Say you go into your favorite restaurant one day for a sandwich. As they hand it to you, they tell you that it’s free, but could you please pass it to their “partner” at the door on your way out. You see that someone from an entirely ...

There’ve been a few articles posted in recent weeks* about Pandora’s music licensing fees. Most notably, a Pitchfork article wherein a band complains that they don’t make ...

I should probably do this before I get too busy again.

Thanks to everyone who came out to see us last week on our "We Didn't Bother To Come Up With a Name or Announce it as Such" tour. You're all wonderful!

Thanks to

Starting tomorrow, we're setting off on a small tour up through the midwest that culminates in a show a NoBrand Con with The Protomen! It's going to be awesome!...

I could have sworn I’d already written this blog post, but I can’t seem to find it! Oh well. Here goes. (Again?)

Right now, one of the hot topic issues everyone is talking about is, of course, gay marriage. The Supreme ...

Having not posted anything to my blog for the last two weeks, I figure the best way to make up for it is to do my best to ensure that no one ever misses my blog posts again!

So here it goes! Trigger alert!

Yeah, that’s ...

Oh wait! I got that backwards, we enjoy cool people like Alexa Dexa and AllOne. The Nashville pop-country scene is banal, terrible, and depressing.

This week, I ended up hosting some CouchSurfers who were travelling musicians. One ...

Right now is an exciting time for music. The barrier to entry is lower than it has ever been before. It takes very little money for anyone to create that album they’ve always dreamed of. This is democratic and awesome, and it has resulted in some ...

Right now, I live in the South, right smack-dab in the middle of the Bible Belt. This means that the concentration of Christians is very high. Further, this means that the concentration of people with Officially-endorsed Conservative Values (tm) when ...

Hi folks!

If you're not following our Kickstarter project, we've been doing a series of blog posts there about the recording process.

If ...

We like to get feedback on our music. Specifically, we like to get constructive criticism on how to fix things.

To that effect, at least one song from from every one of our projects gets posted on the

I've been reading more and more blog, etc. posts about the evils of heckling. This is interesting to me because pretty much all of them are written from the perspective of stand-up comedians. Apparently, in the comedy world, hecklers are universally ...

Heads up. This post is worksafe, but it does acknowledge the existence of NSFW content in case you're paranoid about these kinds of things.

If you’re not familiar with your

Bootlegs are great. I try to bootleg every show that I play, and I bootleg friends’ bands when I get the chance too. I’d definitely rather hear a decent bootleg over an edited-in-post, mostly-rerecorded live album.

One of the things that I ...

I think it’s time to complain about wars. Here are the wars that we should give up on.

1. The war on drugs. It clearly isn’t working. People are still doing drugs. Perhaps we should try treating people who have addiction problems instead of ...

Hi folks! Thanks to everyone who's donated to the Kickstarter so far! We set the bar low, and we've hit it! In fact, we've doubled the goal. Nice!

...

We had a pretty busy weekend these past few days. First on Friday, we played at Geek Media Expo near Nashville. Due to an unfortunate combination of rain, cold, and the stage being outside and ...

OK. So I have a brilliant idea for an invention!

First, we're going to need cheap and efficient time travel. Don't worry! We'll only be going forward, so we don't need to worry about paradoxes or the fact that there's no real basis in physics ...

Bonus follow up to last-week’s jerkiness! As long as we’re talking about politics, what do Rush Limbaugh, Dan Savage, Jon Stewart, and most bloggers have in common? That’s right! Punditry!

Pundits are weird and, I suspect, one ...

So... this post is probably straight-up dickish of me to post, but ...

I was gonna write a blog post about Amanda Palmer not paying musicians, but then she started paying aforementioned musicians. So now you get this instead...

As time has gone on, I’ve gotten a lot more relaxed about a lot of things. One such ...

Lately I’ve been finding myself getting increasingly upset with Google’s tendency to be evil. This is made more unsettling by the tendency of John Q Internetuser to view them as being generally above reproach.

For the most part, ...

Growing up in rural Wisconsin, one of the high points of the year was always the county fair. Everyone would get together and play games and have contests and what not. My mom, being a culinarily-minded woman would enter some kind of cooking contest ...

The written word is a pretty impressive piece of technology. Have you ever really thought about it? Our ability to transfer ideas across time and distance using written language is incredibly useful!

What’s really interesting about written ...

SCIENCE! has, unfortunately, demonstrated that the premise of meritocracy tends to not work very well. People in power tend to be not very good at ...

I didn't have time to write this week's blog post last night because I was busy playing a show with my other band Blue Matches. I'm the bassist (it's downright weird only playing one ...

I got into an argument about religion this week (a terrible habit, I know). As usually happens with these conversations, I find myself considering our philosophical assumptions. I like to think that any reasonable person, given the same set of axioms ...

Obligatory post-4th-of-July jingoism post!

Ok. Maybe not recall, but I am talking about ethnocentrism today. Specifically, I’m talking about ethnocentrism in music.

A lot of the music that I listen to caters to an American audience. ...

