Engineers of Mediocrity and the Chicago Adventure
Issue #16: Dang Steve! It's about time you wrote another one of these!
So it’s been quite a while since I’ve written one of these so I figured I’d throw something together. So what has been going on in my life?
Well, last month on May 6th, my band released a new EP titled ‘Engineers of Mediocrity.’ Now, when I saw my band, I don’t mean the band that I’ve been playing live with for the last couple of years. That iteration of Get Fired actually dissolved after I told them that I was moving to Michigan. However, the original lineup started talking and decided to write some stuff and record before I left the state. We wrote and recorded 2 brand news songs and released those along with some songs that we had previously recorded but had not released. You can listen to the album on Bandcamp, Spotify, iTunes/Apple Music, and a bunch of other digital platforms. Check it out on Bandcamp here:
If you’ve been paying attention to this newsletter, you know that I currently live in Oklahoma but I am about to relocate to Michigan. Near the Grand Rapids area. The rest of my family, minus my son and myself are already living up there. They left last month after we sold our house. I’m staying here until my son turns 18. He is staying here in Oklahoma because he is going to be going to college here. As of this writing, I have about 2 weeks left until I leave for Michigan. It is bittersweet. I’m excited to be in a different area. Excited to be closer to Chicago. But there are a lot of people that I’m going to miss. That’s all just part of the adventure though.
Speaking Chicago, this past weekend, I flew up there to see a concert. One of my favorite bands, The Methadones were playing a reunion benefit show up there. You see, The Methadones are not currently active, having split up about 10 or so years ago. I never got to see them live when they were active so when I found out they were doing a reunion show, I knew I had to go.
Chicago was fun. I flew in early Saturday morning, took a train over to Guaranteed Rate Field and caught a White Sox game (they lost unfortunately), hung out with a friend for a little bit and then made my way over to the venue and watched an amazing show.
I love Chicago. I’m just throwing that out there.
So that was my weekend.
I don’t have a reading update this time around. I am still really behind on my reading, both in comic books and actual books. Lately, I have been reading a book about the history of SST records called Corporate Rock Sucks.
Rogue One Radio
The last few week’s we have been doing recap shows of the new Disney Plus Star Wars series, Obi-Wan Kenobi. This week, we covered Part 4 of the series. The tunes that we played on this episode came from Trashed Ambulance and Screeching Weasel. You can check out the episode on YouTube here:
Radio Unfriendly
Also this week, Scott and I recorded and pushed out the third episode of our new music podcast, Radio Unfriendly. On this episode, we talked about what we’ve been up to lately. Scott talked about his recent Gambler 500 adventure and I talked about my trip to Chicago (mostly about the Methadones concert and how certain members of the audience were entertaining). We also discussed some books about music, and of course, we played some cool tunes and talked about them. The bands we featured on this new episode came from Call In Dead, Paperback Tragedy, Double Cheese, Tee Vee Repairman, Billiam, and Steve & Ginie Jackson. You can check out the new episode on Apple podcasts here:
For this issue’s track of the week, I chose a Methadones song because I have been listening to a lot of their stuff this week (even though I just got through seeing them in concert). The song comes from their 2003 album Career Objective.
Well that is it for this time around. Hopefully, I won’t wait so long to write another one.