Islands in the what now?
Every last tasty little morsel of “Looking Mean & Impressive” is now available for streaming up in the “Listen” link above! Or, um… right there! And remember, if you’d like the gift that keeps on giving… BUY IT FROM ITUNES AND TELL YOUR FRIENDS!
The more y’all pass on the goodies, the easier it is for me to keep makin’ em. Give up shitty music for Lent while there’s still time!
Cluck cluck cluck,
J.
One month later…
Physical illness has kept the band from doing much of anything in the way of promotion. There’ve been little opportunities taken here and there – PLS helped produce a mixtape for Papa Tony, participating in a little remixing in the process. Tunited.com’s contest has been entered, and results will be announced in a few weeks. Robot Bomb Shelter, in his infinite patience and sweetness, will be working on doing a little remixing for me once he gets the stems from me.
And? I’m demoing new new songs, new old songs, and as I am feeling like a good, angsty musician, lots of lyrics.
LM&I should have come out five years ago. I’m still playing catch-up. Thanks to the locals and the remotes, however, PLS is getting up to speed. Being totally unknown and beholden to no label is liberating; liberation and laziness should be mutually exclusive.
As if PLS wasn't hibernating long enough
One of the benefits of being a DIY/un-affiliate is that I don’t have to promote. I could; I probably should.
Seriously though? I need a rest. November was a banner fuckin’ month in PLS-Land; December needs to be quiet and cozy and comfy, me on the couch reading Twitter and Facebook to make sure my people are muddling along nicely. As it turns out, some of the muddling is just muddled. One of the Kid’s Club member’s discs was fucking CRACKED. Thankfully, my mom has extra copies and can probably just drop one off to Numero Uno as she lives essentially down the street.
I have my mother doing distribution for me. I am fucking hardCORE, people.
I’d still rather be signed to 4AD and chillaxing, but it’s more satisfying to sit back and watch the word spread.
Everybody gets their something
A whole mess of people are getting their promo CDs in a few days. The second I gave those envelopes to the post office lady, my album was no longer mine. A wise man reminded me of this recently, and I’m OK with it. It’s been six years in coming, and letting go of this means the beginning of something else.
Hopefully a little sooner than last time.
To those of you just now getting here from the back of the CD sleeve: I thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving it a listen. Now, tell all of your friends and their friends and their friends and then we can all be one big shiny happy family.
Just another shadow in a dream.
… there was a phone booth. No one was quite sure why the hell it was there – it wasn’t conveniently located, and at first, only a few people knew about it. Apparently, there’s now a movie about it starring Steve Guttenberg.
Eventually, someone pinpointed its location and looked up the number. Thanks to the internet, it became a phenomenon of sorts – people would wait for days at the MPB to talk to the random people who would call; they were reaching out to random strangers the old fashioned way instead of say… here.
Eventually, the phone company decided that it was a losing proposition to have a vandalized phone booth that essentially only received calls, and tore it down. There are fan pages, petitions, and all the typical armchair activist stuff that’s endemic to the internet trying to get it back. For now, it’s gone.
Look! A logo!
Thanks to my husband for designing this FUCKIN’ AWESOME site. SRSLY. Check his fine ass portfolio out at Shayc.com.
Aim for the eye.
Schizophasia is also known as “word salad” due to the tendency of sufferers to string together strange words to form their sentences. It can range from pure nonsense to poetry.
I read an article about a man suffering from schizophasia, who described his grandson’s noisiness in such terms. “He fills the room with hurricanes!” always stuck in my head as a particularly vivid example. Their speech centers use the neurons less traveled and pick related words, sometimes tangentially so, instead of the most obvious ones. Anyone who writes would kill for an on/off switch for something like that.
Sufferers probably aren’t as thrilled by it. I had mild, drug-induced expressive aphasia for nearly a year before I switched to something else. It was like always having the right word on the tip of your tongue but not quite being able to get it out. I wanted to recede into the background wherever I was just so I didn’t have to talk to anyone. It made me feel socially inept.
I wrote some of my favorite lyrics then, too.
It was so cold.
I was raised in the Catholic church, went to catechism, got my first communion, and left as soon as I fucking could. It was never for me, and this was reinforced by my grandmother’s funeral. We should have been celebrating her life, and were it not for my cousins singing and playing live in the church, the whole dour affair would have been even more inappropriate than it was, what with the creepy guest priest pimping his own sister’s death much earlier in the year by handing out little prayer cards with her AND his face on it, along with prayer cards celebrating his own anniversary as a priest. Good for you, you insensitive prick.
That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the art created in the name of the big-C Church. Two places in particular I liked. One was a tiny roadside chapel in the boonies of Ohio with three statues in front of a beautiful stained glass window. Inside, the hundred of candles in front of the statues meant it was always warm inside, no matter what time of year it was. When you went behind the building in the winter, the light flickered like a kaleidoscope on the snow. Once, out of sheer desperation, I tried saying a novena there that others had been leaving, and got a note ostensibly left by the caretaker to stop leaving the photocopies of the novena specified. God hates chain letters, too.
The other was a big scary church in the boonies of Pennsylvania, on a hill glowering over a cemetery. There was a soot-stained bridge that led to the hills across from it, and next to the road under the bridge there was a tiny little shrine to the BVM, encased in plexiglass. Worship, but don’t worship too close. Why trust a god who doesn’t trust you?
Instead, I prefer to watch the world’s increasingly poisonous daily devotions to a god they’ve masochistically twisted into something awful from a great distance.
That's when the signs all change.
I didn’t know at the time that the song was about me. I was alone in a gross, sticky-carpeted apartment in Akron when I wrote it. A friend was moving, so that was what I drew from.
A few years later, I’d bail out on my entire life and move to Michigan. A few months after that, I ended up making a lonely, beautiful drive out to San Jose. We went to Half Moon Bay to see the cliffs and the beach, and suddenly, there I was, in my own fucking song.
The things we do for love are wild.
I vaguely remember snow
Half of the songs on LMAI ended up forming an inside joke. If you’re from Poland, OH, USA and you ever got in a car with me while we lived there, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The only thing missing is a reference to King’s.
The other half is a chronicle of what brought me out here. One part travels east, one part travels west. One ends on a beach, the other ends in the quarry. Think of it as an album with an alternate ending I was lucky to avoid.
Get PLS on CDBaby
Get PLS on iTunes
PLS on Facebook
PLS on MySpace
PLS on ReverbNation
PLS on Twitter