I bought an accordion.  I am well aware that this purchase is the musician’s version of the Nordic Track.  This will not languish in the corner of the garage, my friends, oh no.  The day after I bought it, I bent my finger back very, very far against a basketball.  Now I cannot play my accordion.  I guess that’s appropriate, since I don’t know how to play it.  What I’m trying to say is don’t expect my accordion-only covers album of Stevie Wonder songs to drop anytime soon.

In other (aka actual) news, I just bagged up the final mix of a sah-weet Propagandhi cover song for a split 7″.  I don’t know if I’m allowed to divulge anymore interesting details yet, but I can tell you that this is the first A!A! track to involve the djembe.  It sounds like maybe that would be bad, but don’t worry, it’s good.

Also got a couple shows on the stove, one in Jersey and the other in California.  See you there.

- Aaron

At this moment, I am looking at a big stack of money.  It’s more cash than I’ve seen on my desk in a long time, and none of it’s mine.

Last week, I played a benefit show for the Jake Stults Foundation.  It was an average turnout for an Attica! Attica! show in Portland, and the requested donation at the door was $3-5.  Perhaps you can understand, then, why I was astounded that the total we made averaged out to be $20/person.  Considering that some people donated $3, others donated much more.  Two days later, my friend Jesse was at a hardcore show and announced an upcoming benefit screening for the foundation.  One of the bands, Dangers, decided to donate all of their door money and merch money from the show, even though they were on tour.  Two days after that, I was at a show talking to my friend Rory of Soul Control about the situation, and he returned with a generous donation from his band, despite being 3,000 miles from home.

We are truly a stunning community.  Within a week, we raised just under $1,000, mostly from people who barely knew Jake or didn’t know him at all.  We are not some enormous charitable organization using donations to cover administrative fees, nor are we a church with loyal weekly contributors.  We are just a group of people who take care of our own.  And Jake was one of us.

The circumstances of Jake’s life and of his death allowed for him to donate 7 organs and enough tissue for up to 70 additional recipients.  It is rare that a person’s passing can have such a broad and profound impact on extending and improving the lives of others.  We can and should rejoice in this fact, but we must do so with an awareness that the efforts to save his life came at an enormous cost.  As of today, the medical bills stand at $115,000.  I think we can all agree that this is far too great a burden for one person to bear.

So it’s up to us.  I am so satisfied and impressed with the pile of money in front of me because it is evidence of how strong and unique our community is.  We are great.  But this is less than 1/100th of the financial burden that Jake’s wife and family face.  I hope you will continue to demonstrate how strong our network is by helping with a donation to the Jake Stults Foundation.  If you are reading this, then you were a part of Jake’s community, even if you didn’t know him.  I encourage you to act the way you would like the community to respond if you were in the same situation.  Thanks for your generosity, your kindness, and your support.

- Aaron

I lost a friend this weekend.  He started the first band I was ever in.  He was my oldest friend in Portland.  The last time I talked to him, he invited me to sing for his new band.  Now he’s gone.  There’s a lot that I feel, but not much left to say.

Except this: Here’s to Jake.  The most excited storyteller, the most animated bass player, the most unpredictable van driver, and most genuine dude I have ever known.  May the music he left behind comfort us in his absence.

At the memorial yesterday, I found out that someone had already received a successful kidney transplant from Jake after waiting for more than a year for a match.  Three days after his passing, he is already saving lives.  I don’t believe in destiny, but I do believe in beauty.  And that’s about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.

Despite my highly enjoyable first visit to the basement of the Breakfast and Dessert House in Philadelphia, I still did not expect this second show there to be as fantastic as it was.  The ambiance of the basement is a perfect mix of dinginess and coziness, full of friends past, present, and future.  Nick and company put together a good mix of acoustic music, astoundingly good considering they assembled it in a week’s time.  It was one of those shows where everyone was really hanging out in between bands, not just lingering near each other.  It felt so comfortable that I decided to indulge my friend Scotty’s insistence that I learn and play Bad Religion’s “Ten in 2010″ in belated honor of the New Year.  I played the song to an outlandishly enthusiastic singalong.

