In case anyone’s interested, my Xbox Live Gamertag is “Joe Barnosky” because I’m very original.

Tonight I decided to make this summer the re-recording time in my life; I’m finally competent enough with words to say what I mean and hopefully not fudge around with it. So, I gathered up the many folders in which I’ve stashed songs I exported and decided to listen to them and decide on what I’m re-recording and what I’m hiding away forever.

It came to my attention that I’m working on four albums simultaneously; you see, my music is divided into two markets, and each of those has a sub-category of marketability. I’m a Christian, so that is going to sneak into a number of my personal non-worship songs.

* These personal non-worship songs (we’ll call non-Christian things ‘secular&rsquo will be compiled into Imaginary Gardens, based on a poem about poetry by Marianne Moore (called “Poetry&rdquo. This is the stuff that I write most often, since it’s my job to worship, so I get paid to do a lot of that work. There are thoughts that I have no venue for, figurative or literal, so they come out here as real toads.

* I’m also a worship leader for the youth group at my church right now, and I do write worship songs (Sanctuary). These, for the uninitiated, are songs that I’ve written to and for God, and the hope is that something in my communication with Him stirs the listener to agree and say/sing the same thing to Him. This is worshipping together, offering Him the same thoughts and prayers.

* However, the best way to learn music is to steal steal steal (imitation being the greatest form of flattery), so there are a number of songs that I’ve covered, and I like my covers, so I want them to be available to you (Under Covers). Unfortunately, because of copyright law, I am unable to profit from them in any way whatsoever unless I register the covers with the RIAA and arrange for a miniscule percentage of my profit to be paid to the original artist. Therefore, any covers that I record must be given away for free; this is not a negative thing, mind you: I get to share things I like with you, and you won’t pay a cent. Under Covers will also include original songs that I’ve written that include parts of other artists’ songs, since I can’t sell those, either.

* Lastly, there are a number of secular songs that move me musically and lyrically, and I do confess that my primary mode of worship is music, so I yearn to offer the same music and lyric to God instead of the original audience (typically a girl). So, I’ll re-write a few words to make it worshipful and use that song for the Lord instead of cash; this process and album is what I call Reposession. Obviously, these are not sellable, since I’m using most of someone else’s music along with a fair portion of their words.

With that being said, I gathered all of the songs I’ve ever recorded versions of and threw them all into one big folder. Deleting duplicates, I organized the names and listened to all 48 of them. Of those, 18 are currently in a folder called “Just to Have, Even Though I’m Ashamed,” and the rest are in a folder called “Re-record.” I wrote down every song that I intended to keep as I intended to keep it, and took notes on things to definitely change while recording. Then, I placed the song into one of the four slots I drew on the paper and sorted out which song would go on which album. There’s only one song that will appear on two albums, being dual-purpose in nature, and one song will be hilariously shameful when you figure out what I did. Otherwise, aside from making actual album playlists, Imaginary Gardens and Sanctuary have pretty much settled their contents, unless I write anything new during the recording process. Given that I have roughly 30 songs to track over the summer, the odds are that writing will be slim while arranging will be where I spend the majority of my time.

I have grandiose dreams of how I want to set up all of my free downloads, since songs will go up for free until I finalize the album and go to sell it: I would like to make text files with the lyrics of each song and a short description of what the song means. For example, there’s a love song that isn’t a love song, but it’s written for a very close female friend. Okay, there are actually two. One song of Reposession has a line that’s biblically sound and lyrically enticing, but for the slightly daft, I should make that connection clear. Anyway, I want to take the text files and put them up on the download pages of my site so you can see what the album is going to look like, and you can request whichever songs you’d like to see appear next. The text files will go up in the album order, so you’ll build the album one song at a time until I put the whole product up.

As I record, I’ll replace the text file links with links to the actual songs, and I’ll separate my personal comments and the lyrics into the IDv3 tags for each mp3 in iTunes, so when a person is listening and they go to the Info section of the song, the song meaning and lyrics are already built in. Why don’t more artists do this?

So, that’s the gig, folks. Stay tuned: within the next week, I’ll have a surprise ready for you.



-Joe Peanut Butter

Changing webhosts because the old host only lets 200 people update their website via FTP at a time. Protip: if you can only let 200 people FTP at a time, don’t brag about having 30,000 “satisfied users.” Also, admins should read their own forums, because quite a number of us were unsatisfied.

Sorry, old host, but... bite me. I couldn’t put up my Carl Jung song the day I freakin’ presented it because of your inadequacies. I don’t even know how many of my classmates came by to see a post I wrote about shells and cheese instead of anything I wanted to load that day.

*huff*

Two new songs! “Young Jung” and “Neon Butterfly” are up under Media > Imaginary Gardens.


Enjoy, homies.



-jpb

My webhosting situation has been crazy -- I switched over to free hosting, which has worked out really well for me, except for not being able to update my site for the last two weeks. Apparently, something went psycho on the server side and it thought there were 125,000 people logged in to FTP their sites at the moment, so it wouldn’t let anyone else FTP. That’s the best I can gather, anyway.

I’ll be uploading my Carl Jung song within a couple of days.


Rock it like a rocket,
Joe

Theories of Personality students: welcome to my website!

Unfortunately, inviting you here was sort of a ruse; I have virtually nothing of interest at the moment. I do record songs and post them here for free download, but I got sick of low-quality recordings when I could spend a little more time and polish my material up a bit. I’m really excited to re-record a lot, but I haven’t had time to this semester.

The hope was to get a few songs up before today to let you listen to some material of mine, and if you liked it, you could bookmark me and check it out when I release more. Yeah, that didn’t happen. So, sorry if I’ve wasted your time, but do feel free to stick around, look at stupid photos of me, and send a little contact thing if you like.

The song I played in class today will be recorded over the next week, so if you’re interested, check back. Thanks for actually visiting my site; you’re pretty awesome for following through.



Best wishes, hopes, and aspirations for your future,
Joe

I came to post a really neat compliment I received, but as I was opening Rapidweaver, it went through the processes of “Loading page_001, Loading page_002” and all of that... but the first process, I swear I’m not making this up:

Defrosting Sandwich.

What?

----------------------

That being said, a library assistant just asked where I’m originally from. I told her Clarksburg, and she seemed kind of disappointed. After a short pause, she said “You have very distinct voice patterns, like the folks from MHS.” I asked what MHS was, and she said it was Morgantown High School.

Number one, I got to bring good memories back to somebody.
Number two, I don’t sound like a hick.


Rock on.