to be fair, we’ve eaten fairly well today. my wife packed joe and i excellent homemade breakfast sandwiches and a thermos of strong coffee this morning. that carried us through the 1 o’clock show pretty easily this morning, but we were ready to eat by the time the five of us (with tim tobitsch, band friend and megan business partner, as a stand-in for trevor, who had to return to work: they have similar hair) drove off to get some lunch at tessaro’s in lawrenceville.

other highlights include fantastic guitar tone from both myself (new speakers, KT77s) and joe (new speaker, mojo), seeing part of meeting of important people’s set, and some good laughs at tim’s idea for a “tutoring & repo” business (your scores improve or you lose your house!).

on the whole, though, this is the part of the plot where The Real Meaning of the story’s events are really called into question. the moral is unclear. after all, joe and i can have excellent guitar tone, eat well, and fine each other $129 at home and without 13+ hours of driving.

dear reader, even for those of us who believe in more than coping, some days feel like a page of hemingway.

whence, dear reader, the hero will shortly enter the scene with flourish, very possibly from a conveniently placed rope.

or something like that. in our case, the real version would now include a very polite state trooper. although we are still on track to wow the passersby at WPTS Day, the speed of our progress and the height of our spirits are both somewhat reduced. this has now become quite an expensive trip.

ah, troopers. how faithfully you discharge a duty of such immorality. if only you could be persuaded of that which we, the frequent travellers of pennsylvania interstates, know in our deepest parts: your law is no law at all. it is bare graft, collected with undisguised coercion, only designated a “tax” by the ultimate destination of the lucre squeezed from the common man.

if only i wrote protest songs.

dear reader,

that’s right; it’s me. i’ve missed you all. i decided some weeks ago to return to blogging here with a vengeance, but now it’s happening and i couldn’t be happier.

actually, i could be somewhat happier. the occasion of my first post in over two months is not, truly, something about which i’m particularly excited. owing to some not entirely unforeseen but certainly uncontrollable externals, joe and i will be departing shortly from nj to play a c. lunchtime show in pgh, and returning shortly thereafter to nj. (go ahead, check the time. i’ll be back here by 9 tonight.)

so… though i am sadly without brilliance or insight at this hour, you can look forward to blogs and tweets throughout the day that will no doubt keep you informed of our progress in an entertaining way.

ps. did you like “in the impossible tension?”

ok. i don’t really blog too much these days. i know.

nevertheless, i need to briefly weigh in on this iphone/touch/noise.io thing. we’ve been seeing it show up quite a bit on some pretty tech-y sites (engadget and synthtopia, for two), and we here at good night, states, are getting that the gadget-and-synth-savvy world gets this.

i’m quite flattered by the attention, but make no mistake: i didn’t program these sounds for synthheads (though i probably qualify for that label myself). dear reader, you who claim to play no instrument, who do not own your very own modular synthesizer, who frankly are not even sure you can do this, know that this project is for you! gn,s thinks synths are so great, everybody ought to have one; we like making noise over a pretty song so much, we think everyone should do it.

and what’s the worst that could happen? so you don’t play it exactly right this weekend. it’s ok. you’ll get better. (maybe we’ll even invite you to a rehearsal or two.) in fact, several of the sounds will probably respond wonderfully to any mistakes you might want to make, and that tiny speck of unpredictability in a universe of planning is really the point. art is humanity. humanity is unideal.

again i say, you can do it, dear reader. you can stride confidently to the front of the stage, device in one hand, lowly earbuds in the other. you can make the happy accident.

or, hopefully, an ep or two worth of them.

dear reader,

having been somewhat burned in the songwriting department by the experience and schedule of 2008’s internet singles “experiment,” i’ve had some anxiety about the prospect of a new record in 2009. am i still “inspired”? if so, by what? is inspiration even real?

over the last two weeks my fears have been put to rest. partially, this can be attributed to the successful penning of lyrics for my last contribution to “in the impossible tension” (which joe and i have been doggedly recording); but, mostly i admit unabashedly that i am tremendously excited about the complete failure of western financial markets. i know full well how insensitive this is of me, and i don’t take the personal losses of millions of people lightly, but the silver lining of this dark cloud shines so very brightly.

a good friend of gn,s’s commented at one point that we were “an apocalyptic band.” i’m not sure whether that description applies to every aspect of what we do, but the more i turn the phrase over in my mind the more i realize how applicable it is to my songwriting. i predict the failure of everything earthly. i predict the end of me, you, the national [no! surely not!, in my best (which is not very good) eddie izzard], cheap gas (these are not necessarily listed chronologically), amazon.com, hezbollah, those fake keychain carabiners, CDs, thai food, and then, eventually, money itself.

again, tremendous excitement. some days it feels more like anger, and i think maybe we’ll start recording protest songs. but even that is just sideways excitement. all through 2006, 2007, and 2008 (some of the “short films” songs were penned before that), i wrote about dissolution, the end of the old, inside & out. it’s an eternal truth, though sometimes writ very small in temporal circumstances; now, the graffiti’s so big it’s all you can see.

seriously. huge. hedge funds are going to start failing left and right. adjustments will continue, prime rates will stay near 0% for quite some time, deflation will deepen and spread despite the rabid out-of-control inflationary efforts of the Bush ‘N’ Barack economic policy, the u.s. will end up owing more money to china than even i personally care to consider for very long, and we will all lose money. a lot of it. (i think at last count there was something like $500 trillion+ to be “adjusted”–that means LOST, folks!–worldwide, but that might be now replaced by a bigger statistic.)

the weight of this presses down on my heart so hard that it’s like an energy there is being compressed and focused. all things appear in great clarity. the urgency, the need to put pen to paper and hands to instrument is almost overwhelming at moments.

certainly, there is the temptation to feel guilty, but at it’s core this is not a situation of rejoicing at the losses of others–far from it, in fact. art exists beyond all reason as a struggling, defiant expression of all that is real and true but unrepresented in circumstances. i write songs because my body’s motions everyday outline a universe to which i belong only secondarily. my left hand receives wages for the work it does. my right hand writes a lyric about the absurdity and emptiness of currency itself.

and this is beautiful. i find it breathtaking.

so, new record in 2009? yes.

what else are we going to do with all the new songs?