This coming Monday is the deadline for the Aimee Mann YouTube contest.

I don't really like contests all that much but sometimes I need a deadline just to get out of my recurring hebetude. If it was months away I probably wouldn't have entered, but I found out about the contest the week before I was leaving for Northern California and knowing that I only had five days to write and record the song was too much of a challenge to resist.

The contest was to make a video of yourself singing the song "Freeway" from Aimee's new album. I sat and listened to the song a couple of times and decided I would just let it swirl in my head for a while and see how it develops. Three days later, when I went into the CHAOS to record the track, it had evolved into a completely different song but with the Aimee's lyrics. Matt Lynott and Jane Lui joined me in the studio and with Christopher Hoffee behind the board we finished the track by evening.

That left one week to do the video while I was in Northern California. So I stuck a camera into my nephew, Scott's hands and we got to work. It took longer than I expected to film. But mostly because I was laughing so hard. We were blasting the track out of the car speakers at full volume but at half speed so I felt like I was in some bad, slow motion action sequence.

The results can be viewed here, in my first official YouTube video:

You can see the other contest entries here:

http://youtube.com/groups_videos?name=aimeemanncontest&page=1

I'm up in San Francisco right now. It's 2 AM and I just got back from playing the open mic at the Hotel Utah. It was my first time there but definitely not my last; I will for sure be coming back to play shows. The room is great, the crowd was incredibly enthusiastic, and I got to listen to good new music all night.

So after my set, I'm sitting on one of the wooden benches in the corner and a man approaches and tells me he wants to buy a CD. I never sell a record to someone without first meeting them so we exchange greetings and he says his name is Klaus. My brain has this game where it holds on to key people from the annals of my mental and emotional development and shouts out their names whenever it hears something similar. "Klaus Flouride" my brain shouts. But of course...I stared at the back cover of the Dead Kennedys' album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables for endless days in middle school trying to figure out who in the picture was Klaus Flouride and who was Jello Biafra. (The best part? It wasn't even a picture of them. It was a picture of an old lounge band called The Sounds of Sunshine!).

He hands me 10 dollars, I hand him the CD, he says he liked my performance, and my brain says "Klaus Flouride". Later I pick up my guitar from the floor..."Klaus FLOORide". On the way to my car I pass a bike rider..."Klaus FlouRIDE". Okay, okay, brain, enough, all ready.

But by the time I get back to the house where I'm staying, I'm completely unnerved. I look up Klaus Flouride to find a recent picture and right there on his myspace profile page is a picture of the Klaus who bought my CD.

I can't believe I just sold my CD to Klaus Flouride from the Dead Kennedys. I started playing guitar because of the Dead Kennedys. I started my first punk band when i was 14 because of the Dead Kennedys. I got through high school because of the Dead Kennedys. My album wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for the Dead Kennedys. Klaus Flouride is entitled to take as many of my CDs as he wants

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[GF Trivia Tidbit 1]: When I was in high school, I had my own Dead Kennedys style logo that I would put on everything. Something along the lines of:

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My song, Story Street, was voted #1 Acoustic Song in Round 1 of the OurStage.com April competition. Round 2 winners are determined by text voting and anyone can vote.

Anyone with 50 cents that is. 

As much as I like that Round 1 uses OurStage's "patent-pending judging system [which] eliminates cheaters" I'm a bit uncomfortable encouraging people to use Round 2's "patent-pending take all of my fans' money" system.  As democratic as the system is,  you can still guarantee that you win if you've got the most cash.  Which I guess is not so far off from the current state of democracy.

Now if you dig text voting and you've got 50 cents that you want to get rid of I would be thrilled to have you text ACOUS03 to 78243 to vote for my song. 

Vote for Story Street

Tim Pyles will be talking about my new record and playing "Story Street" on the Local Members Of The Day feature at 9 PM/PST on FM 94.9. You can listen online at http://www.fm949sd.com/listen.

And when you're done listening, let them know how much you liked hearing it and that you want to hear it again by sending an email to Tim Pyles at tim@fm949sd.com.

The more requests they get, the more often they'll play it.  The more they play it, the more impressed my mother will be.  So you see, it's all for a good cause.

Jeanne said to me the other day, after hearing an old instrumental song of mine, "I hope you have that written down." What do I need to write it down for? I've been playing it for over a year. It's just ingrained in my brain.

But the next time I went to play it...it was gone.  She had made me think about it and the mere awareness of it obscured my knowledge of how to play it.

Finally, after a significant struggle, I remembered how to play the song. But writing it down proved elusive.  Apparently, I can only play the bridge of the song quickly. When I try to slow my fingers down to figure out what I'm doing, the part just doesn't come out.

It's a strange feeling to realize that my fingers know something I don't.

Thanks to everyone who came out to my record release party on Saturday. It was an honor to play for you. And a special thanks to those of you that couldn't get in but still stood outside the venue to watch the show through the doorway.