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:

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Continue reading

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.

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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.

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Here’s my playlist for the day so far: Sia. Justin Townes Earle. Josh Woodward. Jaydiohead.

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.

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.

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.