Man, I thought the rain was finally over in So Cal, but here it is, raining again. I think we got all of the Pacific Northwest’s rain for the season. Houses are sliding off of hillsides everywhere, streets are crumbling away… When will it end?

Picked up a copy of Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad the other day and was blown away. I loved Goodbye and Hello but had mixed feelings about some of the other stuff I’d heard. This album is really dreamy and groovy all the way through. One of the songs that most grabbed my attention was “Love from Room 109 at the Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway).” I’ve read that Buckley was originally an Orange County musician who performed locally, and The Islander sounded familiar, like I’d seen it around, so I looked it up. Indeed, there’s an Islander Motel not too far from here. On a whim, I went out to see it, with Happy Sad loaded into my iPod shuffle. I can’t say for sure it’s the same place, but the architecture is classic 60’s and it’s right near the beach (hence the ocean sounds in the song). The size of the hotel seems to fit the 109 room number. I resisted the urge to get out and actually look for it. Anyway… just a romantic gesture for a romantic song by a romantic artist.

Things have been too crazy around here lately to get anything musical done! Over the past several months, the building has had work done on the electrical system, plumbing, bathroom, and outside paint, and there’s still more work to be completed. It’s really hard to find any quiet time for studio work or even just Internet deejaying! I had hoped to edit together this great new Hungry Lucy interview feature for Chillcuts last Sunday, but it was impossible. I didn’t even do a show.

We’ve been working on a Pink Floyd cover, though, which is fun. It’s a bit easier to record a song you didn’t write, since it doesn’t require as much time and concentration. I don’t know if we’ll include it on our new album, since we already have the tracklisting selected and pre-mastering done. Who knows, though?

Went to the Apple store yesterday. Boy, is that place dangerous! So much cool stuff. I always want to get one of each… They were still out of the new iPod shuffles. Turns out they have a waiting list! Sheesh. Anyway, I picked up the new iLife suite. Hopefully I will have a better time of upgrading it this time around. I’m excited about the new iPhoto books and the fact that I can now import my digital camera’s movie files into the program. Yay! I wish iWorks had been a part of this software suite, instead of it being bundled with Keynote. Seems like a weird decision on Apple’s part, but I suppose they will sell a heck of a lot more Keynotes this way! iWorks looks pretty cool, hopefully it’s worth the cash. I’m totally over AppleWorks and I don’t like the idea of using Word. Macentric, I know!

Just found out about a place that sells FLAC (and OGG) files online. I was just talking about that concept, too. The only catch is, it costs artists $50 a year to use their service plus they take a cut of each sale. Whole albums sell for just $8.99, which is a bit cheap considering they take almost half of that. So I don’t know if that’s what we’d want to do. Probably better to set up our own online store with FLAC files. Or SHN files. Anyway, the site URL is www.mindawn.com. Trippy.

It seems like we always come back to the question of genre with our music. It’s unfortunate that promotions rely on super specific categories, but that’s just the way it is. The music world is like a giant data base in that way. Folks want to be able to put each band and release into a box so that they can stack it up with other boxes into neat little tables (data base “tables,” not dining room “tables”). I can understand the need to organize information like that, but with something like music it isn’t always so simple. Sure, some bands are totally fine making a career out of one style of music writing, song after song, album after album, but we aren’t. Since 1999, Ryan and I have shifted musical styles drastically, and since 1991, Ryan has made some pretty dramatic evolutions in his sound.

I’m thinking today about the fact that our last album, Windblown Kiss, is listed as “Jazz.” While that is a very cool genre and all, it really doesn’t successfully describe our CD. Nor does “Electronica” really represent the myriad styles of LSD’s retrospective collection, Temporal. Our upcoming album could be listed under either of those genres, and either way it would be missing the whole “Rock” element also inherent in the songs. Not only are the songs each of different genre varieties, but many of the songs themselves are a mix of genres. So how the heck are we going to categorize this one? And how is our band itself being classified?