Obviously, I’m not making huge piles of money at this “music” thing. (What with the bit where almost no one is.) This means that I have to have a day job. As it stands, my day job is programming computers. In fact, that what I went for college ...

So you’re driving along in your car when suddenly you see a cyclist on the road. Oh no! It’s a non-standard vehicle! How do you handle this situation to make sure that you don’t have to deal with the hassle of flattening some jerk on a bike or ...

Last week there was a recall election in Wisconsin. A lot of my friends from the area have been fighting to get to get Governor Walker recalled for the past year or so. One of the tipping points that made a lot of people really dislike him was that he ...

So right now I’m reading The Vampire Lestat. Yes, I know that I’ve previously said I dislike that genre, but a friend insisted and loaned me the book... at gunpoint.....

The command to "be fruitful and multiply" inevitably requires us to expand beyond earth. This planet has a finite capacity to support humans, and there is no end-condition specified. Obedience to this command will eventually exceed what earth can ...

Saturday we played at JABECon in Lebanon, TN. It was good times. It was a first-year con, which brought with it the usual first-year con hiccups (trouble getting the venue pinned down, kind of a light ...

Ok. Back to pretending I'm clever.

I had an epiphany!

An atheist friend once pointed me to whywontGodhealamputees.com (That is an awful domain name, bee-tee-dubs (double-parentheses pro-tip: avoid apostrophes in your domain names!)). The ...

Ok. Something like my last 3 posts have been grumpy and politically. So let’s mix it up with some hilarity!
Last year I went into a record store in Madison and shuffled through the $1 bin. Inside I found this brilliantly-titled album

Hey look! A blog post that isn't me waxing sophistic!

I wrote a guest blog post for my buddies over at

Ok. Let’s see if we can offend and annoy everyone with this one! Autism! It’s a thing. A lot of people consider it a very unpleasant thing. I know very little about it. Good jumping-off point!

Being as autism is an often unpleasant thing (is ...

The  building I work in has a lot of art hanging on the walls. Some of it’s good; some of it isn’t. Some of it fills me with seething, uncontrollable anger. Specifically, some of the paintings by minimalist pioneer

I was thinking to myself, why aren’t we colonizing space yet? I mean, seriously! Is the idea of colonizing other planets not awesome enough for people or what? Then it occurred to me, the same people who have political clout and hate space programs ...

Happy 13337 day, everyone!
Ok. I’m the better part of a day early, but I’ll be busy tomorrow.

“Fighter 1,” you ask, suddenly calling me by my canonical band nickname despite there being no precedent to do so, “what the ...

Theoretically, I like punk music. But here’s the problem with that: I missed punk’s heydey. I was born in the mid 80s and grew up in small-town Wisconsin. By the time I heard any punk besides Green Day or Blink 182*, it was 2003, and I was in ...

An interesting correlation I’ve noticed over the years is that people who like to think they’re smart also tend to like to think they’re incredulous. It doesn’t really matter what they’re incredulous about. Just the smarter they think they ...

You know there are probably musicians who aren't a little crazy, people who don't have have an obsession with playing, who don't have a little voice in the back of their heads reciting lyrics at them all day, who could take or leave music. Screw those ...

I recently got into an argument with one of my friends about whether or not I should completely dismiss a band based on the fact that I hate their name. There’s an old adage that says, “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” There’s another ...

Well, February is almost over, which means it's almost time to be finished with our RPM Challenge album.

Well, then this happened.

Now I'm sad. :(

(Mixing this weekend....

Ok. I'm going to get this stupid album done if it kills me!

Last week, the guy who volunteered to do drums let me know that he wasn't going to have time to do it. Weak! I found another friend who is both a drummer and has recording equipment and ...

Last November, as you may recall, I wrote a blog post complaining about a certain Canadian musician who may have stolen my haircut.

Well, it's that time ...

Once upon a time, there was a video game. It was called Doom. It was pretty awesome, and it revolutionized video games.

It was so influential, in fact, that many other people tried to get involved in the giant money cow it appeared to be. Many ...

For those of you who aren't familiar, here is what Regdar (the laptop) does during any given song: he builds a random loop of 2 to 8 beats using 8 percussive noises. He does this 3 times (on average). Each of these is keyed to a button on the DDR pad. ...

Morgan Spurlock (the guy from the movie Super Size Me) used to have this TV show called 30 Days. The premise was that each week, a participant had to live a life ...

The following is a story of the little guy's triumph against the evils of industrialization.

Jonathan was a parking lot flag waver. He was a darn good parking lot flag waver! Whenever a sporting event, major concert, or awards show happened ...

It may be naive of me, but I've never been too worried about the Stop Online Pree-speech Act (someone should really tell them they spelled it wrong.) Even ...

Being as I may have inadvertantly endorsed underage drinking in last week's post, I'd better rationalize it now!

The drinking and driving ages are stupid and should be switched.

Here's my reasoning:
Public transportation is a great ...

I've been in Nashville for 4 weeks so far. Guess how many open mics I've played so far?

If you guessed 0, you win! "But Steve," you say despite the poor grammar this represents, "why aren't you playing open mics? You love playing at open ...

