Category Archives: Music

New Song! “Lost in the Fog”

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Hey rockers! I had a brainstorm for my latest song “Lost in the Fog”. I’ve been thinking of redoing one or more of my older songs in an acoustic style just to mix things up. So when I wrote a new song a few weeks ago, I decided while working on it that I would make two versions to begin with: an acoustic version, which you can hear now, and an electric fuzz version, coming soon!

The original vision of the song was for it to be a Sabbath-style stoner rock fuzz opus, but the acoustic version stands on its own as a trippy meditation in a different head space. This is the first full version, with an improvised solo.

Lost in the Fog is the 6th new song for 2011 from Mojo’s Army, and the year’s not over yet!

Lost in the Fog Lyrics:

Twisting forward through the fog
Moving forward constantly
The shrouded shapes that appear before me
All become clear eventually

…eventually

The road ahead is lost in the fog
But I press on anyway
I trust the road, trust myself as well
and trust that time will show me the way

…show me the way

Where has the summer gone?
Seasons changing, moving on
Where has the summer gone?
Summer sun becomes icy fog

The truth is out there in the fog
Reveals itself only slowly
Under a streetlight a ghost walks a dog
As the road appears beneath his feet

…beneath his feet

Moving forward constantly
Moving forward constantly
Moving forward constantly

Original words & music by Mojo & Mojo’s Army
© Ragged Birds Music. All rights reserved. Contains royalty-free samples from Apple and Beta Monkey Music.

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Speaking of MySpace

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Call me crazy, but I just went on a little trip sideways in time through my estranged MySpace friends, fans and bands of note.

Let’s backtrack a bit, and don’t stop me if this sounds familiar — for a few years there, I spent an unexpected amount of time chatting up strangers, future friends and fans and listening to music I never would have heard of if not for MySpace. I posted my first ever recording there, made my first fans there. And was pleasantly surprised when a few of these connections became real flesh and blood friends — friends I’ve gone to shows with, hung out with, collaborated musically with. A few more have become solid ‘internet friends’ and we connect daily on Twitter, Facebook, and now the gangly Google+, which is having its backlash-y growing pains period start right about… now.

What did I find on my trip through the not-so-distant past? Partly what I expected — some bands have broken up, some have become quite successful. Some pages are mere cobwebs or placeholders for other more active sites. Sadly, at least one of my regular connections has died when I wasn’t looking. And that… that was a bit of a jolt. An unexpected emotional moment from a much-maligned internet site that has become a punching bag lately, yet no one argues that it was a real touchstone for the changing music industry. I did of course happily reconnect with a lot of music that I really enjoy but have lost touch with because it’s not on the radio or played on Pandora.

There are so many sites now that do so many individual things better than MySpace tried to do all at once, but there aren’t ANY sites now that have that unique combination of near-realtime ‘hey I like your stuff, what are you listening to, let me check that out, here’s my stuff…’ all in one sloppy crazy wonderful free-love kind of spot. Kind of like a free online music swap meet where everyone trades their mixtapes and shows their stuff off, trading comments and chatting daily like we do on Twitter now but with the music right there. I have come to love Twitter but I miss the music.

I went through my whole friends list and made a list of the bands I want to reconnect with, bands whose stuff I really enjoyed listening to and whose members I felt I connected with, if just for a moment in time. Here are a few, give them a listen and a shout if you see them around:

Billy ConnallyHouse of Broken PromisesSuperGiantZepparellaBLACK NOVACraneWhite Witch Canyonblack cobraLoNero - Guitarcore Originators

Billy Connally

House of Broken Promises

SuperGiant

Zepparella

Black Nova

Crane

White Witch Canyon

Black Cobra

LoNero

and so so many more…

Mojo

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An Open Letter to Justin Timberlake and Tim Vanderhook

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An Open Letter to Justin Timberlake and Tim Vanderhook

Congratulations on your purchase of MySpace! Now, as someone who genuinely misses the original MySpace experience and the friends and fans I connected with there (and is not afraid to admit it!) I humbly offer a few notes to help you move forward:

What we loved about MySpace:

Cross-connecting with other musicians and fans. Friending them and commenting on each other’s pages, even if just to say hey, what’s up! Changing our avatars and names to reflect the new songs & albums. Uploading demos of songs and getting feedback. Adding silly-ass third party widgets like Meez. Blogging and having those blogs feed other sites. And beyond that, the ability to *really* customize the page with css code. Not the moveable 2.0 widgets that were more trouble and took up more space than we wanted. But really customizable in a way that Facebook still is not. Some bands even made their MySpace page their real homepage and paid good money to real designers to do it. But mostly, we loved the direct and easy fan and musician connections. It felt like a community in the way that only Twitter does now.

What we hated:

Bad audio quality. Though it was and still is primarily a musicians’ hangout, the audio player quality always sucked compared to just about any other site. That’s how Reverbnation first got on the map, with its superior audio player, and then with its portability (embeddable superior player!). Soundcloud is quickly taking over that area, but you get it. Ugly ads were also a problem, but even worse, the autoplaying of other people’s comment-embedded widgets made some pages completely unusable. Looooong load times after the “upgrade”. The force-feeding of everyone’s minor updates when MySpace tried to be like Facebook and Twitter and everything else combined into something that no one wanted to look at anymore.

Do us a favor and do something special with this site, which has become like watching a favorite old car rust in the driveway under a new coat of paint. I really, truly hope you are able to bring it back from the brink of spectacular failure. I do believe that if anyone other than Oprah can succeed at this, you can.

Sincerely,
Mojo (Mojo’s Army)
\m/ \m/

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