The new single from Jerin and myself is now available at Bandcamp for your listening and downloading pleasure!

Tell It To Me Straight by Kin to Stars at Bandcamp.

Super-happy to get this one out the door as it seems to be a crowd favorite at shows. Jerin wrote the chorus and first verse years ago, and brought it to one of our songwriting sessions last spring where she and I worked up the rest of the tune. The guitar and drum arrangements were done by me, using the DM6Kit and Garageband’s built-in amp modeling mojo.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell y’all that sharing a song via a tweet, a “like”, a “plus” or what-have-you is every bit as valuable as buying it these days. So please know that we appreciate your support no matter how you choose to express it. Which is a polite way of saying: you can haz piano pop? Yes, you can haz, and please haz it along to your piano pop-loving friends, too.

The Outfield – California Sun – Replay 2011 – YouTube. The return of one of my favorite bands from my youth, sounding exactly the same.

Adam Yauch and Paul’s Boutique: How dumb court decisions have made it nearly impossible for artists to sample the way the Beastie Boys did – Slate Magazine.

Results from our Audio Poll: Neil Young and High-Definition Sound. Nearly half of the people surveyed for this article could not tell the difference between an uncompressed WAV file and a compressed iTunes AAC file.

Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » You’ve Got To Be There For The Accident. Participation is mandatory. The next time some musician is bitching at you about how the internet and piracy is destroying everything, check their website (if they have one) and see how many gigs they’re playing, the date of their last release, the number of fans in their fanclub.

HBO Has Only Itself To Blame For Record ‘Game Of Thrones’ Piracy – Forbes. And this more or less outlines why I’m agreement with The Oatmeal (NSFW) and not Andy Ihnatko. It’s bad enough when a popular show like GoT isn’t available, but we don’t just watch anymore. We tweet, we blog, we share, we make funny Team Lanister! t-shirts and head-on-a-stake cake pops and we can’t participate because there’s only one way to legally experience the show. Scarcity ain’t like it used to be.

So I was out in the front yard yesterday taking advantage of our early sunny weather to clean up the weed-choked planter by the front steps. I managed to grab ahold of some rooty, woody-stemmed thing and yank the contents of the planter out in a massive ball of roots and soil, and as I did this a single hornet came buzzing out.

There in the bottom of the empty planter was a hornet nest the size of a tennis ball. Lucky for me, the wayward hornet seemed to be the only tenant. It had found the drain hole at the bottom of the planter and decided to set up shop. As I went inside to get the wasp spray, I decided I was glad to find the nest now – otherwise we’d have hornets flying around our yard all summer and no clue where they came from.

I gave the paper nest a good soaking, and when no other hornets came out I tipped the planter into yard waste can. The nest rolled in and broke apart, revealing a honeycomb-like core. And nestled into the cells of the comb, in a tight little ring, were about eight totally gross hornet larvae.

My reaction was somewhere between ewww and cooool and as I leaned in for a closer look I realized that the way they were arranged reminded me of nothing so much as chambered bullets in a revolver. Which makes total sense because everyone knows hornets are nature’s small arms fire.

When the head hornet came back I squirted her too so she couldn’t shoot me with more hornets.

(Not my dog.)

Hey, when I redesigned this site late last year I scrapped a lot of stuff that I’m just now getting around to putting back. I never intended to turn comments off permanently, I basically just gave up on the design. They’re back on now, and eventually I’ll get around to bringing the Demo Club stuff back too. I was having all kinds of weird mental/emotional issues about the number of links and other garbage littering my old design. Actually, maybe that was just “winter.”

Turning off comments seems to be a thing and while I can respect the reasons some people have for doing so, I’ve never felt the action was very welcoming. I’m sure there are people out there with haters to deal with, and I suppose that the presence of haters indicates you’re doing something interesting. If you’ve earned a sizeable readership you’ve earned the right to moderate the incoming praise and/or scorn.

There’s just something off-putting about coming across an insightful blog that has commenting disabled, dispiriting when it includes a multi-point post outlining all the reasons they’ve turned off comments, and maybe a little graceless when the post goes on to state that people who wish to comment should start a blog of their own. A lot of this is done in the name of “raising the level of discourse” or whatever, with analogies involving living rooms and what should and should not be said in them.

If blogs are the living rooms of the web, there’s a contingent out there still covering their furniture in plastic wrap and asking us not to use the good cloth napkins. There is also spam, and haters. So — pull up the drawbridge and we’ll converse from our towers via Trackback smoke signals? Is Trackback still a thing?

Anyway, see you all on Facebook!