Hey People!

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I'm excited to say I have a few more shows coming up in the near future.  The locations include ..Boston.., Philly, ..New York.., and good old ..Mont.. ....Clare.., ..USA.....

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I'll be back up in the ..Boston.. area (....Cambridge.... actually) at Club Passim with my friends Syd and Luke Brindley on September 13^th.

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Then the following weekend I'll be joined on stage at World Café Live by my longtime friend Brad Saville.  The show is on September 19^th with Syd and Fooling April.

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The Mont Clare show on October 3^rd will be held at St. Michael's pavilion park in Mont Clare, PA.  I'll be playing with Phil Roy somewhere between 4 and 8pm.  More details will be available soon.

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Then on October 14^th I'll be back at my favorite ....New York.... venue, The Bitter End.  I'll be performing solo at 7:30 pm for an hour long set.  New songs… new jokes… I hope to see you there!

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The two digital tracks, You South Dakota and The Blues were released about two months ago and I just wanted to say thanks to all of you for the kind words on the tracks.   All the show details are available online at ToddMartinMusic.com and the new tunes are available on iTunes and CDBaby.com.  Please enjoy responsibly.  See you soon!!!

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Todd

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Next week on ToddMartinMusic... a longer posting...

Time flies when you're not writing in this thing.    Last entry was about the Dogwood festival.   I remember that thing being SO much bigger when I was young.  It was fun anyway.  Now, moving on…

This one is going to be short.  I'm posting some new dates soon.  There are some more to put up out in Milwaukee.  I'm playing from Sunday to Thursday out there during the biggest music festival in the world...SUMMERFEST!!!

Prior to that though, there are a few the weekend before.   I'm really happy to be headed up to Boston to join El Chado Perrone for his CD release party at the Paradise Rock Club.  I'll be there with some other guests and probably everyone who's cool in Boston enjoying the show.

The Who's That Pack fellas and I are playing a little private show on Saturday.  It'll be nice to be back together again on stage. 

Then there is one more show prior to the Wisconsin trip.  I'm playing out in Rockaway, NJ at a house concert.  Check it out on the site or here on myspace.

Ready? … break!

todd

[This is going to be a short one]..

Cue the dream sequence music and fog machine...

I remember when I was a little tike my mom would take me over the Mont Clare bridge to Phoenixville around this time of year to head to the Dogwood Festival.  It's a small fun-ride, alley-game, Ferris wheel type of a carnival.  It was always a good time with Funnel Cake, cotton candy, soft pretzels, Music and little mini-rollercoaster that used to look so much bigger when I was 40 inches tall.

Well, the point is, I'm playing this year as part of the music for Saturday night.  The whole thing takes place at ...Reeves Park in Phoenixville, PA right on route 29.   I go on at 7:30 pm THIS Saturday the 17^th.

I hope I see some of you there AND I hope I get paid in stuffed animals.

todd

This is a bit out of the ordinary but I'm working on building a set list this week for the Tin Angel show.  I've never built a set list this far in advance.  The Show is with Pat McGee at the Tin Angel NEXT Monday the 12th... so I'm more than a week ahead of time. 

It made me think of fun ways I've built set lists in the past just before a show and I thought I'd divulge a few of them here on this blog.

Usually between sound-check and show-time  I find myself backstage, or downstairs, or in a nearby café (depending on what the venue has to offer) building a list of songs I want to play for that show.   Usually I just rattle them off from my head until I have enough written down + a few extra.  Then they have to be put in order…

Here are some of the general order types I've used in the past

Alphabetically – I've done this a few times when feeling a little too busy or crunched for time.   I'd just take all the song titles and recall my ABCs to order them.   The problem with that… well it makes no sense from a performance angle.  It's just simply alphabetical.

Chronological – This way is actually pretty fun for me.  I'd just take the oldest song and put if first, then proceed up through the newest song.  It kind of shows the changes in my writing style.  From 'What You Want' to 'Safe from the Water' there are a few big steps in different directions.

Black and White cookie – I just made that up after recalling a Seinfeld episode where he's talking about the best of both worlds but it makes sense for the following form.  This is probably my most frequent set list form I use.  I simply take a particular characteristic of a song on the list like, tempo, key, mood, or just whether or not I use loops in the songs.  Then I just take the opposite of that characteristic and put a song that fits that description right after the first one.  So it goes back and forth, up-tempo, down-tempo…  fast then slow then fast, etc.  Or A simple 1 guitar and 1 vocal song to a song like 'What you Want' where I have a pretty loop heavy ending with 3 vocals and about 3 guitar parts layered in there.   I generally don't like to put to make loop songs in a row.  It hurts my head.  This form also works with old vs. new as the black and white.