I also played “Frostbite,” which I haven’t played much in the past year.  I always thought that song would be best with a hearty singalong, and this show proved me right.  Back when I started writing music, I used to have heavy anxiety when people sang along to my songs.  It made me self-conscious that anyone was actually paying enough attention to the lyrics to memorize them, or listening to the songs enough times to inadvertently absorb them.  Nowadays, I really crave the singalongs.  In the moments when I’m not the only one singing, I feel like we take a major step toward breaking down the barrier between performer and audience and we become a group of people singing a song we all know.  I enjoy this just as much when someone else is the songleader.  I don’t need the glory of being the one who wrote the song; I just want us to sing together.

The day before, I went to church in my hometown for the first time in years.  The service included several unison prayers and a handful of hymns, both of which are common to most church services.  Speaking in unison is just creepy to me, the essence of cultish groupthink handed down from on high.  Singing hymns, however, is more transcendent.  If I’m alone, I don’t sing hymns because I am not a man of faith.  But I have no problem singing spiritual songs with others because we, whether as a community or as a contrived group of people, desire to feel the power of our numbers and the energy that comes from that.  Reciting words that are not my own sounds monotonous and thoughtless.  Singing words that are not my own still feels exuberant, because singing with others just feels outstanding to me.  The lyrics have to be profoundly stupid or pretty offensive to derail my exuberance.  Hell, they can even be profoundly stupid and I’ll still enjoy the experience.

In the DIY scene, or the punk scene, or whatever you wanna call it, our songs are our common language and our cultural currency, and I’ll gladly sing along to a song that I don’t necessarily find inspiring if it means I can sing with 5, 10, or 100 other people.  The basement show is our house of worship, and we understand that singing along doesn’t obligate a person to espouse every word of the song in question.  If it did, no one would ever sing along to anything.  It just celebrates that we have a common bond within the diversity of our ideas.  And hey, singing just feels real good.

I finished off my last song, and after some shouting for “one more!”, I decided to sing “We’ll Always Be Home.”  I’ve never ended a set with that song since I sing it a cappella, which seems a little weak for a final song, but I was feeling so good I figured, “Why not?”  I started singing, and I was shocked at how many people were singing every word with me.  When I started Attica! Attica!, this was the highest possible success I could imagine.  To encourage more singing along, I tried to write songs that were still thoughtful but a little less wordy than my previous bands.  I didn’t really succeed at that (I’m a verbose dude), but I still hoped that these songs could provide a foundation for a hearty and fulfilling singalong.  This Philly show was the realization of that idea, and it felt really, really good.  I don’t know if I’ve felt that good playing live since Marathon’s last show.

So thank you, Philly.  And thank you to anyone who’s ever sung along or written a song for me to sing along to.  I now have accomplished everything I wanted to do with Attica! Attica!  I’m by no means done (I have a few projects in the pipe as we speak).  It’s just that everything that happens from now on is gravy.

Getting on a plane in 8 hours to go out East and see the good people.  Hope to see you in NYC or Philly!

- Aaron

LAST MINUTE EAST COAST SHOWS!  I’m playing in NYC and Philly next week.  Check the shows page for the details!

- Aaron

Okay, the Great Facebook Experiment of Oh-10 seems to be working.  I even learned about RSS feeds yesterday.  I don’t mean to fashion myself as a complete nincompoop when it comes to Internet stuff, it’s just that I only care about the Internet when it can give me things I need.  Like pants.  I need new pants.  Give me pants, Internet.

