The Get-Arounds "Get Around!" free album

Ricky from The Galactic Heroes spent all of November writing, recording, a whole album. It was part of the National Solo Album Month. Where musicians write and record an entire album during the month of November - all by themselves and they can only have one cover song. I think this is the challenge Ricky needed since he has been separated from Mike by distance and usually records with a collaborator that this encouraged him to go out on his own. Ricky has his own blog where you can see his comments during the month of recording. I know Ricky did a lot of work on this but I feel like his friends and fans real get all the benefit. It has been so long since there was a new Galactic Heroes' song that this such a joy to my ears.

Here is a quote from Ricky's blog about the album"I had already been writing songs as part of my song of the week exercise, but a 30 minute album in a month meant that I'd have to triple my current rate. What slows me down the most when I record is trying to figure out what to write songs about and my compulsive overdubbing tendencies (an old theory is that if you mask a crappy song with enough instruments it becomes good). To counter this I decided to pretend to be an oldies band with 4 members -- 2 guitarists, a bassist and a drummer. All four members could sing. This stopped too many overdubs (though I did add tambourine to almost every song and claps to a few). Also, being an oldies band meant that I could write every song about a girl."

I helped come up with the band name. Padgett came up with the title and Todd did the cover artwork. I would love to see a real live Get-Arounds band play these songs.

Here is a link to the album

Here is a link to his blog which includes way more info and bonus songs. Thanks Ricky!

The Owls - Afternoon Song

The Owls performs their version of "Afternoon Song" in the studios of 89.3 The Current. The song is part of the Songs From Scratch project by Minnesota Public Radio where Minneapolis area musicians were invited to provide their interpretation of a set of lyrics. Pretty awesome especially since from writing to recording this song was all done in a week. This song is unreleased.

more info about the Afternoon Song project can be found here

New Fred Thomas

Yeah thats right. I guess this has been a well kept secret. Fred Thomas who fronts the band Saturday Looks Good to Me has recorded a beautiful album titled "Flood". Magic Marker is releasing it deep into the year 2007. While we know this may keep it off of many year end lists but we feel like this is grower anyway. We have been big fans of Fred's work for awhile. His band's album "Every Night" is what first drew our attention and we pretty much have kept up with everything since. Fred seems to write more songs than most and has been writing them for years. Last years "Sink Like Symphony" was the first solo record that had any distribution. When Fred told us he had been working on the follow up we were happy to get involved. We posted one of the songs from the website. I really like this song but it really is hard to get the full picture of the album with 6 minute long pop/experimental sad songs. This is not the phil spectorish sound of Saturday Looks Good To Me this is much more raw and precious. Here is a traack form the album. Last One