An eclectic and wild week for new music featuring GROUPLOVE, The Ceys, FIFTY FIFTY, John Batiste, The Breeders, Spoon, Yi, Baroness, Chris Stamey and much more. Enjoy!
As always, these songs have been added to the playlist at Radio Free California, the Internet Radio Station (embedded below and available at the app store). For those of you who don't like Spotify you can tune in this week at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm and 6pm Pacific Standard Time (PST) this Wednessday July 12 to hear the playist in full.
On Thursday of this week we will play the album "I Want It All Right Now" by the band GROUPLOVE. That will be on July 13 at 9am and again at 9pm PST. The album is so good that I had a hard time limiting myself to only a couple of songs for the playlist. I hope you tune in!
No cheap shots today. I was busy.
And becuase I love you, here is the video for "I Don't Believe In Love" by Yi. It's AI generated and for the first time I think it's been done right here.
This week we feature new music from Greta Van Fleet, Cory Wong with AOR, Barenaked Ladies, my friend kiffie, Beck with Phoenix, The Smile, The Silencers, Vintage Trouble, Mammoth WVH and much more. Enjoy!
As per usual I am adding all of these songs to the playlist at my Radio Free California Internet Radio Station, which I am embedding below. On Wednessday July 5th we will play this playlist in full at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm and 6pm Pacific Standard Time. On Thursday at 9am and again at 9pm PST we will play a full album, although as of this writing I haven't decided what that will be yet.
Cheap Shots (not much, it's gonna be a slow news day):
New music this week from many indie artists including my friend MOULE, Cable Ties, Ivy Green, VandeYork, Albert Hammond Jr, Lloyd Cole, plus Stewart Copeland, Portugal, The Man, The Hives, Crown Lands and much more. Enjoy!
As always, these songs have been added to the playlist at Radio Free California the Radio Station (embedded below). If you don't want to listen to this week's selection on Spotify, and some people don't and that's just fine, you can listen on the radio station at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm and 6pm PST This coming Wednessday. We will also be playing the album Western Cum by Cory Hanson, who are featured on this week's list, at 9am and again at 9pm PST on Thursday.
New music this week from Dolly Parton (flexing those rock and roll muscles), Peppy Castro, Queens of the Stone Age, Steve Lukather (with some help from old Toto friends), Gov't Mule, Steve Forbert and much more. Enjoy!
As per usual, these songs can be heard at Radio Free California the Internet Radio station (and app), which I'm embedding here:
Great week for new music starting with Dua Lipa, Ukraine's Death Pill, Dream Wife, Greta Van Fleet, Extreme, Leo, Death Valley Girls, Envy of None (featuring Alex Lifeson of Rush), Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, King Krule and much more. Enjoy!
As per usual, you can also hear these songs at the Radio Free California Internet Radio Station, and the playlist itself this coming Wednesday.
Cheap Shots:
I meant to watch the Tonys, because the daughter of a friend of mine is in the company of a show that performed. Aaaaaaand I missed it. I also missed "The Grand Wizard".
What a week for new music! This week we feature Foo Fighters, The Alarm, Cowboy Junkies, Extreme, lovelytheband, Comet Gain, Sakamato Maaya, Motion Sickness, Rancid, Peter Gabriel and much much more! Enjoy!
As always, the music on this playlist and my previous playlists can be found on the Radio Free California website and app!
A few thoughts about twitter:
I stopped using twitter as a place to meet people a few days after a right wing fuckhead named Elon Musk bought it. Up until that point it had been pretty good, and I had made a number of friends. The synthwave musician kiffie for one, whom I've collaborated with (Look for the album "Megapixelation" on bandcamp). I connected with musician David Baerwald, more than 30 years after unwittingly turning down joining the Tuesday Night Music Club, which I've discussed elsewhere.
Musicians Chris Trapper, Christopher Cross, Chris Franz, Chris Isaask and I even once got into a hilarious circular conversation about forming a new band called The Chris'. I would play keyboards and/or bass in said band.
I got to sing a line in a song by Kasim Sulton because of twitter.
And funniest of all is that Arthur Brown and I are now on-line friends. Yes, "I am the God of Hellfire and I bring you... FIRE!!!!" Arthur Brown himself. A truly pleasant gentleman with a wicked sense of humor.
That all went out the window once Musk took over the platform and invited all the motherfucking Nazis back. I moved to Counter.Social and haven't regretted it for making friends. I kept my twitter account though, for the sole purpose of promoting myself as a musician. Talk about new releases and so on.
But twitter got worse, and at the beginning of May I changed my password into a string of random characters, signed off and I haven't been back since. I lost the password too, when my computer died. I find that while I do miss seeing some of my friends there, I don't miss the platform one damned bit.
But the point is kind of moot because of something that is about to happen: twitter is about to get blocked in most of the European Union.
