Lazy Sunday CLXXIV: Solo Cover EP, Part I

It’s a musical time of year, with my school’s big, fun, and stressful Christmas concert coming up this Friday, 9 December 2022 (pray for me).  Naturally, I have music on the brain even more so than usual, so I thought I’d look back at some past installments of Open Mic Adventures, specifically the ones where I’m playing solo (no worries—I’ll do a retrospective of OMA‘s featuring duets with John eventually).

Here are three of my favorite solo covers:

Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Mayhem

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

It’s Christmastime, which means a mad dash of yuletide craziness for yours portly, followed by a stately glide into New Year’s.  Right now I’m riding the wave of insanity, hoping I don’t wipe out along the way to the crest.

Years ago, I worked for a municipal performing arts center as the Cultural Coordinator—a cool title for a stressful job.  The venue was a beautiful opera house of the kind that graced many mid-sized Southern towns in the late nineteenth century.  We did not host an opera company (as far as I can recall, not a single note of opera was performed in the venue while I was there), so the name is a bit of a misnomer, but we did feature a number of different performances, both those we booked ourselves through the city, and those put on by enterprising residents who rented out our facilities.

The month of December was brutal.  In addition to our own events, we were also slammed with rentals.  Friday and Saturday nights saw me splitting my time between an outdoor musical event and whoever happened to be in the opera house that weekend.  One Christmas, I was so stressed out I starting losing weight without even realizing it, leading to my 2011 weight loss odyssey.

Unfortunately, I was so busy and stressed, I started loathing Christmas—a holiday I love!

Fortunately, while I’m still pretty busy at the holidays, I no longer dread their approach.  That said, I have had quite a week, and have another major one ahead of me.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

December 2022 Bandcamp Friday

Ah, yes, December—Christmastime.  A time for merriment with friends, families—and Bandcamp Friday!

The first Friday of December 2022 (today, if you’re reading this on Friday, 2 December 2022) witnesses the return of this pro-indie music observance, a day on which Bandcamp waives its usual 15% commission on sales.

In other words, when you buy my music, almost 100% of it goes to me, instead of almost 85%.

While I haven’t released any new music lately, I managed to release two short collections of music in AprilPéchés d’âge moyen II: One Week in March and The Lo-Fi Hymnal II.  All of my releases are just a buck each, though you’re welcome to pay more if you’d like to help out yours portly.

Currently, my entire discography of ten releases is $6.50, a savings of 35%, which is not bad for ten releases.  That’s $0.65 per release—not too shabby!  To purchase the full discography, click on any release, and you’ll see the option to purchase all of them.

I’m also selling all of my paintings for $10, with free shipping in the United States, regardless of how many you purchase.  They’re one of kind, so once a painting is purchased, it’s gone.

Finally, my book The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot is $10 in paperback, and just $5 on Kindle.

And the paperback version is the perfect gift!  Why give someone a boring, predictable gift, when you can give them a collection of unsolvable, absurdist noir detective stories to read around the yule log?  Enjoy egg nog-enriched guffaws as your friends read mystifying tales of hyper-sleuthing.

Give the Gift of Weird this Christmas!

Well, that’s it for this month’s sales pitch.  There’s been a lot of them lately.  Thanks again for your support!

Happy Friday!

—TPP

TBT^2: The Morning After

I’ve been pretty salty—in the parlance of the kiddos these days—about the midterm election results, a level of disappointment I haven’t experienced since the 2020 presidential election.

It brought me back to this post, in which I opine about Trump’s loss and the stolen election.  My hope was that the Republican Party would embrace the working-class voters that helped Trump win in 2016, lest they simply “return to being the party of agreeable losers.”

Looks like—ironically—the “agreeable losers” won, and have made losers of us all.

With that, here is 4 November 2021’s “TBT: The Morning After“:

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