LoveYourSong.com Got a Facelift, a Tummy-tuck, and Open Heart Surgery!

For those of you who may not know, I maintain a site dedicated to indie music which has been in operation for three years (pretty long considering the shelf-life of most blogs!). However, much to my chagrin, due to an errant mouse click or two, I somehow managed to delete the whole site in one singular moment of terror. At that moment I knew it was either the end of my much-neglected site, or the opportunity for a rebirth. Deciding upon the latter I have spent much of the last few days salvaging what posts I had on a database and redesigning the site. This all might turn out to be a great thing for the site, since the biggest reason for me not posting new content was the difficulty I had with my custom CMS system I had built in days of yore when I was just learning PHP. Now I’m using WordPress and life is better.

So, without further ado, I give you LoveYourSong.com 1.9 (not 2.0, that’s for you John). I can’t take all the credit for this most awesome design. iStockphoto helped a bit.

Guitar Quartet #1

I’ve had a few riffs floating around in my head for a few years now and decided now would be a good time to actually lay them down in some semblance of a song. I was pretty pleased with the sketch that resulted. I haven’t yet attempted words and vocals, so for now all it is is a numbered, instrumental for four guitars (and baby fussing in it’s sleep).

 

 Guitar Quartet #1 [3:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

404

I’ve been a little behind on my rss reading so I’ve been trying to catch up this week. This morning I read this one at Simplebits on unique or outstanding 404 pages. It was fun looking at all the creative/useful ways people found to customize their 404 pages, but it was about when I got to this one that I thought, why make 404 pages with lots of helpful search info? I mean, most sites do nothing but show 404′s when the URL doesn’t resolve. So that means most users are pretty used to seeing them. At least for me, when I see a custom 404 page with “helpful” info it takes me a few seconds to realize that this isn’t a content page that I searched for. If it looked at least something like a typical un-custom 404 page then I know exactly what to do. But that one or two seconds of “wait just a minute, this is a 404 page!” is far too costly for my liking. So as for me and my site, all you get is this, or if you’re really lucky, this.

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

Well, looking at our calendar we realized we wouldn’t have any time to record our song before next week if we didn’t do it tonight. And I’ll be darned if I don’t meet my goal of a song a week, so that’s what we did. This was a quick recording so it’s rough, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I love my wife’s simple voice. So perfect for a folk hymn like this one.

Of note with this version of the classic Christmas song: since we adapted the words to the melody of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, the five original versus didn’t quite work. I did some searching online and found a really old version of the poem that had a 6th verse, so we threw it in.

 

 I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Silent Night (almost)

This week’s song is entitled Silent Night (almost). Almost because the room I recorded in was not exactly silent. If you listen really closely you’ll hear a baby sucking on a bottle in the background and a dog wining at a door it’s been banished behind. Also, almost because I take a fair amount of creative liberties.

I plan to do one more Christmas song this year (yes, beloved co-workers, I do actually appreciate Christmas music, just not two months prior). Next week’s song will feature an adaptation of I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day set to the melody of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. My kind of Christmas music . My wife sings melody so it will suck significantly less than my usual weekly song, so stay tuned!

 

 Silent Night (almost): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download