Well, it’s just been a long, long, slow, hot summer. I got back from touring at the end of June — there have been a few gigs since then but mostly I’ve just been working at my straight job, and spending most all my free time working on new music, writing new songs and doing some recording with Michael Krassner over at Truckstop. (Mike was one of the prime conspirators in the making of the Dutch Harbor soundtrack, by the way.) You can expect to hear some of this work on my next album though I can’t say when that’s going to be finished. The Truckstop tunes sound amazing but I want to do some songs with Jim O’Rourke as well, in his studio.


Also sang some harmonies for an upcoming album by Jon Langford’s Skull Orchard. It’s so cool to get the chance to record with all these folks, and it’s so flattering that they’d ask me. And it’s a challenge mentally and vocally; I’m trying to sound a little different with every project.

I have a few other projects on the backburner too, but just secret stuff that I can’t really talk about yet ‘cuz it’s not done, or not for sure, or not cool to talk about just yet. More tour plans, guest appearances, etc… I’ll let everybody know what’s up as soon as I get the green light. ;-)

Oh yeah, and I’ve been updating the heck out of this here website… I’ve switched everything over to use cascading style sheets, a cool new technology that works with the 4.0 versions of IE and Netscape. (If you’re seeing a lot of white pages then you may wish to upgrade your browser!) It’s been a bit of a pain to make the conversion, but using the style sheets will make it much easier for me to control the look and feel of my ever-mutating site, without having to go in and edit all the pages by hand every time I find a new font that I like. As always, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know if something goes wrong! …broken links, illegible font colors, etc. I’ll try to fix ‘em.

I’ve been checkin’ out some really great live music here in Chicago lately. Michael Hurley played at Schuba’s and just BLEW my shit away!!! And I got to see Liam Hayes from Plush play at the Empty Bottle, opening for the Japanese band Ghost, that was amazing too. And Los Sones de Mexico for my 33rd birthday… hmmmmm… life would be so boring without live music, dontcha think?