MORE UPDATES...

THE ALBUM: Skip’s in—he wants his song on the album. He wants me to handle the publishing, so I guess this is where Joe Becomes a Music Publisher. ASCAP, I think, since they’re a co-op and BMI isn’t; I’ll tell Skip he needs to join ASCAP as a writer (I do, too) so Joe Publisher doesn’t have to take out memberships in two PROs. I have a little “pocket” consulting firm, Outside Services Ltd. (the logo is an outhouse), that I’ll use as the “shell” for the publishing company—applying Occam’s Razor (“Do not multiply divinities without reason”). There will still be lots of forms and fees—just what I need while I’m unemployed.

TRIP TO SOUTHERN OREGON this weekend; official reason is a briefing session Saturday for the “Star of Stars” fundraiser for Rogue Community College (both Darrin Wayne and I are finalists, and we’ll be backing each other up). I have a “pallet on the floor” place to stay, so I’ll do two nights. I can play at the Wild Goose Sunday night, but it’d be nice to find a place to play Saturday. It is a holiday weekend, and not much is happening.

NEW SONG: A throwaway, really—but it was nice to be able to whip it out over a 6-hour drive in the car. One of those online contests where they assign a title and you’re supposed to write to it; in this case, the title was “Twenty Chickens for a Saddle.” And I tried, really I did—but it kept coming out “Twenty Saddles for a Chicken.” I decided in the end to screw the contest and write it anyway. “Twenty Saddles for My Chicken” is a surreal, bouncy little romp—very chicken-fetishy, I suppose--and if nothing else, may be an addition to Gene Burnett’s chicken songs album.

(At least I wasn’t alone. Other entries after mine included “Twenty Chickens for a Sadist,” “Twenty Chickens on His Saddle,” “20 Chickens for Seattle,” “Saddled with 20 Chickens,” and “Twenty Chickens for a Salad (Ask a Hooker).”)

WHITBY SHORES: Well, it’s a nice site—lot of musicians and writers, many of whom I know from other places on the Web. I’m slowly but surely copying my music over from Soundclick—I have a feeling Soundclick is probably not long for this world, between over-regulation by its “moderators,” its determined effort to be a MySpace clone, and its reliance on what appears to be an antique and poorly designed operating system that’s lately been prone to major shutdown failure. I told deejay/veejay Len Amsterdam, who founded and runs Whitby Shores, that I’d post the URL for Whitby Shores in the blog, in case anyone outside was reading; it’s http://whitbyshorespost.googlepages.com.

And “The Writer’s Blog” is on Whitby Shores now, too (if you’re reading it there, you already know that). That makes the fourth “home” for the blog; it’s still on Google’s Blogspot, MySpace, and Songstuff, too. I really need to create a personal Website: just a one-page clearinghouse with links to all the other stuff—the songs, the blog, the “buy my CD on CDBaby” (when I get that set up). I will need it by the time the new CD comes out, which will be sometime between September and Christmas. (That’s why there had to be a Christmas song on the CD. Just in case…) And yes, maybe the time to do that is while I’m unemployed and have time to experiment.

Joe