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Happy holidays everyone, I hope 2016 didn’t do any damage to your face or hands. Everyone says this year was bad, but I’ve been hating years for years over here. Most are wildly overrated.

Anyway, in celebration of the end of this garbage-ass timespan, here’s a 2016 mix of Fuck You, Motherfucker (It’s Christmas):

Originally written and released by John Benjamin on December 22, 2002, I recorded my version on December 23, 2009. My intention was for it to grow to become an Instant Holiday Classic (IHC), an irritating radio staple that once a year would make me wealthy beyond my wildest Christmas imaginings. This plan has not yet come to fruition.

JB has a band called Ménage À Garage.

I continue on as Brad Sucks.

Good luck in 2017.

What a big Record Store Day I’ve got coming up this Saturday. My friend Dan at Backbeat Music suggested we press some Making Me Nervous postcard flexidiscs. And now they exist:

POSTCARD FLEXIS

See, it’s a postcard? But if you put it on a turntable it’ll play a very scratchy, low-fidelity version of my song Making Me Nervous? Disclaimer: I’ve tested them a bit and some auto-return type turntables haven’t been able to play them so uh: no guarantees they’ll work on your system. But they’re neat!

If you want me to mail you one, just Paypal me $10 USD and send me your mailing address and I’ll get it out to you asap.

SHOWS

I’ll be doing an in-store (duo) performance at 3pm at Backbeat on Saturday. Everybody who buys a record gets a free flexidisc! Details here.

After that, I’m heading to Kingston to play a full-band Brad Sucks set at The Mansion in Kingston. Details here.

I think that’s it. After that, I’m gonna lay down for a while.

I did an interview for The Setup, where creative folk go into nerdy detail about the gear they use to get stuff done.

Status update: I’m still doing music full time in 2016! I’ve got some things I’m excited for you to hear/see but they ain’t ready yet. So here’s other stuff:

I’ve got a live show coming up on April 16. Details over on Facebook. If you’re near the place where it’s happening on the date and at the time that it happens, you should come inside the place and see a music show. 

I was on a couple podcasts recently if you wanna hear me talk with my dumb mouth. One of ‘em’s short and serious and the other’s long and wacky:

The Passionative Podcast [iTunes]

In this episode, I interviewed Brad Sucks, the OG of crowdfunding your album and one of the first people to give away his music for free online. Brad and I talk about how to trust yourself and your art, stop worrying about things being perfect and focusing on building a fan base instead.

The Crapshoot [iTunes]

We’re thrilled to welcome Brad back to the show for a deep dive on Stardew Valley. On the way, we also touch on Moshow the Cat Rapper, Stovokor, Axl Rose, Bee and Puppycat, Kickstarter entitlement syndrome, Undertale disruption, Josh’s impending spin-off podcast Quarter Quorner, John Campbell, blind-fire delivering psychology services, a series of tweets that Jesse never got over, veterinary rackets, Andre Agassi, getting involved in an ass tattoo, signatures versus Signature signatures, living in the formative and evolutionary age of video games, and what kind of murderer you would be.

Also I have a note here reminding myself that I’m way, way overdue on sending out my mailing list, so sign up for that if you want to get in on that.

I think that’s all for now. Thanks for reading. I enjoyed 10 Cloverfield Lane. 

Happy New Year to you all. I’m gonna do music full time in 2016, so that’ll be weird.

My pal Allen Henderson, who made the famous Which Way Game and Steamshovel Harry (that I did the music for) has a new website of his animation up. It’s full of secrets (hint: click the balloon on the first page.)

Also here’s some old test animation Allen did for a project called Frank and His Exposed Brain. I recorded three theme song ideas that you can hear there.

I believe the idea was that Frank would be having a normal day but then run into problems (birds, soccer balls, weather) because his brain was completely exposed.

