Radio Crystal Blue

This Sunday, October 29th on the 7pm live show
Radio Crystal Blue will be playing music
from my soon-to-be-released album
Sirens of Brooklyn

Listen to the show

Fall

For me, the fall is burnt wood and apples. These are two things that fill my mind when the leaves begin to turn and the air becomes crisp.

There is one other thing that is indescribable. The best way to explain it is the smell of snow. Tiny particles of water freeze in the air and fly up your nostrils and it smells like kissing a snowman. They are so small that they can't be seen by the naked eye, but you can feel them.

These things are here. Though I love them, I know that they bring the cruel and ungiving tongue of winter. It makes me want to flee to the south and do a show.

I recently did an interview with a very nice man named Russ in Texas. We talked for over an hour about the album, the world and all sorts of things. I accidentally locked myself in the airshaft on the 23rd floor of a 24 story building, which is where the whole phone call took place.

I miss my family. Lately I have found myself in a very emotional place, very open. The fall does this to me. It is the dark and the cold that seep into the skin and the soul. I've heard of people in scandinavian countries going into rooms with ultraviolet light as a therapy for their sadness. This makes me wonder, are people happier in California?

Some News and Thank You's

Some News. I recently did an interview with .... which will be featured in the December issue of Genre Magazine.

On Nov. 6th, I will be sitting down with Josh and Sarah for some conversation and to play a couple of songs live in the studio for the HereTV! Podcast.


Thank you:

-to the people at Homopod radio who have featured my music and have put 7 of my songs into rotation.

-to Duane Wells for writing a review of my album that almost made me cry. I couldn't possibly ever ask for a better review.

-to Bear Radio for featuring 2 of my songs.

Extra Extra Read all about it

The first review for Sirens of Brooklyn has been posted.
I am a little bit smiley to say the least.
Read the Review

F**K is a 4 letter word

Folk is a 4 letter word, often inspiring shivers of pain to ride up the spines of would be music listeners. We all squint in terror waiting for the F bomb to explode. The shrapnel can be devestating and often takes the form of a long haired hippy dippy woman who wants to tell you all about an erotic experience with a birch tree in wyoming during her cross country voyage to the Michigan Women's Festival.

My music is often categorized as folk, not something with which I fully agree.

However, some of the best songwriters I know are self proclaimed or labeled by default as folk merely because they play an acoustic guitar, have intelligent lyrics and don't work with crazy dirty electro beats and that insane vocal filter that removes all human qualities from the voice.

This pigeon does not fit in your hole.

Folk however is A O K with moi.

Violent Touch

I had the good fortune of being roommates with a girl who was studying massage at the Swedish institute. The only problem is that every time she would massage me I would scream and laugh to the point of needing to be gagged. It's not that the massage didn't feel good. It is just that the sensations were too intense to process in a manner which didn't sound like a tickle torture tantrum.

For better or worse I have always been sensitive to touch.
Yesterday, a woman rammed a briefcase into my shin and kept walking as if it never happened. I couldn't really fathom that she was unable feel the throbbing pain pulsating in my leg. How someone can hit a person so hard with a briefcase and keep walking amazes me.

Recently a friend poked me very hard in an extremely tender part of my body without realizing it had happened. It sent shocks of pain up through my stomach and raised the finest hairs on my body to razor sharp attention. For a moment I felt like I could vomit. When I pointed it out, I was told that I was not poked in my tender parts. The dismissal of my pain brought my emotional tenderness to the surface. I feel so open, exposed and raw at times.

Violent touch awakens memories from the past,
small words to deaf ears,
things I don't talk about.

These things didn't happen to me.

Robert Recommends

Robert German and Carrie Thomas in Coney Island. Photo by Carrie Thomas.

I would like to take this moment to discuss some things I am in love with right now.

first off, The Dresden Dolls!
Self-described as Brechtian Punk Cabaret, they fuse the sounds of British punk and German Cabaret with electrifying live shows that hump your ears like hardcore early Tori Amos. Yes, someone needs to towel off that piano bench at the end of the night.

My second love is BAM, Brooklyn's much hipper answer to Lincoln center. I highly recommend the movie screenings at the Rose Cinema. I was able to catch, David Lynch's Lost Highway, and let me just say that it was both perplexing and emotionally penetrating on the big screen.

Much more than an art-house cinema haven, this purveyor of cutting edge theatrical, musical, and dance performance makes Brooklyn's burgeoning art scene puff it's chest in defiance of Manhattanite elitist attitudes. No, You don't need to cross the bridge to consume some culture when it's just a leisurely stroll from the epicenter of South Brooklyn.

Clap Your Ass Say Yeah

I went into the studio this weekend to work on Unplug.
I added hang clapping, but needed a deeper clapping sound, so
had to drop my pants and smack my ass into the microphone for the desired effect.
I'm sure I could have gone into the street and found a random "professional" clapper,
but this was so much more interesting and produced the desired effect.

