New Website/New Blog....

I think I forgot to mention the new website/blog. Oops. Anyway, thanks to me mate John for designing a very cool site. I'm going to go ahead and stop posting blog posts here. So kindly redirect yourselves to http://www.wewerepiratesmusic.com/blog

Cheers!

m

Best & Worst Songs of 2009...

My apologies for being 9 days late, but I've been going back and forth on the best song of 2009 and in the end, I copped out and declared a tie because I couldn't choose between the two. On the other hand, choosing the worst was not challenging in the least.

BEST:

Animal Collective: "My Girls"

Watch the video HERE

Isn't much that I feel I need
a solid soul and the blood I bleed
With a little girl, and by my spouse
I only want a proper house

There isn't much that I feel I need:
a solid soul and the blood I bleed.
But with a little girl, and by my spouse
I only want a proper house

I don't care for fancy things
Or to take part in a pressured race.
But to provide for them when they ask
I will, with heart, on my father's grave

On my father's grave

I don't mean
To seem like I care about material things,
Like our social status,
I just want
Four walls and adobe slabs
For my girls

AND

David Bazan: "Please, Baby, Please"

Listen HERE

When I woke up the next morning,
You looked right through me
Through your eyes crying,
I could finally see

They said, "please baby please"

When I called you from Atlanta,
You refused to speak
Not three days sober,
Begging for a drink

And I said, "please baby please"

Those two pairs of big blue eyes
Stare me down, watching me fall
But what makes a man realize
That he's about to lose it all?

Sunrise at the county lock-up
Now our baby's twenty-three
She was out late drinking,
Killed a mother of three

She said, "please daddy please"

and now for THE WORST:

The Black Eyed Peas: "I've Gotta Feeling"

This song is easily as bad as the other two are good. And if you're unsold on this being the worst song of 2009 and possibly of all time, please feel free to read the lyrics here.

WWP's "Merry Christmas" Featured on Insomnia Radio...

Thanks to Insomnia Radio for featuring the Christmas song, "Merry Christmas" on Christmas day!

Rest In Peace, Henry Martin...

My very good friend Jeffrey's father passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on Sunday. He will be missed terribly. In a era where a good man is hard to find, he was one of the truly great ones. He dedicated a huge amount of his life to helping others. He is an inspiration to me and many others and will be dearly, dearly missed.

In honor of Henry...



Headlights - Love Song For Buddy from Brad Chmielewski on Vimeo.

New American Apparel WWP T-Shirt!

New unisex American Apparel WWP "Tree-shirt"!

Thanks to WASU for the nice review....

Which you can read here. Incidentally, Boone, NC is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in my life.

Thanksgiving mix....

Tomorrow Lisa and I are heading to Nashville to spend Thanksgiving with family and friends. I felt as though a quick Thanksgiving mix was appropriate:

1. Ben Gibbard: "You Remind Me of Home"

2. Iron and Wine/Calexico: "History of Lovers"

3. Elliott Smith: "Baby Britain"

4. Beach Boys: "Vegetables" (bonus Brian Wilson version from the original Smile sessions here)

5. Sufjan Stevens: "The Lord God Bird" (link to download here)

6. Owen: "A Bird in Hand"

7. Andrew Bird: "Plasticities"

8. Mynabirds: "Numbers Don't Lie" (third track)

9. Cake: "Frank Sinatra"

10. The Clash: "I Fought the Law"

11. The Beatles: "All You Need is Love"

Ok, so here's the chronological theme of the mix.

1. Most people travel for home Thanksgiving (The sunday after Thanksgiving is the most heavily traveled day of the year).

2. When one arrives at home, most right thinking (right as in correct, not politically right) people immediately wish to have a few glasses of wine to lessen the awkwardness of seeing family.

3. I felt that the amount of alcohol some of us consume at family gatherings warranted another booze-themed track.

4. The meal begins and there will be vegetables. Oh yes, there will. Listen to Mr. Wilson's psychotropic ballad to leafy greens and get ready for yams!

5. Yeah, I know the song is about the pileated woodpecker, but how many good turkey-themed songs are there out there? Anyway, as a non-carnivore, I won't be loopy on the tryptophan as many of you will, but turkey is the quintessential Thanksgiving entree. So, since you will be partaking anyway, may I recommend free-range?

6. More bird-related music. And what would Thanksgiving be without football, and while this may be a stretch, I'm not a huge American Football fan, so I decided to go with Kinsella's current project, Owen.