The set list I'm building for the Tin Angel show, I think that's going to be a whole new format entirely!

Todd

And ...Boston...I give you a Passim show...with the WinterPills, your new favorite band.  I'm really excited for this one too...but we'll all have to wait a bit.  It's not until July 12th at Club Passim. You, me (post hibernation) and a few more science nuggets for you to chew on.

The latest invention... its not really a product invention, but more like a concept. 

New Yorkers, Bostonians... all you city folk.  I'm not sure if you're aware of it or not but every time you order delivery... there are an awful lot of waste containers generated.  I do it a LOT.  The containers are really cheap and you don't really see it in the price of what you order... but you see it in the recycle bin and eventually floating down the river behind you mom's house in the suburbs downstream from the frat houses.  Recycling = good but not 100% efficient and if you didn't HAVE to recycle a piece of something... you're better off ReUSING it.  We'd save a little waste in the big cities across the nation.   Here is how...

I'm not saying this is the end-all be all for every delivery place... but maybe it suits the city delivery joints.  Here is the plan.  Stainless containers...thin yes, stainless yes, washable yes,  heavier...yeah ok... but wasteful NO. 

If the delivery place had stainless containers of the same size as their polyethylene $0.001 containers they could offer them as 'rentable' pieces let's say. 

If this plan were implemented... When I order once from a sushi place on the corner, they can charge me $3 more for the container the first time.  Then the next delivery I could give them a clean-ish container in return and wouldn't get charged for the food containers I just ordered in the new stainless container(s).  It's like a one time up front charge... then you return the last container that you were given each time.  

 The delivery places can even put advertisements on them and stamp their names on there so they make sure that they get theirs back.   Maybe it's 'out-there' a bit but I think people would dig it.  I'm sure it'll have to be a 'returned clean' policy and then on top of it... to please the FDA and the customers alike... the restaurant would have to sterilize them, but that's something they already do with their current dishes, right?   

If you lose a dish or don't have one clean to return, you pay another $3 for the new one.  If you return two...and only get one with your order... $3 off.

Any restaurant owners out there? Anyone know a restaurant owner?  Anyone ever eaten food?  Comment….a-ready-go

I've been working on writing a bit and booking the odd show here or there.  This time the 'there' is in Philly and it's a great pleasure to announce that it's with Pat McGee.

We're playing at the Tin Angel in Philadelphia on May 12^th at 8pm. 

It's at south 2^nd street, Philadelphia, PA 19106 above Serrano's.

Go to  http://www.tinangel.com/  The site says 8:30 … but IGNORE that.   I go on at 8pm.   8 Pee Emm Eastern Standard Time.

More to come - See you soon!

Todd

1a) Man, I used to love that game.   For some of you youngins out there it was probably the first game you had ever seen... no, no... it wasn’t the first game ever.  I think SimCity 1800 was.  It was for my Commodore 64.

1b) I can’t believe no one commented on the "knighted" feeling from the last blog.  What the hell is that supposed to mean?

2) Speaking of lists... I was just adding some movies to my Netflix Queue (a giant 382 item list that I’ve strategically organized to suit my mood over the next few months...or days, depending on how fast the USPS people can get them to me.

3) This is not really a list of things (above) but below is a real list of things that I invented.... or thought I invented...until I started reading more science and technology websites and the like.

Awesome ideas  (I’m not going to number them starting with 1 because then it’ll look like that was my first idea....and it in fact was not.... it’s just my "A"th idea on this list)

A) A universal credit card that has all your information on it.  Maybe it’s got every card in your wallet from your Blockbuster card to CVS, to you Discover Card.  Anything with a magnetic strip has some form of information about you on it. Why can’t someone make something that a consumer would buy and perhaps hook up to a computer so that they can drop all their credit cards onto a single ID card.  I’ve found, after much searching, that someone beat me to this idea (which is totally fine by the way... I don’t care to go through the work of building or creating the products listed here at all... I just want SOMEONE to do for me so I can buy the blasted thing).  Anyway... it seems the company that I found that is working on something similar to this just hasn’t put it ’out’ yet.  It’s called a ’chameleon card’ or some cool marketable name like that...but the point is... it’s coming.   I think the company was up in the Boston area somewhere.  Good work guys.   If anyone out ’there’ knows of a company that already has something on the market like this, please let me know.  I’ll stop using quotes around ’everything’ if you can feed me some ’info’ about it.

