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I’ve been working hard on a 9 song Snakepants and Rocco project with my best friend Tim Skrewed of Bedpan Fight. It’s called “9 Parts Cat’s Asshole”, named for our description of Black Velvet. Real high-brow stuff. These are Tim’s songs, and they are straight-up catchy pop-punk anthems. It’s about 83% done at this point, with nothing but a few guitar parts and a bunch of harmonies to track. I hope to have it done in April.

Then after that I’m going to dust off my own mohawk* and work on smalltime vault’s return to punk rock roots. There will be a few old punk songs. There will be a few new punk songs. There may even be an old Einstein song or two.

* figuratively speaking, as I’ve never actually had a mohawk. But I did go to court for vandalism defaming the elderly. That’s more punk than a mohawk, right?

The first smalltime vault album is now completely tracked and mixed!

Big shout-out to Crazy Merv, who played the drums for three of these songs. He didn’t know he was playing the drums for these songs though. I tricked him. We recorded a demo of cover songs for our bar-band Go Gadget Go. I stole the drum tracks and re-recorded my own music over them, without ever telling him. He thinks he’s playing Cranberries, The Outfield, and J. Geils instead of 1000 Year Sleep, The Millionth Piece, and Cordelia. You’re awesome, Merv!

The last project on the list was to get Rich Cook’s vocals on Brass Cat Devilry. It was a lot harder to convince him that he was really just recording covers for Gadget. I was all like “Let’s record Abracadabra by Steve Miller.”

He was all like “I don’t know the words.”

And I was all like “I wrote them down for you.”

Then he read the devil-part for my song and was all like “None of these seems familiar to me. Are you quite certain that this is Abracadabra?”

“DRINK THE WHISKEY AND YELL THE WORDS ON THE PAPER, RICH”

But seriously, thanks to Rich! No, I didn’t write devil words for him because he is the worst person ever (at least 4th or 5th on that list…). I wanted Rich yelling the devil part because he is a bad-ass, hardcore yelling machine.

For now these songs are only available on the Soundcloud Playlist on the web. I’m going to start doing my homework to get them on iTunes and Spotify and what-have-you. This homework effort will be parallel with an effort to tighten up my drum mix and start working on the next album. That’s where I’ll stray far away from all this genre-line-crossing and sissy-stuff. It’s time to get back to my punk rock roots. 

It took more than just a few drinks to get the courage to create a Facebook page. But I’ve created the page, where I’ll always be too scared to invite any one there with an unfinished website.  I have zero fans and zero likes right now! Not even my wife! Oh well. I guess this is as soft as a soft-opening can get. This opening is softer than a newborn duck, fresh out of the dryer.

The Soundcloud player seems to be working. So don’t be a player-hater.

I’m up to my asspits in task-lists right now. Web page stuff. Grahic design stuff. Social site stuff. And I still have to record one last vocal track before I can really say that smalltime vault has a self-release. I just established my Soundcloud page and uploaded most of the tracks there. I guess I’ll have to take the plunge and make a FB page for this music later too. I’ll probably need a few drinks before I’m willing to take said plunge. I’ve prided myself on being one of the last bastions of social networking refusal so far. So this is terrifying for me.