Last Friday, one week after Rebecca Black’s song “Friday” leaked to the internet and caught fire, The Heaps decided to give our friend Tets’ houseparty a treat at the end of our song “All Those Kids”:

(vox: Erin; guitar: David; drums: Ben; keyboards & backing vocals: me; song concept & melody: Matt)

The crowd liked it, but I think this was a one-time drop in.  Our next show will probably be in mid April and I’ll bet the “she said ‘sunday comes afterward’!” mania will have burned out by then.  The whole thing becomes less delightfully scorn-worthy when you consider that the inept songwriting came from the song’s opportunistic producers rather than a clueless 13 year old, and speaking of clueless, RB’s response to widespread internet derision was to release an acoustic performance video, as if it was the auto-tune that had everyone laughing and pointing.  Well, anyway, we were happy to jump in on minute 14 of that fame–the show was a blast and the country punk headliners Two Ton Strap were great!  Thanks to everyone who made it out!

Party anthem mummy intrigue!

About half the songs The Heaps still play were written by our old guitarist Mike, many written after he stopped playing with the band himself.  Here is his latest skeezy composition, “Real Estate Agent,” or as the file he sent me was labeled, “George Michael Hel Yes”:

[vox: Erin; keyboards: David; drum machine: Franz; bass, inaudible backing vox: me]

I understand the “Hel Yes” part, but I’m still unsure where George Michael fits in.  This mysterious arrangement was improvised by the current line-up of the Heaps minus Ben (who was on the East coast) plus my brother/bandmate Franz.  Or you could think of it as the current line-up of the Great PYRMDS with special guests Erin and David.  Anyway, this song’s probably not going to become a band staple, but then again, I said that about Divorcee and Casual Encounters.

BONUS: Here’s a song I’m looking to revive into active rotation, “After the Afterparty”:

[improvised vox: Erin & Franz; keyboards: Matt; drums: Ben; scratchy guitar: me]

The challenge to bringing it back is that this is the only time we ever played it.  Like all of us, Erin was making it up as she went along, so she’ll have to relearn her own lyrics.

In Heaps news: we’re hoping to play another show in April, and I’m playing with the idea of us recording an EP of actual (home) studio recordings with the new line up since we haven’t put out a record since “Love Dinosaurs Forever.”  As for the Great PYRMDS, we did a lot of raw recording over the holidays that I haven’t cut yet, but we have a million times more material than space on our forthcoming first album, so when I have more time, we’ll cut that and then start thinking about what’s going to be on the second.

Because I’ve been so busy, this blog has sorta become just “that place where I post the song from the last day of class” every quarter, so here’s the latest installment:

If you’re wondering what this is, each time I teach my freshman comp class on “L.A. Stories,” I cap the quarter by having the students write me new verses for a song I wrote a few years ago about my most favorite / least favorite freeway interchanges in L.A.  You can hear the versions from previous quarters here and here.

When The Great PYRMDS recently invited some of our favorite people to make some music with us, Erin (of The HEAPS) had the idea to draw vocals from the anthology NEW PONY.  Here are two of those tracks:

“You See Where This Going,” which draws from “Warsaw” by Sommer Browning and Brandon Shimoda:

[vocals: Erin; some beats: Franz; other beats & synths: David; guitar & looping: me]

NEW PONY was itself the result of a call for collaborative works and responses to previous releases from Horse Less Press.  The Great PYRMDS used to be called The Bros. K, and are normally VJ Franz K & me, Milo Cantos of The HEAPS and The Shrapnelles.  David makes electronic music as Hyphen Jones and can also play guitar infinitely better than I can.

Here’s another one: “An Abandoned Shell,” which draws from “Insect Wildlife” by Erik Anderson:

[vocals: Erin; beats: Franz; synths: David; saxophone & looping: me]

Did I mention that Erin & I have a (less meandering, more titillating) song called “Cyrano d’Regiment” based on the late great avant-garde novelist Raymond Federman‘s “Take It Or Leave It“?  You can see a video of it in this post.

Submitted for your entertainment: a medley of songs sung by me with Elvis flavoring.  Those songs are “Before You Cry” by Camera Obscura, “Here Comes That Feeling” by Brenda Lee [recently covered by The Heaps w/ me on sax], “I’ll Follow You Into The Dark” by Death Cab For Cutie [an old Tia's-request staple from the earliest Heaps line up], and “Death Cab For Cutie” by the Bonzo Dog Band [yes, the song that gave the name to that band]:

The Elvis impression here is deliberately dialed back from my award winning (!) electro-werewolf cover of “Don’t Be Cruel”–I love the ridiculous dynamics that pretending to be Elvis can yolk together, but subtlety is also key to a good Elvis impression.  Bonus trivia: it was the performance of “Death Cab For Cutie” by the Bonzo Dog Band in the Beatles “Magical Mystery Tour” movie that got me interested in interested in Elvis in the first place.  That explains a whole lot.

