blog @ stevendunston.com

This track is now 11 years old; hard to believe it. Kosovo (the song) is a Weird Al-type parody/tribute song based on the Beach Boys’ Kokomo. I wrote the lyrics and recorded this in 1999 as NATO was escalating its involvement in the Balkans.

In 1999, there were few internet outlets for this sort of thing. I did get some interest and some airplay out of some college radio stations, until a dispute with HFA knocked it off the air. I maintained that it was a clear case of Fair Use given that it was a parody, but they had better lawyers, and claimed that it was a rework of the original, which required publisher permission.

Anyway, here it is; click Continue Reading for the lyrics:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Continue reading

The Album “To Get Home Before Night Comes” was released on Jamendo.com in 2006. Three years and 171,000 streams later, I have finally released it as a physical CD, available now on CDBaby.com.

It includes “Danger Girl,” “Move a Little Closer” and “Better Man”. Of course, all seven tracks will still be available for free download on Jamendo, but if you want the hi-res version, lyric liner notes, or just like to hold the CD in your hands, well now you can.

Thanks to everyone who listened, and to Troy McCullough for the generous use of his photo for the artwork.

This is a little bit of Halloween Candy I recorded on a Saturday afternoon in 2002, a ghoulish, silly pop song somewhere in between Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Hope you like it. It’s Called Fright Night.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Periodically I’m going to be adding some music to the blog that for whatever reason was never included in an album release.

This is a stripped-down cover of What’s Love Got to Do With It, made famous by Tina Turner in 1984, and winner of several 1985 Grammy Awards.

Obviously, since I didn’t write it, I haven’t been able to include it on albums released with a Creative Commons License.

Let me know what you think.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Jamendo has been on a roll lately, expanding their offerings to artists and building services around the core of quality Creative Commons music that they have established.

With their professional music licensing, Jamendo is taking unsigned, Creative Commons artists into new markets.

Just in the last couple of months, my music has been used in a video in Vancouver BC, a film in Sweden, aboard French High Speed Rail, and now comes loaded on the latest mp3 player from Archos.

The icing on the cake is that one of my tracks, Move A Little Closer, is currently one of the top 5 tracks in sales on Jamendo Pro. I don’t know exactly what that means yet in terms of dollars, but Jamendo promises to pay 50% of revenue directly back to the artists. Not bad for music that I planned to give away.

From time to time I’ll be posting my playlist. Most of it will be free music, freely available as downloadable mp3 files, flac files, etc. Occasionally I’ll include an independent band or small-label band worth listening to. Today’s music:

• Jamendo Ambient Mix
• Drive-By Truckers (available on emusic.com)
• Tim Fite’s free album, “Over the Counter Culture”

Jamendo’s album count keeps going up, and the quality of the music keeps improving as well. I’m loving the tag-based streaming player built into the web browser. One can also stream music with Pandora, or Last.fm, but with Jamendo, if you find something you love, it’s easy and free to download it immediately.

The Drive-by Truckers are classified as Alternative Country on emusic.com, but as several reviewers have pointed out, they are perhaps better referred to as Southern Rock.

Tim Fite is clever, bitingly sarcastic, and bouncy. It’s definitely hip-hop, also country, Texan, and scathingly political. I’m a fan of bargain-bin-diving djs, hunting for wacky samples. Tim Fite has taken this technique to a new plateau.

Not sure how they found me, probably through Jamendo. But it’s very cool to have my song included with the open source competitive karaoke sensation that is Ultrastar Deluxe. For those who are unfamiliar with it, it’s a free program that tracks your voice as you sing along with songs, and then gives you a score based on how well you follow the original.

This is the perfect example of why I release my music under a Creative Commons license. They even have a link to my Jamendo album on their front page. Sweet.

Ah well, real life intrudes on art. I had big plans for recording in 2007, but it never quite happened. Excuses and circumstances included the mundane (the theft of mics, hard drives and software from my studio) and the tragic (the untimely death of my good friend and frequent collaborator, James Sabin).

I have been throwing myself into web design lately. Like music, it provides a certain amount of creative satisfaction. Unlike music, it provides a steady paycheck.

In November, I bought a new MacBook, which allows me to run Windows (for the necessary website proofing in IE7) and Ubuntu along with OSX. I have been exploring the burgeoning Mac open source software community, and here are some of my current favorites. While I have been enjoying the obvious choices on every Mac open source list (Firefox, VLC, Handbrake, Transmission, Cyberduck), I’ll focus on some you may not have heard of.

Cog: the anti iTunes

Cog doesn’t have an online store, track ratings, CoverFlow, or most of iTunes other slick touches. So why do I keep coming back to Cog? Simple things. First of all, it plays nearly every audio format, including ogg and flac files, which are increasingly a part of my music collection. Second, it doesn’t try to manage my music collection or hijack my optical drive. It just plays the tracks I ask it to play. Third, it Audio Scrobbles, and I’m enjoying tracking my listens on Last.FM.

Bean: the Anti Word Processor

Bean doesn’t merge your mailing labels, sync with your spreadsheets and calendar, or manage your footnotes and bibliography. It just does what I want a word processor to do about 90% of the time when I open one. It just takes dictation from my fingers, and allows me to apply simple formatting, then save it in a tiny, standardized file format. Was that really so hard?

Disk Inventory X: Find that Cruft that’s filling up your hard drive

Apparently there is no such thing as too much hard drive space. While I made do with a couple of floppy disks in high school, now I have terabytes of drives around the house, and they always seem to be full. Disk Inventory X scans your drive, and gives you a visual representation of the acreage each folder and file takes up on your disk drive. Genius.

I’m a huge fan of open software and free ideas. Ever since Windows XP launched, with its authorization schemes, I’ve been on a migration path away from Microsoft. And yet, while I use a Mac laptop and Linux on my desktop for web development, I still use Windows XP along with Cakewalk SONAR for all of my recording and sound design.

There are two primary reasons I have persisted in the proprietary world of Windows and Cakewalk. The first reason is that I have invested in a lot of Windows-only hardware. And the second reason is that open source audio tools have lagged behind their proprietary counterparts in terms of features and friendliness. But those reasons no longer suffice.

Continue reading

According to Apple’s marketing campaign, if it’s on iTunes, it’s on the Apple TV. That may be true for Apple’s early adopters who plopped down $299 for the privilege of porting their media from their computer to their television. But it wasn’t true for Apple’s Global Sales Training Department, which frantically contacted me about a month ago, seeking to use my music for the launch of their Apple TV Sales Training DVD.

Continue reading