Wow…how good am I at promoting SES? So good that I forgot to check on this page for almost 2 months. Awesome.

I’m all for a team who’s never won the SB win today, the whole old man saga of Kurt Wariner, etc., but I have too many friends who are from west Pennsylvania, so here’s to the Steelers whoopin some ass.

Here’s hopin Baltimore gets there come uppance completely come upon.

It’s always fantastic to have another outlet for your music as an indie artist, especially one that is free. So I can’t fault ourstage for a couple of LITTLE bugs that…well…bug me. Like how a song can go from number one to number 147 in one fell swoop, I don’t understand the nuances of the judging that makes that happen. But that notwithstanding, the only thing that really gets to me as I judge some of these songs is how either 1) they are miscategorized or 2) I don’t know what rock music is anymore. A lot of the songs, nay, the majority of the songs I hear on the “rock” channel sound like they belong in “modern rock”, “alternative rock”, “pop”, or even “metal”. I guess the definition has changed somewhat over the years, but I still think of rock in terms of Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Little Feat, Free, Pink Floyd, and more recently, Black Keys, Black Crowes, My Morning Jacket, etc. A song filled with PRS guitars through Mesa Stilleto amps with synthesizers and angsty vocals doesn’t meet my criteria for a purely “rock” song. There’s too many damn categories for a song that sounds like Linkin Park to clog up the rock station. Any thoughts? Comments?

That’s one of my all time favorite quotes from Mr. Steven Tyler. He is the twitch in his drummer’s eye. I just got done watching the making of Pump for the umpteenth time, and man, what a circus. I can’t even begin to imagine what those guys were like in their most insane periods.

Band dynamics are an interesting thing, and no band worth a damn is without a little bit of tension. That’s what makes for great music. That said, I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that all the members of SES get along as well as we do. Ryan and I can have our differences, lord knows there have been a few hundred over the years, but whoever is the most stubborn on a point usually turns out to be right, so that’s comforting in and of itself.

So here’s to tension, long may it stretch the canvas on which we paint.