s another conversation) and just get on with the work with whatever time I have left on this planet.
So I’m going to empty my drawers and post one unreleased song a day, for the duration of the quarantine, or until they start to suck.
Free to a good home, starting with this one.
Monday, 29 January 2018
Twenty Years of the Royal We
It’s hard to believe.
From our humble, be-tilde’d beginnings at www.passport.ca/~sinatra we embraced the world wide webs whilst they gently, lovingly ensnared us like baffled houseflies savoring their first tantalizing whiff of vapona.
We partied with a sliver of that first big Mercury Records cheque and invested the rest in gear and rent, so grateful we could do this full time! No more day job for us.
We gasped as the best-intentions-cum-best-laid plans of Starjob Records collapsed into a PolyVersal morass of UniGram.
We paid some attorneys fees.
We adored those Laura Nyro bootlegs and obscure Dodgers sides and Coke Commercials and all the other amazing stuff that showed up unexpectedly on Napster and Soulseek and Gnutella et al. Everything is free now! We did not know we were sealing our own fate.
We grimaced as the economics of music-for-a-living quickly crashed and burned around us like the twin towers of arrogance and naivete they probably were.
We giggled as indie music became the domain of the family-free, mom-and-dad’s-COBRA-insured undergrad living above the garage. Look at us, we formed a band! Any teenager with a Macbook can make music, really there’s nothing to it! We can do this part-time!
Then, we cried
Like a wind that’s always blowing
Life is flowing
Move on
Tuesday, 28 November 2017
House Concert
I opened a house concert for my old friend and tourmate Michael Holt. This is the warts and all document, sneetched from Facebook Live. Super rough around the edges and straight from the heart. All new songs except for the opener and closer, this is “what I’ve been up to”, sort of.