Bootleg Cover Art

Originally uploaded by Geof F. Morris.

Well, since Sandra is openly discussing this in concerts, it’s worth posting the good news for all to know …

“I’m playing my guitar side saddle,” she said at a show up in Nashville a couple weeks back. “We have an extra member here up on stage.”

I believe the street date for this release is early this summer.

On behalf of [squarepegalliance.net] and the larger fan community, congratulations. Folks seem to really be excited.

Derek Webb is featured, along with folk-singer Rickie Lee Jones, in an article in USA Today.

A tip of the hat to fellow Square Peg Andrew Osenga for the link!

Sufjan Stevens, and yes that’s the first time his name has appeared in print without a glowing descripter like “golden-boy” or “everyone’s favorite indie artist” or “Lovechild of Yanni and Satan” in front of it, has written an essay entitled “Friend Rock” that i found somewhat amusing.

But have you heard about Friend Rock? It’s very simple: you are going to a show not so much as a fan of the music, but as a fan of your friend, the musician, on stage. There are various incarnations, of course: you may know the singer, the drummer, or the bass player; you may have dated the keyboardist years ago; you went to high school with the trumpet player; one of them is your housemate, your office mate, your soul mate; or it may be “friendly-professional.”

It made me think of the Square Pegs, and for that reason i offer you the link for your reading enjoyment.

bryan

Andy Gullahorn’s new website has fresh content and a new look.  There’s a  slug of new haikus, at least two new reviews, and a handful of entertaining pictures.  Gullahorn has a practice of reviewing each show in which he participates with a pithy, often hilarious, defining haiku.  They usually make one lament missing the show even more than usual .  Here’s an example from the December 8, Fayetteville, Georgia show:

The Land of Dickens

“Andrew Peterson Concert”

In British accents

After a long and painful illness, Gullahorn’s message board has left the building, but some sources suggest that is just as well.  The board was apparently high-jacked by ubiquitous spammers.  We received one report from an unnamed source who suggests that Gullahorn’s board  is now in message board heaven, far away from that other place where they send those nice spammers. Anyway, if you haven’t yet been introduced to the wry, unpretentious humor that is Andy Gullahorn, now would be a good time. Incidentally, he writes a pretty good song too.
 

http://www.andygullahorn.com/Home.html

Here’s a few items that have been lingering around in squarepegalliance.net circles:

• Chris Hubbs has launched [andrewosenga.net], designed to be your unofficial resource for all things Osenga. Check it out. [And if you've got a Peg that you'd love to build a similar resource for, let me know and we'll work out the details.]
• You might have noticed that site performance stunk on ice for the last couple of weeks. Even after some performance tuning on the server, it became clear that we just needed more horsepower. We doubled the RAM in the server [to 4GB], and things now run much more smoothly. As a result of the tuning, however, IndieRiver.net had some changes. Nowadays, you must connect with a TCP port in the range of 56000-56999; everything else will be rejected by the server. If you’ve been trying to grab a show and failing, that’s why.
• Eric Peters and I have been working on a HOWTO on how to book a Square Peg. Please let us know what questions you might have in the comments below; we think we’ve got everything, but you might come up with something that we don’t know.

As always, thanks for your patronage of the Square Pegs and of squarepegalliance.net.

Back on Saturday, we pointed you at part of the interview that Eric did for Eb+Flo before they went under. He finished up the interview postings on Tuesday with some more personal things, including how he gets into writing albums:

10. How do you decide when it’s time to record a new album?

When I have enough money saved and enough good songs written.

11. I know you are typically very humble so this might be difficult for you…but when you look at your newest project, Scarce, what would you say is most important about these songs (or a certain song in particular?)

To date, it has been, hands down, the most difficult album for me to make. I was really struggling with heaps of self-doubt about whether I should even bother making Scarce, or bother spending a sizable amount of our saved money on yet another project that might or might not ever break even. At the point I’m at career-wise, I am a lucky individual to be able to fully recoup within 2 or 3 years of an album’s release. That’s a dreadfully long time, in my book, and an awfully heavy financial commitment, especially considering that I have always struggled to move product. It’s a strain to think about getting out from underneath one album only to put myself under the fiscal burden of a new one. So, I’m one of those nerdy fiscally responsible artists, what can I say?

I would add, however, that I feel Scarce is more of an honest and direct album than what I’ve made in the past. The pop-friendlier first half of the album eases, hopefully gracefully, into a more confessional tone by album’s end. It was unintentional, but I like that the songs fit together in that way. I am thankful to God for songs like “Squeeze”, “Save Something for Grace” and “Long Road”. Those are the heavierweights on the album, in my estimation. I’m indebted to Brent Milligan (producer) who really challenged me and summoned the best possible songs out of me. He refused to let me settle for mediocre demos, many of which I had already submitted, but failed to make the final cut. Brent was integral to my being able to plug away and push forward through all the doubts and warbled headspace.

Also, Kei Akiyama interviewed EP back in December, and he’s let us reprint that here. It’ll show up after the jump. [We had to make a jump or you'd not see anything else on the front page!]

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