Chris Merritt And The Dirty Girls show 8:00 pm tonight in Upperville, VA at Buchanan Hall:

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It’s the town over from Middleburg on RT 50. Buchanan Hall is the first building on the left. Upperville has a population of like 12! Come one and all for great music…..beer and food as well……great venue and a great band…..

Friday, Jan 27th, 8:00 PM

Next week’s Chris Merritt shows:  Richmond, VA HERE, Northern VA, HERE.  Also, Brooklyn, New York, HERE.

Recording has started!  After lots of writing songs, arranging, rehearsing, hustling, it’s finally time.  Now the hard work begins.

Brett and I tracked drums in the studio all morning before hunching back into the bitter freeze.  New songs, old new songs, and new old songs.

Scheherazade is finally close to being arranged after five months or so.  It’s going to be……epic, beautiful, ridiculous.  If, of course, it doesn’t fall flat on it’s face….many of these new songs feel risky…..which is a good thing…..but is why I’m insisting on doing close to thirty before choosing the record’s playlist.  That might not be “rational” or “humanly possible”, but I’m doing it anyway.  New songs The Itch and One Man To An Army are exciting my inner fake vibrations.

Here’s a couple (random) snippets of sketches/demos I have sitting on my desktop.  The Dirty Girls have been working hard to make these into something legendary…

UPDATE: Here’s the show info for tomorrow (NYC, Jan 16th, 8:30 PM) http://www.facebook.com/events/273146779413891/

When did this happen?  The band and I have some great shows coming up.

In New York this Monday night (that’s January 16th) I will be performing with some good friends at The Cake Shop.  Michael Holt (incredible, prolific pianist/composer/songwriter as well as hilarious performer) will be there as well as some other amazing artists from all over the world.  David Celia and Scotty Mack from Toronto we be there as well as  Will Hunt from London.  Everybody is top notch.

In Richmond, VA Chris Merritt And The Dirty Girls will be playing with legendary Nashville songwriter David Mead.  Awesome?  Yes.  New songs, great artists.  (January 25th, 2012).  You can’t beat it – it will be an amazing night of entertainment and hot men. Also with Harper Blynn.

(Northern VA – we’re playing a show on January 28th 2012.  More info to follow.)

UPDATE: Here’s the show info for tomorrow (NYC, Jan 16th, 8:30 PM) http://www.facebook.com/events/273146779413891/

When I site Third Eye Blind as one of my top ten bands of all time, people usually think I’m joking.  Ha.  Well, it’s no surprise, given their appearance in every crappy teen-comedy made in the 90s.  Stephen Jenkins voice has a flamboyant lisp, and the band has many overused/awesomely cheesy devices – Third Eye Blind is an easy target.  Singing “doo-doo-doo” in their most known song didn’t help.

But Third Eye Blind has an element of irony.  Semi-Charmed Life, under the bubble-gum pop facade, is the darkest drug-abuse song to ever be played on the radio (and probably will be forever).  The brighter the songs get, the darker the lyrics (check out Slow Motion).

They also released some incredible albums after their enormous hit record.  Subsequent albums flew right under the radar and contain some of the most masterful, heartbreaking, ass-kicking rock-and-roll songs ever recorded.  I love the contrast of Jenkins cheesy, horny, inch-deep lyrics when the man also happens to be a melodic genius.

Here is my challenge to you:  suspend your forgone conclusions momentarily and pretend these tracks make up an album and see what you think.  They’re some of my favorite songs of all time.

Faster / Wounded / Losing A Whole Year / Company / Red Star / Slow Motion / The Dao Of St. Paul / Persephone / Good Man / Blinded / Darwin

And by the way, Blue is a great album from start to finish.

As far as I’m concerned, there are a few things that once were staples of our society and are now conceptually obsolete (whether they are pragmatically is a different matter).

Music piracy and the music industry have been hot topics in the past ten years, but oddly, no real solutions have been reached.  In my opinion, that’s because there never was an argument:  technology makes things free and easy – music has been set free.  It never was a core physical human need like food or shelter, nor a product, nor a service.  Music has never existed on a practical plane.  It sits on a cloud above the heads of human animals with science, literature, and all forms of art (in other words, all the best milk our beautiful brain-nipples produce).  Capitalism only played well with Art before that sexy home-wrecker Technology came along and made everything free.

By the way, I think even more indispensable to the explosion of piracy is the ease of it’s perpetration.  It’s not necessarily that it’s free, but it’s just so much easier to start a torrent download than to put in a bunch of debit card numbers on a website, or go to a store, or deal with iTunes and DRM issues or whatever.  I would bet that things would be much different if we had something like the following (and I’m not saying this is a perfect idea, but hypothetically for a minute): what if there was a mandatory tax at the beginning of the year, where everyone had to put 400 bucks into a paypal-like Arts And Sciences account, that was super-easy to use to download new music or movies or fundraising opportunities or whatever.  I think people WANT to support the artists/projects they like, but their laziness gets the better of them.  I know, at least, that’s what happens with me….

There are a billion asshats out there who are making worthless (to anyone but themselves) music on Garage Band or Pro Tools or whatever.  I’m not being mean.  It’s great. Sort of.

So anyway, here is my point.  With the spread of technology, music has been set free.  That’s it.  Get over it. It’s discouraging, but then again, I had a very encouraging thought…..

How easy and ubiquitous has paint on canvas been for hundreds of years?  Anyone can make a painting.  But how many great artists have we had?  Many brilliant artists, but probably only the top 1% or less who have ever put brush to canvas.  There’s still a blank canvas out there.  You can still be great at something.  It still matters if you’re great at something.  I, for one, plan on making three records this year that have never been made, and are better, more fun, more insane, and more unique and touching than any collection of notes and rhythms out there.

Hey there, friends and fans!  I hope you had a magnificent holiday season!  This post is a little overdue….

They say to limit your New Year’s resolutions to just one, but I’ve had surprising success in the last couple months with quitting a few things at once.  I will continue the following:

1.  No drinking
2.  No smoking
3.  No drugs

With these added resolutions:

1.  No kissing ladies
2.  Working out every day
3.  Making a to-do list every night

These resolutions are not goals in themselves, only means to an end.  I am working on a few projects at once, and I aim to finish the best records I’ve ever made this year.

First in the oven is the freshman Chris Merritt And The Dirty Girls release, which will be my magnum opus.  Close to thirty songs are being recorded…weird, insane, beautiful.  No compromises will be made. Brilliant percussionist Brett Ripley will be tying the whole thing together, engineering it to make sense rhythmically, providing meaning and backbeats to support the madness. Other guests will be there too. This album will also include my interpretation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherzahde, which has taken six months to even arrange and learn to play.  This record will definitely give you tingles in your pynus.

I’ve also been working on with a couple of great young musicians on a new band called Future Caveman. The songs are magical, raw, youthful, simple. We’ve finished quite a few songs and will start recording any day now.  Think Paperface meets White Stripes meets Ash meets a swift kick in The Shins.

And finally, I’m working with a hyper-talented young lady who smashes drums and guitars for a living.  She’s the most rock-and-roll human I’ve ever met.  We have some songs that are so heavy they will melt your face.  More on these projects as they develop.

Now. Won’t you join me in making this year your bitch?  Have some songs:  boom(Mechanical Mind) bap(Margaux) bing(Baby’s Gone) pop(Walking On The Water) snap(Live Or Die Once) crackle(Spider)