7. Even more bird-related music. While I couldn't tell you exactly what "Plasticities" is about, it's definitely anti-cubicle. And so am I. And on Thanksgiving, you cubicle dwellers will have at least eight paid hours of cubicle-free eating and drinking. So, enjoy it, because Monday is only four days away.

8. Yes, that's right....one final bird-related song. But this one is a bonus because it also relates to family, as Laura from Mynabirds is my cousin and while I won't be seeing her for Thanksgiving, we will be getting together for the next big holiday. Oh and while you're at her site, please listen to all of the songs as they are all excellent....I am quite impressed. (Another personal favorite is "Let the Record Go")

9. Ideally, your meal will end with some sort of delicious baked good. Personally, I'm a pumpkin pie fan myself, but this song is for all you cake lovers.

10. If your family is anything like mine, sooner or later, the discussions will turn to either of the two dreaded family conversations: Politics and Religion. And, if your family is anything like mine, it will nearly come to fisticuffs. And if your family is anything like mine, at least one of them will have purchased Palin's "Going Rogue" and will be touting the wise gems gleaned from the most polarizing political figure since Dan Quayle......yikes. At this point, the fighting will commence. (Extra points if your family's fights are so hardcore that "the law" actually shows up to break it up.)

11. Hopefully by now you've got the fighting out of your system and moved into the next stage of drunkenness and you just want to hug it out and get along. All we need is love, indeed.

Enjoy, my friends....and have a Happy Thanksgiving with safe travels.

Too Early for Christmas Music?

I think not.

Please to be enjoying some Christmas cheer in the form of this WWP original. Consider it an early Christmas present.

WWP on Shifted Sound Podcast....

Thanks to Shelby from Shifted Sound for featuring "Settle Down" and "The Three of Us" on the podcast. You can download/listen on their website or here on iTunes. They feature a lot of great new music.

Stephen Wiltshire is amazing.

thanks to @micahharris via @impossiblecool

WWP Feature/Interview on Towermix.com

read it here.

Halloween time is a busy time....

In addition to playing a Halloween Rock n Romp next weekend....on Halloween....I felt like recording a cover of "Thriller" (Listen/Download HERE).



Happy Halloween my friends,

m

We Were Pirates on Local NPR Station, WAMU

Why is there a photo of Kojo Nnamdi in the WAMU studio in this blog post?

Because Gabe and I were very graciously invited by our local NPR station, WAMU (88.5 fm in DC) to come down to the station and record an interview/live performance for Metro Connection.....and.....we kind of both forgot to bring cameras. And since we are both technological cavemen, neither of us even have camera phones. So, this photo of Kojo in the studio will have to do.

Anyway, the whole thing was a blast and host David Furst couldn't have been cooler. He was ill at the time and couldn't make it into the studio, so we got to experience the crazy magic of radio. It went a little something like this:

Mr. F called into the WAMU studio from his home studio to do the interview. With a little help from Andrew the Engineer, the whole thing was completely seamless.

I have been listening to Metro Connection every Friday for a long while and I'm a big fan, so it was great to be able to go be a part of the show.

Highlight? Getting to hear Andrew the Engineer's telephone exchange with legendary Washington DC meteorologist Bob Ryan. Yes....We are nerds.

If you live in DC, tune your dial to 88.5 on Friday at 1pm and listen to Metro Connection. If you're not in DC or you miss it, MC has a podcast you can download here.

We Were Pirates on The Vinyl District's TWITSTOCK!

Thanks to Jon at The Vinyl District for including WWP in TWITSTOCK! Which for the layman, was a feature where he invited guest bloggers to pick 5 songs to post and discuss. I chose to go with an Autumn Driving Mix theme. And my songs were:


1) Simon & Garfunkel - "Baby Driver"

2) Delta Spirit - "Motivation"

3) Yo La Tengo - "Autumn Sweater"

4) Iron & Wine - "Naked As We Came"

5) Emitt Rhodes - "With My Face On The Floor"

Check it out here.

Centralia, PA....

Centralia, PA is the creepiest place I have ever been in my life. I've been wanting to make a trip there for years, but only recently got the chance when Lisa and I were driving back from NY this weekend. Centralia is a ghost town in Pennsylvania about halfway between Scranton and Harrisburg. The story behind the downfall of this town is so unbelievable, I felt like I had to witness the devastation in person.

