And it’s great. We had Tin Hat tater tots last night. They were delicious. James and I just went to the sculpture park down by Elliott Bay, I’ll get pictures up soon. The weather here’s great, but the weather back East was good when I left, too. So everybody gets good weather. How’s the weather in Sweden, brl?

Tim told me to post a song that “reminds me of Seattle,” since he’s busy preparing to take a trip there. Since I am in Atlanta and am therefore separated from my external hard drive, I’m missing most of my music collection. Nevertheless, I found one, and whether or not this is what Tim was looking for, here’s song number 15 from “Every Song I Hate”:

[audio:http://www.infiniteregress.org/bmp/Inaudible.mp3]

This version of the song made it onto a comp (I don’t remember which one). A properly recorded version of this song is on MLB’s one and only official release, the Josh Sings b/w Tim Sings 7″. This song began as a finger-picking experiment, or something, and I remember learning to play that version of it one of the many times I took the bus from Bellingham down to Seattle our first year of college. I like this one a lot.

We saw Benji recently in the area, and then the next day I found this song in my Inbox from Brandon. He adores this song (his words), and I agree that it is spectacular. Benji lives in Brooklyn now, and I hear that he’s releasing a new record sometime this spring.

The first time I heard Benji was also the first show we ever played, in Josh’s backyard in Richland, WA. We played under the name (gag) Accustomed to Failure, and it was fun. Benji, Kissing Book, and The Ninjas also played. Later that night, when someone asked, “Where’s Benji?” I heard someone reply (I think it was Andrew), “Downstairs, watching cable.”

I’ve been listening to Mastodon on Hype Machine all morning, and it’s mostly because something to break the monotony of soft, melodic and catchy music is necessary every now and then. Actually, I would argue that some of this heavy stuff is actually pretty catchy; nevermind that every third song listed on here is Crystal Skull, so it’s probably ingrained in my head by now, and also, I haven’t the slightest idea what they’re saying, like, at all, so there may be a subliminal effect here that could cause some odd behavior. On a related note, I just figured out my IA professor was singing, Blood & Thunder the other day.

Tomorrow we’ll probably back to normal. Bonus points to anyone that listens all the way through these songs to the coup de grace of the current search, Bladecatcher.

The full title of the song is actually “anyplace is like everyplace else/everyplace is like anyplace else,” which is a truly Modest Mouse-ian name for any song. And this will actually be the third time I’ve posted it, the first two times were in 2003, once in October and once in December. The song is good, still, and the natural reverb on the voice (from what was I think the newly built garage the P’s built at Ironton) is perfect. The move back to the dry voice is a little jarring, but the lyrics all make up for that, if only for the line about drinking beer on the back porch.

I’m out for the weekend; thank God Shake Shack is back open. It’s raining here now, which means short line. Have a good one.

Here’s another one by Andrew K.’s first (?) band, 4th Grade Nothing. I’m not sure, but I think Andrew sings the verse. This is the song on the tape that most makes me think to myself, “Glossary” (when the chorus comes around).

[audio:http://www.infiniteregress.org/bmp/4th Grade Nothing/05 Trendy Girl.mp3]

Incidentally, I’ll hopefully be seeing Glossary in April when they come through Denver.

- bmp

This is probably my favorite Harvey song, not only because I get mentioned directly (I wasn’t that punk in high school, but I appreciate the gesture) but also because it has some awesome harmonizing with Sister Whittington.

Here it comes! Directly at you!

Contains explicit language. I’ll kill you!

bmp started mailing me random songs we used to listen to, and there were a lot of them. While the variety is little, they are loaded with nostalgia. Since I missed posting yesterday, I’ll have two of them here for you today. Since these aren’t our songs, I’ll probably have to rotate them off the server as applicable. The first? The Godrays:

I’ve always loved these guys, and somehow, Glenn always manages to say this one line out of nowhere. That and he always says, “What is this, the Filipino New Year?” (from Mars Attacks, natch). This whole album is great; Josh and I covered one of the songs sometime, and we have it on minidisc somewhere. b, find that, will ya?

A few years back when I went on tour with 1985 and Goldstar we had a night off in Minnesota – - one of the Twin Cities, I don’t remember which, but Sebadoh was in town doing their first reunion tour thing. Labrynt and I went down to the club to catch them and ended up hearing the last two songs (and still paying for it). Lab and I both gave CDs to Lou Barlow; I don’t think he listened to mine (or he did and he hated it, natch), but Goldstar got invited to play a show with Lou in Bellingham when he went through there. Yay!