I’ve been horsing around with Markov chains with the idea of developing some songwriting tools. One of my experiments seemed funny enough to make into its own Twitter bot. It mashes up VICE headlines into strange new ones. Some examples:

If this is something you need in your life, you can follow it here.

I’ve been winding down the “real” work (aka hourly, billable, profitable, stable) in favor of doing music full time (aka unlimited hours, not billable, unprofitable & very unstable) which has been slower and harder than I thought. But I’ve been finishing up a few projects and songs and getting ready to crank out new Brad Sucks material all over the place. Here’s what I’ve been up to in the first bit of 2015:

Bee & PuppyCat

I’ve written a few things for the awesome Bee & PuppyCat show that I’m excited about. The song I’m finishing this week is sung Felicia Day. I got to direct her via Skype which was a new and cool and frightening experience for me. It was pretty awesome to hear her singing words and a melody I wrote.

Natasha (B&P creator) posted this shot of me on the monitor in the studio while I was handsomely directing Felicia Day from my desk here in Canada:

It’s been really fun working on this, I’d love to do more. If anyone reading this runs like an uh, awesome, successful project that needs… bad music… you know, get in touch.

I Don’t Know What I’m Doing on Vinyl

A while back I asked on Facebook if anyone’s interested in a vinyl pressing of I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, which was first manufactured as a real packaged CD in 2005. People seemed enthusiastic so I’ve been moving forward with it.

Honestly, I’m not a person who cares much about vinyl records. I own two: Micheal Jackson’s Thriller and Twisted Sister’s Stay Hungry and they’re hanging on my wall. I don’t own a turntable. I’ve got more nostalgia for cassette tapes and 128k MP3s downloaded from Audiogalaxy. Pressing (and shipping) vinyl is ‘spensive and a big commitment and I’d like to avoid having hundreds of my own old-ass record in my basement, so I’m hesitant (aka scared).

But I have a bunch of vinyl quotes and I’ll figure out the next steps soon and probably re-ask that everyone’s suuuure they want my 100% digitally recorded album in an old, giant, fragile, heavy, noisy, expensive to manufacture and also expensive to ship format.

My friend Bruce’s album

Over the past year I’ve been helping my Texan chef friend Bruce Enloe out with bass playing and some recording and mixing on his new record Unseasonably Cool (soundcloud link). (Tracks 2, 3 and 7 are my faves.) I also played bass at the CD release show last week, which had this cool poster (designed by Mark Ettinger, drummer of the band):

Also there was an article in the big local city paper about Bruce and the record.

That’s it, thanks for reading. More stuff soon. “Always be social media-ing,” they told us in Internet school. I update my Twitter and Facebook regularly.

A video posted by Brad (@bradsucks) on Feb 20, 2015 at 10:50am PST

Sad news. I learned yesterday that ANSI artist Fredrik Olsson aka Big Yellow Man, who did the rad artwork for my 2008 album Out of It, passed away in October.

I really wanted to use ANSI artwork for Out of It because BBS’s and ANSI were a huge part of my teenage life. (I was in iCE and ACiD at various points.) I also thought it might be the first time it was done? I found Fredrik’s work on Deviant Art. Pieces of his like “television” and snowy street really stood out to me from other ANSI artwork, which tends to be a bit juvenile and cleavage-heavy. “television” is the back cover of the Out of It CD and I still love looking at it.

Fredrik was a loved and respected member of the Blocktronics ANSI art community. They’ve paid tribute to him with their latest Artpack. (I used PabloDraw to view it.)

I didn’t know Fredrik well, but he was great to work with. Not only did he design the artwork for the package but he handled all the fiddly print stuff to make sure all the colors and pixels came out perfect. He seemed proud of how it turned out.

Check out some of Fredrik’s artwork. You can also watch a captured session of him drawing an ANSI piece if you want to see what it was like to paint with your keyboard and ANSI text characters in the old MS-DOS days.

Thanks and so long, Fredrik. You’ll be missed.