Tuneless fuckers.

No, there's nothing wrong with it whatsoever. Since when are you a musical purist? I'm experimenting, man ... that's where it's at, right? That's what Big Green is all about. THAT'S WHY WE'RE ABOARD HER ...

Oh. sorry ... I lapsed into James T. Kirk dialogue for a moment. We were just having a little back and forth over some musical contrivances I've been attempting on our latest crop of NED TREK songs. Last count we've got fully eight numbers in the works - an unusually large parcel, though our recording process has taken a bit longer than has been our habit in recent years. As some of you know, we used to take some pains over our albums (e.g. International House, five years in the making). Then when we launched our podcast, we started slapping songs together in hours rather than days or months (e.g. Cowboy Scat, a ridiculously slap-dash effort).

That's ... uh ... real good, Abe.Well, the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direction. I think we've put about six months into these songs, and we're only now at the mixing stage. Mind you, we have just a few hours a week to do anything on this at all, then it's back to the salt mines. Still, taking time allows us to experiment a bit more, which is what Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was calling me out for just then. Not sure when he graduated from Julliard, but apparently the sight of me playing a coronet with a violin bow blew a few breakers in that little brass noggin of his. It's called innovation, Marvin. Deal with it.

The unfortunate side effect of taking longer on these songs is that we go through longer periods of posting no new songs. That makes us tuneless fuckers for a good portion of the year. But don't let our silence fool you - there's a lot of music going on in this drafty old hammer mill. Why just the other day Antimatter Lincoln pulled out his banjo and started plucking. Now, there aren't a lot of things that even Anti-Lincoln does worse than I do, but plunking on a banjo is one of them. And I'm freaking awful on that instrument. That's why I took up the coronet. Though I'm thinking an accordion bellows would help that horn dramatically. We'll see. Back to the lab!

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