Details about the next Heaps show coming soon!

It’s like playing a bike horn . . .

In HEAPS news, we’re planning on playing a “good bye” houseparty for our mascot/bandmother Tia in September–more details soon!  Here’s the Heaps playing Brenda Lee’s “Here Comes That Feeling” from our most recent session:

[vocals: Erin; guitar: David; drums: Ben; sax: me?!]

Little known fact: Even though Erin plays the sax on other Heaps songs, I was the one who played it back in the day. Okay, so my sax part is not as sophisticated here as that on the El Perro del Mar cover of this song, but this track represents not only our first time playing this song ever but also my first time playing the saxophone for real since high school!  I remember almost nothing about reading music but the power of muscle memory came through!  I had a blast.

Here’s another postpunk poodleskirt Heaps track, a cover of the sci-fi rockabilly love story “starDORKstar” by our friends, Bloodspill: Rockers from Beyond:

[Erin: vocals; Darren: saxophone; Ben: percussion; me: bass, guitar, backing vocals]

Erin’s friend Darren–who’s been playing saxophone a lot longer than Erin and a lot better than me–was visiting us on the West Coast and we’d been wanting to record this cover, so it all just came together.  Also, the guitar and bass aren’t multitracked–I’m actually wearing both and switching off between them.

What else is going on?  Keeping up with my 3 posts a week at the cabinet of curiosities that is MugginBugeyes, but musically, aint nothing shakin’ but the leaves on the tree.

a song about L.A. (again) co-written by my students (again)

Once again, I taught the class on L.A. to my Orange County students, and once again I decided to close out the quarter by having them write new verses for my song about favorite / least favorite So Cal freeway sections.  Here’s a recording of me playing the song for them on the last day of class (captured via my laptop’s built-in mic):

I had fun doing it, but I sort of think the previous class came up with better verses.

Last year around this time, I made lavish predictions about what I was going to do during the summer, and then I got so busy with other stuff that I didn’t do much musically until the fall.  This time I’ll say I don’t know–The Heaps may try to broaden our performance radius to Long Beach, The GREAT PYRMDS (aka The Bros K) may generate some more material in advance of our fall record release, and I may actually make some progress on The Shrapnelles’ ukulele album about Hercules.  Who know?  If something happens, you’ll hear about it here.  (In the meantime, there’s my tumblr of cinematic inanities.)

It took a long time for me to give in and start a blog but now suddenly I have 2: to celebrate the christening of mugginbugeyes.tumblr, here’s the recently revamped “Dreadful Party”:

I wrote this song not that long before Erin joined The HEAPS and we played it at her first show with the group, albeit in a very different form (Erin played flute for the entire song, I was solo on the singing, Vernon played violin, Mike & I played guitar, and Sam guested on the conga drum because Ben wasn’t even in the area yet). I felt like the new arrangement was one of the highlights of our recent houseparty show (which also featured the new synth grinder “All Those Kids”), but the version here is from the penultimate practice before the show.

Anyway, why start another blog?  Well, you may have noticed that all the ZombiePublicSpeaking posts are introduced by some absurd screencapture from a movie or TV show–it’s yet another hobby of mine that I’d do even if I didn’t have an outlet for it on an original music mp3 blog (even though, yes, I’m always on the look out for pictures of people explicitly listening [or not listening], as well as groups of 3 people [to stand in for the [current] Heaps] or 2 people [to be my side projects with Erin ("The Pet Set") or Franz ("The GREAT PYRMDS" aka "The Brothers K")]).  Anyway, since I make screencaptures anyway–and I have specific visual interests (like eye popping, fake punches, blowing smoke)–Erin suggested I give them their own place to be displayed where likeminded cappers might, and so was born: http://mugginbugeyes.tumblr If you bother to read THIS blog, you might as well check out that one as well–it’s just 3 images a week, posted on Wednesdays, and will hopefully give you disproportional delight to the 10 seconds it takes to look at.  If you’re a tumblr’r yourself, follow me, I’ll follow you.  If you’re an RSS’er, there should be a link on the bottom of my tumblr page that will let you subscribe.  Hope you like it.