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:

Albania, Slovenia, Time to catch a train yeah
Out of Serbia and Bosnia, NATO’s going to bomb ya,
Sarajevo, Montenegro, baby why don’t we go Croatia

Off the border of Greece there’s a place called Kosovo
But you don’t want to go Because they’re bombing it all
Bodies in the sand, You can feel blood dripping through your hands
You’ll be dragged through the streets by the mobs of raving Serbians
Way down in Kosovo

Albania, Slovenia, Time to catch a train yeah
Out of Serbia, and Bosnia, NATO’s going to bomb ya,
Sarajevo, Montenegro, ooh time to go anywhere but Kosovo,
Get killed by people who you used to know
That’s just the way things go
Way down in Kosovo

Milosavic, somebody catch that bitch

We’ll put out to sea, the Adriatic’s the place to be
If we’re lucky we’ll see the ships of the US Navy
Afternoon delight, watch the missiles taking flight
Looks like somebody else is going to meet their maker tonight
Way down in Kosovo

Albania, Slovenia, Time to catch a train yeah
Out of Serbia, and Bosnia, NATO’s going to bomb ya,
Sarajevo, Montenegro, ooh time to go anywhere but Kosovo,
Get killed by people who you used to know
That’s just the way things go
Way down in Kosovo

Milosavic, somebody catch that bitch

Even NATO knows, it’s too late for Kosovo,
But if you want to see
How bombs help out the refugees
Get down to Kosovo

To Get Home Before Night Comes is now available at cdbaby.com.

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.

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

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.

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.

Top Five Songs on Jamendo Pro

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.

• 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.

Northern Star on Ultrastar Deluxe

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.

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.

Ubuntu Studio open source Linux-based audio production

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.

This week, when Ubuntu 7.04 launches, it will have a companion, known as Ubuntu Studio. Ubuntu Studio is a community-produced collection of repository packages, audio tools and plugins that provide a comprehensive audio and video production environment. And it is my path to a fully open source music studio.

To learn the ropes in this new system, I will be recording my next album, called “The Open Album.” I’m still working out the licensing, but I think it will be something similar to the GPL.

Here’s the scoop: All tracks, plugins, and project files will be released along with the album. Other musicians will be free (and encouraged) to remix, premix, and otherwise tweak the music, provided they release all their source material, which will require that no proprietary software be used.

I’m excited to get started, but it will probably be a few weeks before I get familiar enough with the software to post anything resembling an alpha release of any of the songs.

Once the album is finished, it will be published at Jamendo, and all source materials will be released at TheOpenAlbum.com (currently redirecting to this site).

What do you think? Do the principles of software apply to music? Is it brilliant, or stupid? Intuitive or unworkable? We shall find out.