Anyways, Sebadoh holds some serious nostalgic cache for us as high schoolers — We all piled into Brandon’s minivan (I think) and headed to WSU to go see them play. I remember stopping at Subway, and Lou Barlow’s joke of the night, “Tomorrow, we head to a place that rhymes with noisy.”

That’s Boise, for you non-NorthWesterners.

Here’s a bunch of videos from Louis-Philippe Eno, the first two from Malajube, a band from Quebec (singing French of course):

And the last from Islands:

They’re all very Gondry-esque, and if his career path is any indication, we’ll see Eno films in the theaters someday.

This is one of the fastest songs I’ve ever written; fast as in tempo, not time it took to write, though I bet it didn’t take me that long to write, because I was full of teen angst back then. It features bmp on the drums, and he could always rock those things. We would always lose it somewhere near the end when we played so fast, but things usually turned out all right.

Things sounded good on 4-track.

I almost put up “America Joe Does the Internet Song,” but was afraid I’d be sued by some WSU teacher for libel. Also, I didn’t want to get blacklisted by some filtering software (I probably already am) when Jason talks about the other stuff in the song. Instead, I went with the gibberish in “Jason’s Funky Song.”

It sounds like he’s beating someone in the background. How did you get so funky, man?

This is the first song off the tape that I got from Josh — The first time the name Kissing Book (ed: I think this is actually 4th Grade Nothing) was named, and it features a lot of Joey Kneiser, on the drums and singing. Kneiser currently plays with Glossary, who are heading West and will be visiting CO and WA. They’ve never been out there while I was there, at least not to my knowledge, you should do yourself (and me) a favor and check it out and report back.

There was a stage when about 80% of the songs I wrote included this E variation, I don’t know the technical term for it, like Emadd9 (I have no idea what that means), but I loved the way it sounded. This song is really fun to play, and Brandon pointed out that a medley of all the songs with the chord is a great way to start the day (like with Folgers in your cup).

At some point, we’re gonna get through all these and I won’t have something to post everyday, so I hope everyone’s enjoying this stuff!

I just hung out with Nathan last night; he’s either moving here, or going to Berlin, he’s not sure yet, but it was good to see him. I’m sure we’ll go to Barcade before his time in NYC is done, though.

Here’s bmp’s words on his song:

And then there was Nathan Smithe (the ‘e’ is silent). This song is brilliant. Listen carefully to the lyrics. The ending is just genius. He screams out “RESOLUTION!”, cuts to a Christian rock band song, cuts back, and rattles off the immortal line “—–”. (I put “—-” because I don’t want to ruin it for you. You’ve go to listen!)

[audio:http://sounds.infiniteregress.org/archives/Christmas%20Lights%20on%20the%20Ceiling.mp3]

The Christmas light thing also reminds me of the Dream Box that he built out of a bicycle box and Christmas lights. It was at my house for a while and I remember trying to sleep in it once, but the lights were all up in my face. I think the song is pretty funny, what band is that? Is this considered fair use?

I’m sick and I need to get to bed, but I wanted to get this up so it would be there waiting in the morning, so I won’t say much right now (maybe I’ll edit this post later), but today you get a double serving, since I’m trying hard to get all these songs out there. These are actually much more recent than the rest of the songs, so keep that in mind, though when I say recent, it’s probably more like 5-7 years.

“Reign Part One” is from Brandon’s project, The Life and Times of You (LATOYA).

“Where to Start” is from Josh’s project, The Greatest American Sport. Here’s what Brandon had to say about this song:

Josh returned my four-track when we were all in Seattle one time. I think it was New Year’s a few years ago when we had a little party at Ali’s apartment. He left a tape in it that had just this one song on it. It’s a pretty great version of Where to Start.

I don’t know if you remember, but “The Greatest American Sport” is “feeling people up”, I think. Josh knows.

I really like both of these songs. The first one feels a lot like bmp’d been listening to a ton of Braid. The second sounds like Josh just being Josh — I don’t know how he does it, but his lyrics always just sound like he’s talking to me about something, which is a gift. It’s a shame he doesn’t write more songs. (Yeah! Take that!)

Actually, I kind of like this song. I don’t remember why it’s called Underdog, nor anything else other than the part about it snowing; I had just gotten out of the Uptown Cinemas, having seen one of the worst movies I ever, Michael Richards’s Trial and Error. When I walked out of the theater, it was snowing pretty hard, and the parking lot was empty. It was about 1130 on a school night and we didn’t have cell phones back then. I just walked in the backdoor and heard nothing of it from my parents. It’s amazing what kind of context the movie gives us — Released in 1997, so I was 17. There must be three guitars on there, leaving no room for doubled vocals on the 4-track, which always makes people’s voices sound better. I don’t know what it would have done for me, as I was singing way below my “good” range anyway.