Centralia was a coal-mining town established in 1866 and doomed to failure less than 100 years later when somebody was burning a bunch of garbage near the entrance to a coal mine, and the fire became so hot that it caught the coal underneath the town on fire. Since then, millions of dollars have been spent to put out the fire, but all attempts have been in vain. In 1981, because the ground started to collapse in random sections and the toxic gasses coming from the coal mines got to be too much, congress voted to relocate the town members and essentially condemned the entire town.

So, they re-routed rt. 61 to make a big circle around the town and bulldozed all of the houses. Since then, everything in the town except a couple of cemeteries on the outskirts has been left un-touched. Over the years, massive cracks have formed in the ground where a constant supply of toxic smoke pours out. There are different theories on the subject, but experts believe the coal vein under Centralia will keep burning for anywhere from 100 to 250 years.

So, Lisa and I decided to check it out to see if it was as bizarre and creepy as it sounded....and it was. In fact, much creepier than I anticipated. I don't think I could adequately describe how uneasy I felt walking down long-abandoned highways with trees growing out of the asphalt right next to cracks which smoke poured from. So, we (mostly Lisa) took a bunch of photos to do the talking for us:

The mountains surrounding Centralia.

Entering the town.

Re-routed section of rt. 61 where we parked.

The only remnant of Centralia as it was is a a little memorial and this old, worn bench.

Walking down the abandoned highway. Let the creepiness begin.

There were a few other people walking around but mostly it
was just rednecks on dirt bikes and ATVs using the
remains of the town as a playground.


The smoke didn't turn out very well, but if you follow our gaze
there was quite a bit of smoke pouring out of this crack.


It's much easier to see here. The smell was awful. Like burning plastic.


Penny the friendly dog was really uneasy the whole time. We
didn't stay that long since the ground was so hot because of
the firesand she just clearly didn't want to be anywhere near
the place.


Don't know if you can tell, but there are a few people at the
bottom of thehill walking up and I wanted a post-apocalyptic
zombie type of shot. Lisa was kind enough to humor me.



Oh and in case you couldn't tell, the graffiti covering
the abandoned highway didn't make the whole scene
any less bizarre.


This was my favorite shot. Mostly because I liked the
stark contrast of standing on the still-smoldering ashes of the
remains of a coal mine with the wind turbines behind. Although
the turbines are creepy in their own right, it was still kind
of comforting to see the sustainable energy source off in the
distance with the devastation of the coal mines in the forefront.

Leaving the town was unsettling as well. Mostly, because we expected the closest towns to be pretty far from Centralia....they are not. The next town over, Mt. Carmel was no more than a few hundred yards from the border of Centralia. The other unsettling thing is that there is a strip mine less than a mile from Centralia. You would think that having destroyed an entire town, the locals would want to try to avoid having the rest of the beautiful mountains surrounding them raped.

I guess that is what I find most disturbing about Centralia. The fact that so few people seem to know about it. It's not like the Three Mile Island accident (which happened only 68 miles from Centralia in Middletown, PA) which is common knowledge. Somehow Coal accidents seem to be covered up a bit better. Like last year when a berm broke in East Tennessee and 525 million gallons of wet coal ash flooded the area completely destroying the local eco-system. The disaster was so massive in scope that scientists still don't fully understand the possible ramifications for people down stream of the accident. And after all of that, very few people I spoke to had even heard about the spill.

That is pretty terrifying that the mainstream media doesn't do more to cover these kinds of eco disasters. This isn't just the kind of thing that people with an environmental conscience should care about. In TN, subsequent water tests have showed elevated levels of lead and thallium which have been directly linked to birth defects and nervous and reproductive system disorders (read more here). That effects everybody.

So, yeah, I am not a big fan of coal as an energy source. And the whole "clean coal" idea really doesn't seem to be much different than using traditional coal burning methods. It kind of seems like a PR move by the coal companies with very little substance that politicians support because the coal companies are extremely generous to their campaigns. And even if they come up with cleaner ways of processing the coal, it still needs to be mined. And unfortunately, that means strip-mining and mountain-top removal mining, which as far as I'm concerned is the most shameful form of environmental rape that occurs in America. There is no excuse for this practice still being used today.



You can check out Centralia on wikipedia. Also, Bill Bryson discusses his trip to Centralia in "A Walk in the Woods."