Song-A-Week slightly delayed
I am working on mixing and mastering this week's song, but it will be a little late. I hit some snags with my hosting migration and I'm still having some technical difficulties. The google problem still isn't solved, so if you do manage to find this page, please bookmark http://www.regulargonzalez.com as that will always direct to the right place. Hopefully I will have all the URL stuff sorted out quickly, as well as the latest song finished, but in the mean time I have posted an old song from the vault.
While you wait for SAW #2, enjoy a song I wrote for a Song Fight competition where the challenge was to write a song with the title "We Were Not Meant To Be"
New Host and WordPress migration
Since being featured in The Creep podcast, I realized my current hosting situation would not do. Scott Johnson said "ask him for him by name" without giving my website address, but anyone searching google for "Regular Gonzalez" would get regulargonzalez.com without the all-important www. That's relevant for technical reasons because I was using google's free hosting, but it only works with custom domain names if there's a subdomain. The raw domain name can't be redirected via the method they use, but that meant that people googling me weren't finding the website I had set up and were just seeing an error instead. Since that's no way to welcome new fans to my music, I had to pull my shit together and get a new host.
Now I have proper hosting from a facility with stairs, and I am going to be using WordPress as my blog/site framework. I am pretty familiar with the package, having helped a friend set up his WP blog recently, so I should be able to work some PHP magic behind the scenes in order to add cool custom stuff and embed awesomeness in the very fabric of this website. For now, it shall be moderately bland and uncustomized. Have patience my dear listeners; a new song-a-week arrives tomorrow!
The Creep Podcast Episode 3 featuring Regular Gonzalez
Because Scott Johnson and Brian Hough have such excellent taste, they have chosen to feature my song "It's The Creep" around the 28 minute mark in episode 3 of their new podcast, The Creep. Over 700 people have already listened to the song on SoundCloud just from them tweeting it before the episode went live. I expect I may have some new fans from this, so I welcome all of you to my new internet home. I will be tweeting via @gonzalezregular so please follow me there. My Facebook page will be updated soon, and I have some really old stuff on MySpace which you can listen to if their Flash player works for you (it doesn't for me).
I am quite busy with my day job right now so there's not much here now, but I have big plans. I have 20 or 30 old demos and about as many new songs and covers I will slowly be recording, cleaning up, and putting online in the form of downloadable albums and free Song-A-Week entries. I will be getting stickers and other merchandise set up. I will be playing some shows in and around San Francisco, both solo and with my band Cartoon Violence. I will be updating this web site and probably moving from Google (which is temporary) to a more robust host.
Stay tuned, dudes and she-dudes, for there is much music in our future.
It’s The Creep (Song-A-Week #1)
Okay so here's the story... Earlier this year I needed a vacation but I was dead broke so instead I got a free 10 day trial to World of Warcraft and vacationed in Azeroth. I had enough fun in those ten days to want to stay longer and so I paid for a month of the game, got a few characters up to the mid level, and then quit when I was ready to go back to caring about my real life experience instead of experience points in WoW. I did, however, enjoy listening to The Instance podcast while I was running around The Barrens with my Troll Hunter, Barglenawdle, and his vicious red raptor, Zouss. I didn't renew my account after that one month, but I did continue listening to The Instance as I moved on to other things, including Starcraft 2.
Last Friday morning I woke up and got to work at my day job, turning on the latest episode of The Instance to provide the audio fuel for my morning productivity. Much to my surprise, the intro contained a message saying a new Starcraft podcast called "The Creep" had been started by Scott from The Instance. I immediately subscribed in iTunes and started reading the user comments, the first of which complained about the mundane intro to the show. Since I have been playing a lot of Starcraft 2 these days, I would love for The Creep to be a good podcast, and a good podcast needs a good theme song.
I broke out my Dobro, wrote down every crude joke I could think of involving the Starcraft universe, and then added a piano track to flesh out the song. I really wanted to work some of the main SC2 theme into the song, but I couldn't get it to work. Instead, I just went for a style I guess I'm calling Terran Ragtime. I've sent this off to the folks at The Creep, and we shall see what they think of it. I have not yet listened to Raid Warning, which is one of the two parent podcasts to The Creep, but from what I've heard of The Instance, I imagine my song will be well received. Whether they'll actually want to use it as a theme song shall yet be determined, but I imagine it will at least make it into the end of the show.
So, seeing as how it's Monday and I promised I'd post a new song every Monday, here is Song-A-Week #1, It's The Creep. My apologies to those outside the Starcraft universe who don't get any of the references. I hope you find the song enjoyable nonetheless, and next week's entry should be a bit less topical.
Thing of the Week (ala Jonathan Coulton)
Once upon a time, when I was a code monkey for Electronic Arts, helping to make the Sims games an even more effective waste of perfectly good lives, I wanted to quit my job and make music. At that pivotal moment, I became aware of Jonathan Coulton. My girlfriend at the time was quite enamored with him, and most of his songs I actually heard first sung by her rather than Mister Coulton himself. Anyhow, he comes into this whole story because while I was busy hating my job and my girlfriend was busy singing his songs, he managed to parlay his web dev career into a successful nerd music career including some fairly mainstream press because of his innovative touring and artist management techniques.
Both Jonathan and that girlfriend were personal inspirations for me to quit that job which was strangling my soul, but it took me a while to really gain traction on my music again. A few weeks ago I attended PAX 2010 in Seattle, where one of the musical performers was Jonathan Coulton. Though he was an inspiration to me in my personal development, I had yet to be fully wooed by his musical abilities. Perhaps there is some jealousy in there, as I'm sure there is some overlap in our styles. We share too many influences (TMBG, Weird Al, and The Beatles to name a few... and I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Coulton listened to a handful of Barenaked Ladies in his day) for me to not be a little bit jealous that he's more famous than I.
Anyway, two things happened that weekend which changed my opinion of Jonathan Coulton. The first was that I got to talk to him at a Q&A panel, briefly relay my EA story, lament that I wasn't a rockstar yet, and ask if he had any regrets or advice. He said he had no regrets, and encouraged me on my music. The second thing was that he performed that night, I barely managed to get a seat for the concert, and he rocked the fucking house. I must say, he sings his songs better than my ex.
The point of this whole rambling story, I guess, is to say that I will be shamelessly borrowing Jonathan Coulton's gimmick of posting one song a week. Since he personally encouraged me, I can blame him if things go wrong. And who knows, maybe I'll open for him some day at PAX... one can dream, no? So I'll be posting a song a week, starting this upcoming Monday.
Toxx clause in effect.
Yet Another New Website
Well ladies, germs, genders, and stereotypes; It's time for yet another installment of the Regular Gonzalez Experience where I put my music on a website, play a few live shows, and fail to become famous. This is version 3.0, which is starting blank. I will add, as time permits, both new and old projects, as well as updates about official albums both studio and compilationary, plus tour dates for the SF Bay Area and possibly the surrounding regions.
Your health and general well-being will also be greatly benefited by listening to my super awesome other band, Cartoon Violence, as well as my collaborator Blake's other band Apple Pie Hopes. Blake is an old school homie who I have known since sixth grade, and we used to make silly demos on four-tracks in his bedroom when we were 16. Now we're all grown up and we do grown-up things like make music in our bedrooms.
Anyhow, I hope you will become a fan and join my mailing list and subscribe to my newsletter and buy a timeshare in my planned community and make my music the national anthem to your own personal country. If not, your loss.