The European Union (EU) has something called the Digital Services Act. This declares that any company that can be defined as a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) has to follow specific rules about content moderation. Specifically, they have to have procedures in place to prevent cyberbullying, illegal content, misinformation, ads targeted towards minors, hate speech, and more. Targeted ads based upon culled information regarding political opinions and religion are forbidden. AI manipulated content and deepfakes must be labelled. There's more but you get the idea.
These rules are voluntary, but all 19 companies that the EU calls VLOP's signed on. Facebook, Tik-Tok, twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Amazon, Google, Bing, and yes even twitter signed on when the rules were passed. 18 of those companies are still signatories. Guess what one withdrew?
twitter withdrew from the agreement on May 27th, 2023 and that date is very important. It's exactly 90 days before the voluntary participation becomes mandatory and the EU can start enforcing the provisions by levying fines and getting directly involved in how companies implement their social media controls. Facebook has already been levied a fine of $1.2B about sharing user data overseas. Those provisions went into effect earlier.
twitter, by signaling that they will not abide by any ruling of the EU on how they run their business now has another problem. If the EU cannot force a company to be part of the agreement, they are obligated to BLOCK the app.
Now lots of people these days are pretty computer savvy, and know how to use a VPN. But for those who don't, which makes up a majority of all users, twitter will be unavailable starting the end of this summer - August 25, 2023. Exactly 90 days after twitter withdrew from the agreement.
It's that 90 day mark I can't get out of my mind. Musk isn't very smart - he's made missteps time and time again but he takes credit for the fixes and because he's the rich one in the group we tend to give him the credit. We really need to stop treating rich people like they're smart. Anyway, I can't help but feel that this 90 day withdrawal is intentional. 90 days notice.
90 days notice. That's the sort of notice you give when you have a professional reason to give notice. I firmly believe this is intentional. Musk has already shown a tendency to only respond to accounts in the United States when he does his "trolling" schtick. I think he's trying to refocus the app to be specific for the US.
Why?
Look at who he hangs out with, and what he does out of the limelight. He hangs with Ron DeSantis, a chubby schoolboy in a too tight suit with fascism fantasies who panders to the basest of the base in his political party. He's building a town in Texas just for people who think like he does. He's skirting regulations left and right. He showered a town in debris after the explosion of one of his rockets.
(And off topic here, but why the fuck is a private citizen of any kind allowed to have rockets?)
He's about to get fined like crazy in Germany because he doesn't moderate the Nazis who are using twitter, which is actually a crime in Germany. Fines and prison crime.
twitter, which has attempted to call itself the home of free speech absolutists like Musk (he's not one, by the way) is about to drop all pretense and move from being the Fox "News" of social media to becoming the "News"max of social media. It's not about the value of the company. It's not about the money - even after all of this crap Musk is still richer than just about anyone.
It's about the same thing that right-wing fuckheads always want. Power. Power over as many people as possible. They don't care about the how or the why, they care about the existence of power. Unshared power. Power for them and not for anyone else.
Power to tell you how to think. And you're going to think like they want you to think or else.
This is not an American thing but we Americans have just about perfected doing this. We have shown over and over again during our history that we are the best at taking the worst ideas and weaponizing them against ourselves. twitter is becoming the same kind of American, and it seems to me to be intentional.
I unfriend people like that. I don't need that sort of horseshit in my personal life. I don't need twitter.
I miss a few people there but funnily enough most of them are people who won't have access to it in a couple more months.
And maybe you will find that you don't need twitter either.
Quick, can you name all ELEVEN people running for the GOP Nomination so far? Don't feel bad if you can't. I just read the article in the link and I still can't.
New music this week from Sparks, The Damned, Steve Lukather, Foo Fighters, Comet Gain, Panic Pocket, Hugh Lee, Baby Rose, Bayonne, Alex Anwandter, Stewart Copeland, and much more. Enjoy!
As always, these songs have been added to the rotation of Radio Free California, available online (embedded below) and in the app store. This Playlist will play 5 times on Wednesday, And on Thursday we're going to play a full album at 9am and again at 9pm Pacific Standard Time. This week's album is the new Paul Simon effort, Seven Psalms, which is arranged and performed as a single song.
No cheap shots today. It's Memorial Day and I'm not working for it today. But because I love you, have some Cory Wong live, featuring Victor Wooten.
New music this week from blur, Homecomings, Yes, Todd Rundgren, MOULE, Greta Van Fleet, PONY, The Ocean, Leo give his version of an old Frankie Goes to Hollywood song, lovelytheband drops a new single, We feature a couple of songs by the Japanese pop band Homecomings (one of which is the theme to the anime "Kimi ha Houkago Insomnia", The Ocean releases the final album in their Phanerzoic trilogy, Ed Eagle, kiffie, Cory Wong and Theo Katzman all release songs where they are guesting on other people's albums, and much more. Enjoy!