B)  Geez, maybe I shouldn’t list them all here... but here is my other favorite idea of late.   The Energy Gym, Power Plant Gym...or some cool name like that.  My idea here is that I used to see tons of people working out in gyms in Boston everyday.  Riding a bike, tugging ..ing machines, walking on the stair-climbers, etc…forget the free-weight people...but everyone else.  Think of the power being wasted!!!  Each of those bikers, rowers, or whatever you call the people on the elliptical machines could be collecting the Watts that they generate every time they visit.  All the energy could be captured the same way that wind mills and hydro-power plants work.  They basically turn something (picture a motor in reverse) and it generates electrical current.  That’s nothing new.  At the time, I thought that the idea of attaching it to the equipment might have been, still, it’s not been implemented in a Gym I’ve been in so I thought that was pretty clever.  But it’s not the end of my concept.  The whole reason you collect that energy is simply so that it’s not wasted.  If one person can generate enough power to supply energy to a light above their head while they’re there... then the gym doesn’t have to pay an electric company for the energy that light bulb would have required.   If you’re still with me at this point I think you get the picture.  Anyone not interested in this would have stopped reading after the first few lines. 

Anyway... In an on-grid system... if somehow enough people work out and generate enough electricity that it’s in excess of what the gym is using, there are state and federal regulations that require the electric company to buy that electricity from you (as if you were a power plant, hence my name "Power Plant Gym").  From what I understand, they actually are required to buy it from you at the same price as you would have bought it from them.   So let’s say the gym members are capable of doing this.  They can generate more power in one day than the gym requires to remain open.  That’d be awesome.  I went on further to imagine a way of tracking people’s performance.  Let’s say you would have paid $100 a month for this membership but instead.... the gym offers an incentive plan for it’s members.  Sign up and come for free if you can generate X kilowatt hours per week.  The member’s IDs could be used to log them into each machine and track their performance during their time there.  They’d work out for free AND feel even better about doing it!  Or maybe that’s just me  Anyway... [wow this is long].  

Syd and I were on a trip one time a few years back and I was telling him about this idea.  A year or so later he told me that he read about Richard Branson (of Virgin Records, Airlines, etc) was building some kind of Gym on the energy collection premise.  I was excited until I heard it was in Japan.   I’m not sure if it all went through... but I know that I’d sign up tomorrow for any gym in my area that offered this kind of plan + technology.   Damn I love science!

The rest of the ideas will have to wait.  It’s getting late and I still have to work on my revisions for this dang time-machine.

Talk to you soon.

Todd

I’m starting a new-ish plan.   The plan is simply to take a little more time to write in this blog and make numbered lists of things I like and dislike...

1) I don’t like the word ’blog’ as a verb.  It’s a noun I think.  I can’t say for sure b/c I haven’t ’wiki’ed it yet.  More on this later.

2) Do you remember AOL IM? ha - I liked that...but mostly when I was working and could use it to talk to a good friend/engineer.  Were we talking about working business?  Um, sometimes.

3) I LOVE the new Copeland album.  It’s like listening to deathcab AND  ryan adams all at once if the two bands were playing the same song, that is.   I’m not saying its like listening to Into That Dark and Avalanche simulateously... though that might be an interesting combination.

4) lists - I love them.

... more to come ...
tm

p.s. knighted ????

Alright well here I am driving.  This is truly a "road journal".  What it amounts to is me driving my car, the bubble shaped Prius, and talking into a talk and type device.  It's kind of like a live blog with all kinds of errors in it.  I guess I just wanted to talk about what I've been doing lately. 

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I'm really excited about this CD that will be coming out in late August.  It's called Mont Clare and its badass.  Note: the talk and type feature really struggled with "badass".  We'll have to fix that.  And I'd also like to talk about this tour that I'm doing with the who's backpack... what?  Not who's backpack... I said the who's that pack.  Not you've got it.

The CD that I've been working on since January is almost ready.  Keith Karlson, Brian Factor, Dave Chalfant, ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Brazzaville... that's Brad Saville and myself came together to record an epic masterpiece called Mont Clare.  I might be teaming up this record with a live release as well but that's still up in the air a little bit.  The live release is with tracks from live performances with my band called the ends.  Oh you don't want to capitalize that??  Bygones.