After the studio I went to an international sausage party. I kid you not. There were sausages of the world all lined up with little descriptions and the flag of their home countries. There was also a selection of mustards of the world which just made the night that much better. In the backyard were bluegrass musicians jamming. Chris, Marc, and I all went back and added our own special harmonies to the songs. It was a foot tapping good time.

After that, we dropped by a potluck dinner and had a taste of the best pulled pork in the universe.

Yes, my life revolves around food. Clap your ass, say yeah.

Full Moon

I was riding the F train from Manhattan to Brookyn last night when a crazy man got on the train. He was a harmless nutter butter,randomly yelling phrases or advice that made no sense. The one that stuck was "You can't smoke reefer on the train. You have to go on the platform for that."




I may have fallen a bit behind on advances in the penal code, but I think you probably can't smoke reefer on the platform either.

Regardless, this man was somewhat entertaining. He started yelling stuff about food, which of course caused me to feel immediate bond. He knows the way to my heart.

Just when I had gotten used to the rants of one crazy, a second crazy man stumbled into the train car clutching a photograph of Paris Hilton he had obviously ripped from the pages of a tabloid. He was yelling something something very important and totally garbled. I appreciated his passion, but still have no idea what he was saying.

It's so typical that I would end up being the meat in a crazy sandwich during the full moon, when I should be squatting in the woods naked writing poetry to the goddess, beating a drum with my pagan sisters. Oh my pagan sisters, take me into your loving bossoms.

Photograph by my lovely sister by choice Carrie Thomas

When I'm feeling like an outsider, strange and bizarre to everyone around me, I find comfort in those who make me feel as dull as dishwater. I pale in comparison to Salad Fingers.

Digital Whiplash

Somewhere in Brooklyn I am sitting at a coffee shop on my laptop computer wirelessly connected, oh so connected to the information super highway. Next to me is a girl also on her laptop next to a guy on his laptop next a girl on her laptop and so on and so forth into infinity. It's quite possible that the girl by the door is in a chatroom sharing her bunt cake recipe with the guy in the back on his laptop next to the bathroom.

I have never been one to fear or loathe technology. I generally embrace it, but there is something horribly wrong with the world. We are collectively losing our ability to interact face to face. Never in our history as a civilization have we had so many ways to connect with people. We have cellphones, smartphones, webcams, laptops, email, and even smoke signals.

For some reason though, we're all disconnecting. we are plugging in and tuning out the world. We are all suffering from attention deficite disorder, obsessively checking email and flipping between open computer windows, television shows, podcasts, and text messages. We sit across from each other checking our cellphones, responding to texts sent, and maybe even actually talking about how much of a boring time we're having, planning our exit via the digital escape hatch.

Is it just me or is everyone suddenly so busy that they can't return a phonecall, email or smoke signal? Are we on overload? No one can focus. We don't even have the patience for commercials. We DVR and fastforward through them or we simply download the show from Itunes and watch it on our video ipod as we surf the transit system, happy that we don't have to make eye contact with another human being.

I am a hypocrite. I am blogging about this when we should be having a face to face conversation.

I need to step away for a minute and unplug.

Photo by Carrie Thomas

3 trains of thought

There are times in which I want to lead a more glamorous life than I do, and when it comes down to it, I'm not incapable of being glamorous. It's just that the effort required to sparkle and shine like a new penny, is more than I am willing to muster.

The closest I got to glamour this weekend was being perched on top of a piano singing Tina Turner's Private Dancer, a song which is near and dear to my heart. My sister and I used to have this classic album on vinyl. We would sing at the top of our lungs into hairbrushes and dance around the house. Why my mother ever thought this was a good idea, I'll never know.

After the Kitt and Kaboodle show, I went out with my friend Jason and his hubby Simon. We found ourselves in a crowded bar full of attractive well groomed individuals, yet I was bored out of my mind. I found that all I really wanted was to be able to interact with my friends without having to endure the combined chattering of so many people. I guess also, when you're walking through the meat market and you don't have cold cuts on your shopping list, it all just looks so raw and unseasoned.


On Saturday went back into the studio for the first time since running the final mixes for sirens of Brooklyn. I recorded the first track for my next album, title still to be decided. The result was kind of peculiar and baeutiful. This track is very much rooted in the African Spritual with my mind glued to the rejection of technology. How contradictory to then write about it in a blog. Yes, I know, my first album hasn't even been released and I'm onto the next thing. This new project, which is floating around in my head will include some songs which aren't even written yet.

Some of my other songs have been giving me grief. I didn't allow them to be on Sirens and they're getting nervous about not making the cut this time. I have assured them that they will have their days in the sun. I may have to appease a few of the more nagging ones by letting them have their b-side glory on a possible EP. My lips are sealed though. I'm not going to say what's coming next. There are three trains of thought going on right now. It's almost impossible to say which will pull into the station first.