And then a Foo Fighters song flew in under the radar at the last second, so I had to add that too.
<<insert sound of a needle on a 45 here>>
Well you may have noticed that this one is late. Late late late late late. That's because the evening that I was going to post this my computer suffered a Klingon breakdown and I lost everything. The whole. FUCKING. Machine. All of my files. My comics, my anime, and even two singles I had slated for July. One last mix and they were heading to the distributors.
All gone.
It's now five days later and I only just got a temporary working machine today. I'll have a new machine next week and then I will start the process of rebuilding, on <<shudder>> windows 10. I fucking hate Windows 10.
What amazes me more than anything is that I haven't lost my temper over it, and if you've read my work you can imagine that I might have a temper to match it. And I do.
But here we are anyway, and not a damned thing I can do about it. So I'm going to be sporadic for a bit while I rebuild my setup and my studio. I can re-record the singles but I had a magical performance on one of them that I'll never be able to reproduce. I also had the weirdest guitar solo I've ever recorded.
So I'm sorry this one's late. The radio station is down and I've lost all my e-mail contacts and bread recipes. Give me a moment or two to put it all back together again.
And because I love you and we need a laugh, may I introduce you to Dara O'Briain:
Welcome to this week's new releases! Music From The Hives, Serge Tiagnyriadno, Leap in Exile, Daft Punk, Sparks, Ed Eagle, Pet Shop Boys, Mammoth WVH and much more. Enjoy!
So the Radio Station version of Radio Free California is running strong. You can hear all of the Radio Free California Episodes for the last 6 months on random play, and I'm going to add the music from each playlist every week until I have a year's worth of uploads, and then start deleting the oldest music one week at a time, so that the rotation is constant.
No commercials, but we do have occasional announcements voiced by the wonderful Diana Mars. Also, Every Wednesday at 2am, 6am, 10am, 2pm and 6pm we run that week's Radio Free California uninterrupted. All times Pacific Standard.
Here is the web stream, which you can imbed on your own or open as a new webpage:
At this time there are no plans for an Apple version. We found that the licensing requirements were too burdensome. This isn't a money making venture - I'm doing it because it's fun and I like to share new music.
Fantastic week for new music featuring Iggy Pop, Gord Downie with Bob Rock, The Smashing Pumpkins, Cory Wong, Yusuf, Ben Folds, Peter Gabriel, Trev Lukather, Peter One and much much more. Enjoy!
So we have launched Radio Free California as an internet Radio Station. It's available on the web right now, and will be an app available at the Google Storein the near future. We're still kind of working the bugs out, but it's running now 24/7, and features ONLY new music, drawn from the various playlists I've put together and featured here since October of 2022.
Radio Free California will only be playing music less than 1 year from its release date. If you want to hear "Freebird" there are PLENTY of places you can go for that.
I've embedded the site here so you can just press play, or you can click here to be taken to a separate web page.
Cheap Shots (btw, tht thump you heard was the door hitting Scott Baio in the ass as he leaves California):
I' commenting on the picture here and not the story, but the more he protests the more he seems to resemble a Disney Cartoon character, don't you think?
New music this week from phil broikos, Yes, Benjamin Russell, Brenda Mtambo, Annahstasia, Stewart Copeland, The National, Smokey Robinson and much more. Enjoy!
So I live in San Francisco, California. It's a great place to live but I have to admit that radio here is fucking terrible. There are almost no outlets for new music and those that exist want to go so far outside the mainstream that a person whose tastes lie more towards rock, alternative and pop really have nowhere to go. The Bay Area's one great rock and roll station is more classic rock than anything else, the one adult alternative radio station is now doing sports and talk radio, and the one real alternative radio is now a "Dave" station - which means nothing past the year 2004.
For a working musician it is best to understand what else is out there and what your contemporaries are doing, so I crave and devour new music. That was really the whole purpose of starting Radio Free California in the first place, to share my discoveries. New music really isn't all that hard to find, but the days of being able to rely on radio to bring you new music are gone now.
So I've begun work on a new project that I hope to launch in June. I'm taking Radio Free California and turning it into an actual Internet Radio Station. It will feature the music from these playlists and a bit more, but the key thing here is that all of the music will be no more than 2 years since it's official release. All genres welcome, and I'll be playing the people with 50 followers right next to those with 50,000,000. Unsigned artists won't be regulated to 10pm on a Thursday night, but played in the main rotation with all the other artists.
Does this mean I will be launching an app? Why, yes it does! I'll let everyone know when it's ready, but Radio Free California will be available for both Apple and Android.
Cheap Shots:
A lot has been made of "Dark Brandon's" showing at the White House Correspondents Dinner, but for me the best work of the night was the last 5 minutes of Roy Wood's speech. A comedian who really gets it - maybe he should be the next host of The Daily Show.