The CD has tracks from a bunch of new material that I've been writing since November.  We started a record in January and so many of the songs evolved while we were still in the studio.  I've been playing a lot of the songs live and I really like the way they come across solo but I think I'm looking forward to releasing a CD even more because there's so many different textures are we've added to each song that can give the songs totally different dynamics.

During pre-production for this CD I went and spoke with Dave Chalfant about some of the ideas I had for this album.  David I talked about how we're going to use different instruments and different sounds as characters on some of the pieces.  That sounds outlandish.  I know a lot of people do it but I really wanted to experiment with it on my own this time.  One of the tracks I think the played into the most is called "the weather". In this song there is one character represented by an electric guitar that has a consistent part in the song the repeats and stays strong throughout the song this character is a level-headed reasonable person.  (wow, a hyphen?)  There's another guitar that plays the other character in the song that is a little bit off the wall and crazy at times.  That guitar part never really resolves to a consistent behavior throughout the entire song.  One of the characters and the story is battling with a problem and the other is trying to help solve the problem or at least provide some kind of support for the other character.  I really like the way it came together because when I listen to the song now… that's what I'm listening for.  I know that until it's spelled out for some people it may not be something so obvious but I hope you get it in the long run.

Another song where this takes place is called "for better".  This one is more of a call and answer part.  The call on answer doesn't take place in a vocal form though.  It's really more like a tonal call and answer guitar part.  It takes place towards the end of the song and supposed to symbolize two characters' communication about committing to each other.  The song is a long one but I really like the way decided on accepting that.  There's actually a part in the song that talks about leaving space at the ending "for what we've not seen".  This is supposed to be very literal representation of the song subject.  It starts off talking about how you would write a song that describes a relationship that you're in and in the end the song IS the relationship to a certain extent.  Somewhere in the middle of the song we go from discussing the past, to living in the present, to attempting to examine where we're going in the future.  The result of that examination is supposed to be unsettled but still positive, that is to say, it doesn't matter where we go as long as it's together.  It's the last track on the CD for some of the same reasons that "time for good" was the last track on that CD.  A really like the way the song came together and I think it was one of the last tracks on the album to be formed. 

I really can't say enough about Dave Chalfant's contribution to this album.  I came to him with 12 or 15 songs that might've had four or five different solid ideas but it wasn't until we started preproduction that we flushed out some of the stringy ideas and really made them into what you'll hear.  We took those original 12 to 15 songs, tossed out the trash, and prepared 11 fine little ditties.  I'm so excited for this record to be ready.  I wish it were in my hands now so you could hear it.

Now, about that news that pack... no... who's that pack.  This tour is could be a law.  I tried to have it type "this tour is going to be the bomb" and it said "this tour is could be a law"... so now I guess it's "a law" too.  I'm going on tour with Tim Blane, Chad Perrone, Patrick Thomas and Syd.   We're not doing the standard in-the-round performance that you might expect.  We're doing something more along the lines of a five person multi-instrumental singer-songwriter troop.  It's going to be "the law".  Note: that time was intentional.

So where do we go from here I could say what I've been listening to the last couple weeks.  Or the last couple months since I last wrote you a news article or blog.  Let's see... I'm pulling out my iPod right now... I've been playing a lot of Steve Tannen and the week piece... gasp, yeah, that's what I want to say... read these... no... weepies.  There, I had to type it.  What else?  I can't get enough of Madi Diaz.  She's phenomenal.  And what can I say … I've been listening to Tim Blane's new record nonstop.

Last I played with Val Emmich and Joey DeGraw at the knitting factory.  It was my first show in the main space.  It was a light crowd but I really enjoyed playing in that room.  Val was fantastic.  I hadn't seen before but we have a lot of mutual friends and I'd heard good things.  But last night really was a pleasure.  The rest of the night went smoothly and I had a great time.  I met some girls from Holland.  I'm a pretty big deal there.  Not really, I'm just kidding, but not really, but really.  Wow this thing actually tracks pretty well now.  The only thing I need to teach it is how to type out "ha" when I laugh.  I guess it just takes time.

So I think that about wraps it up for this road journal.  The New Jersey Turnpike is behind me I'm now on the Pennsylvania Turnpike which means I'm nearing my old hometown of yes, you guessed it, Mont Clare.  It's time to go.  Signing off and getting this ridiculous Britney Spears shaped microphone out of my face... as always thanks for reading and listening and coming to shows... take care of yourselves.

Todd