You really can’t even blink without the Internet passing you by.  It makes me think about the “singularity” (have you hear to this?!).  A handful of futurists (and maybe one particularly prominent one whose name escapes me) are predicting that the rate of change will continue to accelerate exponentially, leading to a point where change happens so quickly that it will be indiscernible to human intelligence.  In other words, artificial intelligence will supersede human intelligence, unless we augment human intelligence with artificial intelligence.  Yes.  Robocop.  I actually sort of believe all this, but until then?  I’m going to continue to be amazed about RSS feeds and attempt to devote more of my time to basement shows and less of my time to mediocre forms of pseudo-communication like Facebook.  Oh, and if you haven’t already done so, be Attica! Attica!’s fan!  Singularity, here we come.

- Aaron

I just made a Facebook page for Attica! Attica! I don’t understand how it works.  The Internet is making me feel like Grandpa.  The Grandpa who can’t program the clock on the VCR.  Er…I meant Tivo.  I’m not going to beg for you to become my Facebook friend or whatever, but it would be nice if I could get more fans than the Attica! Attica! page that someone else made and that I have no power to update.

- Aaron

Apparently there’s a new movie in production called Attica! Attica! Attica! So 5 years from now, everyone’s going to think I got the name from this movie, no matter how accurate or inaccurate it is.  I would hope that, when naming your film after a chant that is intended to expose abuse of state power, you would have a film that’s sympathetic to those whom the state does not serve.  The article I linked, however, has no problem playing fast and loose with the facts.  The reporter states of Cell Block Z, “…where the riot that killed 39 people, mostly guards, began…”  Let’s get these facts straight.  1 guard was killed in the riot itself.  9 guards were killed by state bullets when the state retook the prison and shot bullets indiscriminately into a yard filled with tear gas.  Oh yeah, 28 inmates were killed at that point, too.  The state only provided ambulances for injured guards, allowing several inmates to bleed to death.  The state bulldozed all the evidence of the event.  The state blamed the deaths of the guards on the inmates, fabricating the claim that the guards’ throats were slit.  I named my band after this event because it is the essential example of the state’s inability to craft a humane resolution to a human crisis.  Now you tell me, what part of “the riot that killed 39 people, mostly guards” is accurate?  This is the essence of either lazy or intentionally skewed reporting, which appears in nearly every mainstream article.  The facts are out there, but who’s calling the reporters out when they don’t even try to get them right?

Full disclosure: I’m addicted to the song “Watcha Say” by Jason Derulo.  If you don’t know it, it’s probably better if you don’t look it up.  While I firmly believe that autotune and over-production are out of control, I am fascinated by the major label methodology of producing hits.  I enjoy seeing what maximum expenditure can (and can’t) produce in the studio and I appreciate what the hitmakers believe will successfully exploit the public’s desire for barely-discernible originality.

It seems like everyone except the aging executives at the majors know that the well is running dry on CD sales, and no matter how viable digital sales (or subscription access to “the cloud“) become, there won’t be a whole lot of money to throw around.  So what happens to artists like Jason Derulo at that point?  Can pop music find a way to make records that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that still turn a profit? Probably not, which I find a little upsetting.  As trifling and dastardly as the majority of the music industry is, I lament a world without highly polished pop music.  It’s always been a part of the musical fabric of my existence, and though I’ve intentionally shunned it for a good portion of my life, I still like that it’s there if I want it.

On a somewhat related note, Public Enemy is asking its fans to fund a new record.  This is an interesting model, and one that I think can work if you’re a currently popular band with an obsessive fanbase.  Is P.E. that band?  Eh…I love me some Public Enemy, but they’re heyday was 20 years ago…now they’re asking for $250,000.  I recorded both of my last two albums for under $1,000.  Yes, I’m no Public Enemy, but 1/4 of a million dollars?  Sounds like Flavor Flav hasn’t been saving those paychecks from Flavor of Love.

ANYWAYS…I’m playing a few Portland shows coming up.  Also, I posted a couple new tour diaries awhile back.  You can check them out at Willamette Week and Punknews.

Yup.
- Aaron