For those of you who missed our recent social media campaign, we deemed the operation a success and have posted our Regional Variations bonus EP online for all the world to hear:

It’s basically demos & alternate mixes of songs from our Indifferent Cities EP.

The last song is our favorite. During the production of the album, we were emailing audio tracks & Pro Tools sessions back and forth, but Team Vietnam’s hard drive died before they could make reference mixes from the final recording session. This means that Team America was basically putting together a pile of puzzle pieces without any idea of what the finished puzzle was supposed to look like.

The only session that survived the crash intact was “Tay Ho”, though something awful happened to it along the way. Maybe it went mad from watching so many of its brothers die in the drive failure. In the weeks before we realized what had happened, Misha and I had some fairly tense discussions about quality control. He thought I was being racist; I thought he had finally lost his mind.

We eventually got it sorted, put it on the album as a secret track, and were soon playing “Tay Ho” to appreciative crowds across Vietnam. The rest, as they say, is history. But, generally speaking, this is why you don’t record an album over the internet.

In other news, our store’s back, just in time for the holidays. Probably the only place you can get five albums for $20 this side of Moscow.

Here’s our life in realtime, at least until we find a permanent home for it. Live it, love it, carpe everything.

I just got back from Google’s “Discover Music” launch and…wow. This is a big one.

Real writers have done a great job of documenting what it all means, but the gist of it is this: when you Google a band, album, song title, or lyric snippet, a little player is now going to pop up in the search results, allowing you to listen to either a 30 second clip or the whole song, courtesy of lala, iLike, MySpace, and/or Pandora.

On the one hand, this is awesome. In a lot of ways, standardization is the working musician’s friend – for better or for worse, MySpace has sort of become the de facto “electronic press kit”, and this partnership legitimizes what was otherwise an increasingly outdated website that somehow still does what it does better than anyone else out there.

On the other hand, nothing good ever comes from this kind of consolidation. </hyperbole> My pet theory, which I stole from Aaron Wall, is that they’re going to wait for this to gain critical mass, then change up the terms so that bands/labels who don’t want to pay for placement get disappeared or bumped way down in the search results. “Extortion”, is what they call it where I’m from.

If their overall goal is to take on iTunes (which I’m assuming it is, because no one said so much as “Apple” during the 90 minute seminar), more power to them. I love a good fight, and it’s about time iTunes’ “here’s every band in the world, have a listen and/or buy” interface was replicated on the web proper. As the dude from OneRepublic said, this isn’t going to get rid of the torrents, it’s going to help you cut through the noise and find what you’re looking for faster. And the prominent links to buyable MP3s & Wikipedia bios make everybody on the supply side feel good.

And yet, I can’t help feeling like this is the beginning of the beginning of the end. In both my day and night jobs (webmaking & songwriting, respectively), I’ve come to love the “long tail” of the internet, and consolidations like this always make me a little uneasy.

But whatever. We’re all going to die in three years from giant Aztec meteors – might as well enjoy the ride down.

Story:

Hey guys,

I was just sifting through some old pictures, and a few summers ago I was up in alaska workin on a crab fishing boat. On one of our days off, i was wandering around the small down we were in, and i stumbled across this OLD boat wrecked on the rocks of the harbor. Its not an uncommon sight to see, peoples boats break loose in a storm, and its too expensive to fix them, so they just leave them there to rot away. What was weird about this one was that it was named the Peggy Sue (lots of boats up there have names that are two girls first names). Immediately i thought of the ballad of johnny lo. I ran back to the boat we were on to grab a camera and snapped this picture for you guys.

Hope things are well.

-Jimmy

Picture:

Song: The Ballad of Johnny Lo

Secret: We’ve never actually been to Alaska.

Misha and I were looking at our Facebook and Twitter pages this morning. They’re pretty cool, we said to ourselves, but…man. They’d be great if they had a few more fans. Like, really next-level great. Vin Diesel great.

So we figured we’d bribe you into following/fanning us with a totally unreleased and never-before-heard studio MP3 from the Indifferent Cities sessions. (Don’t bother clicking that link, it’s just text we turned blue and underlined.)

Here’s the deal: everyone who befollows/befans us on:

…will be beTweeted/beFaced with four and a half minutes of audio awesomeness come mid-September. (Again, ignore that link, we’re just being jerks.) Everyone who doesn’t, won’t.

Cool? Cool. Let the games begin.