Shameless Spousal Promotion

Exciting news! Rock n' roll songwriter Steven Gullett, friend of the blog and my husband of a serious-long-ass-time, has a new EP coming out today!

Since we've moved to California, he's focused less on performing and more on writing and recording. I'm particularly proud of him for this record, since it was created entirely in our dining room and he plays every last instrument on the damn thing.

Also: the songs are pretty great ("My History" is a personal favorite; Track 1 is, as you might imagine, NSFW).

1. Fuck Your Revolution
2. Falling Down is Easy
3. My History
4. My Monkey
5. Some Kind of Ghost
6. Hanging By a Thread

This is a digital-only release, available wherever you prefer your digital music served. You can also stream it or pay-what-you-want for a limited time by downloading it from Bandcamp.

Please give it a listen!

Back In The Saddle

Hello, poppets!

As you can probably tell from the cobwebs and dust around here, I've been insanely busy in other parts of my life. Which is good, because it means our little family business has been booking work and keeping the kitties in high-end organic treats, now with extra calming compounds. Manuscript got formatted. Books got edited. Websites got built. Rock shows were attended and Zombie Radio went to Vegas.

WZMB LIVE, NOT UNDEAD: Craig Sabin, Barri Willerford, moi, and James Mathers

I love this picture, except for the way my eyes and lips disappear. Seriously, I need to remember to wear makeup more often. Oh well.

At any rate, I've missed the blog, and I've missed all of you, and I've been thinking about TONS of things to post about. So I am happy to report that regular posting will hereby resume. In the meantime, have a 2-minute rock song.



The Henry Clay People - The Honey Love He Sells from Jam in the Van on Vimeo.

On Asking For Favors

So as some of you may have heard, the Songwriter has a new solo album, Secular Jukebox, coming out this summer.

Speaking of the record, you can listen and comment here, 

or sample and buy your very own copy from Amazon, iTunes, or CD Baby. 

It is an amazing album. And every purchase helps keep the kitties in food. 

Don't buy it because I said so. Buy it because my cats are cute. 

Or, you know, because you love good music. That's nice too.

It won't make us rich, but we try to break even so we can keep making more art. It's like a little cottage industry, really. He writes, plays and records the thing. We both pitch in to do promo work. And then he plays the gigs and hawks the record there, too. Here in the House of DIY, we do it all. And what we can't do, we have to ask for as a favor.

Now, I'm not so awesome at asking for help. This is because I secretly believe I am a missing X-Man whose mutant superpower is being able to do every single solitary thing that crosses my path and do it perfectly or nearly so, without a smidgen of help from anyone ever. I help them, you see, not the other way around.

This belief has not been so beneficial to me, as you might imagine.

So I have had to try and teach myself to ask for favors, and I've come up with some internal guidelines that might be useful to other folks, possibly those afflicted with similar X-Men style delusions.

1. Be relaxed and cultivate an atmosphere where it is okay for your friend to say no. Better to get a 'no' and stay friends and move on than to get a 'yes' that colors your relationship with resentment and obligation.
2. When someone does say yes, experience and express sincere gratitude. This is good for both of you.
3. Never ask somebody to do for free what they do for a living unless its a very good cause, it also benefits them in some way, or they owe you one.

You've probably noticed that these are all about drawing boundaries. There's a reason for that. Boundaries help. I'm not saying boundaries are always awesome and made of ice cream and butterscotch and should never be challenged. But they should always be clear, so if you are going to break them, you have a pretty strong idea why. They make everybody more secure and more comfortable. Good fences, good neighbors, etc. And good friends and neighbors are the kind that might be willing to do you a favor.

Dreams Do Come True: Sweet Demotion by Lonn Friend

When I was a little girl, I thought I was going to be a rock star.

And then somewhere along the way, I thought that, not only would I BE a rock star, I would also MARRY a rock star. And maybe be an actress. And live happily ever after in sunny Los Angeles. (There is a woman who DID get that life. And I wouldn't trade mine for hers under any circumstances.)

The man who helped feed that dream was Lonn Friend.

While I was growing up in Ohio, he was travelling the world chronicling rock n' roll excess in RIP Magazine. And every month, I made a pilgrimage to the 7-Eleven by my grandma's house to buy the new issue.

In those pages, I would read about new bands that were making waves on the Sunset Strip, what it was like to be the first hard rock act in the Eastern Bloc, and what Lita Ford's mom thought kids should do about their problems.

Lonn Friend made that world real to me, from 2000 miles away.

Fast-foward to now: I do in fact live in Los Angeles. I am married to the Songwriter. I am not a rock star, but I'm a writer and that's better for all concerned.

Through happenstance and the Songwriter's Facebook, we meet Lonn Friend for breakfast. I am trying to be cool, but inside, I am screaming "THIS IS LONN FUCKING FRIEND!!" He tells us great rock stories and we buy a platinum album to hang on our wall (look to your right and you'll see it in my profile pic).

He mentions he's working on a new book. I mention I'm a writer and an editor.

We talk about kismet, and the cosmos, and synchronicity, and what it feels like to try and redefine yourself along spiritual lines when you've lost the things you thought were all-important. He tells me he's still looking for angels in this city, and maybe he's found another one. He asks if I'd like to read his new book, maybe take an editorial pass at it.

Are you fucking kidding me? Uh, yeah!

So I did. And I am here to tell you, it is a righteous piece of writing.

As of this month, Sweet Demotion: How an Almost Famous Rock Journalist Lost Everything and Found Himself (Almost) lives and breathes. You can buy it here, among other places. And I feel so ridiculously lucky to have been even a small part of it.

Rock on, Mr. Friend. Rock on.