Astute readers may have noticed that I've blatantly stolen this "blog about crackpot theories" thing from my older brother.* Now I'd like to steal another aspect of the idea from him. He once defined ...

About two months ago, we signed up to participate in a battle of the bands. It was a pretty elaborate setup: It was going to take place over the course of 3 separate nights. The winner was going to get a professional music video made. There was going ...

Today, I think we should talk about (and link to!) horrible music.

A few years back, some... scientists? collected a bunch of data points and tried to quantify what people like ...

I've had several conversations with atheist to agnostic friends over the years that included a question something like: "If God is so existenceful, how come He has never appeared to me?"

Setting aside the fake words used by my imaginary debate ...

The adventure that was last weeks show really highlighted something to me: I like all-ages shows. Though it's not because they're safer and weird stuff is less likely to happen. Generally, we want crazy, unexpected things to happen at shows. That's ...

For those of you who missed it, last night's show was an unusual one. They ended up juggling the bands around timing-wise a bit, which wasn't a big deal. A couple fans only caught the tail end of the bands they came to see, but it wasn't a game ...

This is a true story that an archaeologist friend of mine once told me.

Once upon a time there was a kingdom called Oryen. It was a mighty and prosperous kingdom with a wise and benevolent king. One year, the king ordered a great ...

No, not that one! I spent this week visiting my brother in ...

We played a show with Chooglin' last November.

They were a really enjoyable, high-energy group! I'd describe their music as what you'd get if ska was derived from funk instead of reggae. (This is, of course, to imply all the best parts ...

Godwin's Law is one of those universal rules of the Internet. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it states: "As the length of an argument on the Internet increases, the odds of someone being compared to Hitler or the Nazis approaches 1." There ...

We played a show with Prizzy Prizzy Please last summer, and it was pretty brilliant! They put on a high-energy show with some really cool sonic textures.

Their prominent use of ...

We had a pretty sweet show at the Frequency in Madison yesterday.  Unfortunately, only about 20 people showed up who weren't in the other bands. We rocked pretty hard but there weren't a lot of faces there to be rocked. I guess everyone was two ...

Quite possibly one of our favorite bands (that isn't ourselves) is Map of the Woods. It's actually Fighter #2's other band, so this is probably pretty nepotastic of us to say this, but they're a ...

This one time I was asked to judge a battle of the bands. However, due to politics and interpersonal issues, I was eventually kicked off the panel. In fact they told me that they'd prefer I don't even show up at all.

But it was supposed to be a ...

Note: The following does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of Regdar or any of the other fighters. Just Steve

At the laundromat that I use, there are 4 types of dryers. Each of these takes only quarters, and in return for your ...

Once upon a time in the Baka dynasty of ancient China there reigned an emperor named Dallit. There was one thing that Emperor Dallit loved above all else, and that was tasty beverages. He was a conniseur of fine hot and cold beverages. He employed a ...

Note: The views expressed in this blog post are merely the views of the author and do not neccessarily reflect the views of Regdar or any of the other fighters.

Other note: Thanks to Dave for introducing me to the phrase "crackpot theories."

We played a really fun show yesterday at the Frequency in Madison. Thanks to everyone who made it out, and thanks to Rego, Map of the Woods and, Band at the Pub! (who might have actually been called A Bear Climbed a Mountain Once or something like ...

Let me preface this by saying that some consider me a bad driver, and, to be fair, I did get my license in San Antonio, where half of the population doesn't speak English well enough ...

Back in 2009, my brother Dave and I (Steve) put together a band called Zombie Dog.We practiced for three weeks, then spent two months driving around, playing shows. Along the way, we picked up a random bassist named Gene. Our adventures are ...

I live in what I like to refer to as the "ghetto" of Dubuque. It's a lower-income part of town, and it also happens to be where most of the African American population in the city lives. This probably means that calling it "the ghetto" is a little ...

Today someone told me to watch last night's musical guest from SNL.So I cued it up on Hulu (endorsement please!) and started watching. I haven't listened to much Arcade Fire, but I've generally enjoyed them. It was good times.

Then I saw this ...

Thanks to everyone who came out to catch us yesterday at the Lift! It was a blast! We opened for The Defibulators (solid, straight-ahead bluegrass from New York) and ...

One of the great things about having a site on the Bombplates system right now is that it's still a very small system. We have a very small development team. This means that creating great-big new features isn't always feasible, but it does mean that ...

This weeks Bombplates pro-tip is a direct sequel to last week's.

If you're serious about your band, you'll probably want to keep track of what you spend making music and how much you get ...

The feature I'm talking about today has actually been in the system for quite some time, but we don't link to it in the UI anywhere yet (except, of course on the manage page.) Let me tell you ...

Bombplates sites have a brand new feature, hot off the keyboard! The electronic press kit.

Go to YOURSITE.com/manage/epk, and you can start putting it together. Some finishing touches need to be added as far as presentation goes, but you can ...

I haven't ever managed to figure out the whole "making money" side of music, so I work a day job to fund my music habit.  It just so happens that my day job is lead developer for