New Discoveries

Here are a few neat things I have found lately.

T.W. Walsh is the drummer for David Bazan’s Pedro the Lion. Pedro and side project Headphones, are lead by Bazan though the bands occasionally do some of Walsh’s material. If I understand it correctly, another side project, The Soft Drugs, is solely based on Walsh’s songs. Walsh actually wrote one of my favorite Pedro songs, Start Without Me, which is on their MySpace page. Anyway, this is a really confusing band, but my point is thatThe Soft Drugs material is really good. A friend kept bugging me to listen and I thought I had and didn’t like it. Eventually I went back and realized they were all new songs to me and are really good. So, check out the streaming stuff on the MySpace page or download the mp3s at thesoftdrugs.com. Walsh creates a simple indie rock sound similar to Pedro and the writing is quite good. The song I love is the very 77’s-like Defending the Paint.


While reading the Nov/Dec ’06 issue of Poets and Writers, I saw that poet Paul Muldoon is in a band called Rackett. The music is not that good, but with Muldoon as their lyricist, the convergence of poetry and music is really interesting. Check out their website and make sure you read through Muldoon’s lyrics because most of songs are very well written.

The November 2006 issue of Wired had possibly the coolest article I have ever read. In "Very Short Stories," Wired found 33 writers to pen Sci-Fi short stories that had to be six words long. Then they went to five graphic designers and had them design the pages for the article. The people they found to write are a great group and include Stan Lee, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Kevin Smith and Neil Gaiman. The results are amazingly cool. The stories can be seen in Wired’s archive, though you really need the hard copy to fully appreciate it. My favorite is by Harry Harrison, “Time machine reaches future!!!...nobody there…”