You can still listen to Dance of Words by J Raud and the Firing Squad for free at Bandcamp.

It’s amazing how much time it takes to make an album. I think we spent like 150 hours in the studio working on this one. To top it off we must have played around 20-30 shows.

Thanks for all your support.

I’ve always thought Anthropologie selling bohemian was a little silly. This person thinks so too. Check out their site below:

http://www.anthroparodie.com/

I recorded a new Christmas song over the weekend. It’s an instrumental called “For the Love of Santa”.

Click here to listen: For the Love of Santa
J Raud: keyboard, guitar, sound fx

Expect more instrumentals to come in 2012.

You can listen to Dance of Words by J Raud and the Firing Squad for free at Bandcamp.

Sometimes a demo is recorded before the official album version of a song is made. Which version is better depends on who you ask.

Bruce Springsteens’ Nebraska was all demos. After recording the studio album, the band and Bruce realized that the album they wanted to put out was the one Bruce recorded at home, or the “demo” version.

Although I am not comparing myself to Bruce, I have released many demos as official recordings too, and my albums Naked as a Jay Bird and Nickels & Dimes are two cases in point.

Dance of Words was a more polished album I made. I found a demo of one of its’ songs recently and thought I would share it.

Give a listen to the  Half Glass Full Demo and the official version of Half Glass Full. Which do you like better? Are there good things about both?

Back in December 2006 Luke Rohlfs and I wrote and recorded a Christmas song- all in one day. I’m happy with what we came up with, even though I messed up my pronunciation of the word “schemes” (I sing “sheems” instead of “skeems”).

Anyway, the song, “Can’t Sell a Snow on Christmas” has a dark feel due to its heavy minor chord construction. We also protest the commercialization of Christmas in our lyrics. We still haven’t been able to steal Christmas back from those corporations…

Listen to our Christmas song here: “Can’t Sell a Snow On Christmas”

Credits:
Peddlers: “Can’t Sell a Snow on Christmas”
Vocals, Keyboard: Luke Rohlfs
Vocals, Guitar: Jeff Raudebaugh

Current Listening is where I post about musical artists I am currently into.

Blur- They were all the rage in 1997 with their American breakthrough hit “Song 2″, when everybody was singing “woo-hoo!”. Now their frontman heads the world famous band Gorillaz. Blur were huge in Britain. They no longer record together, but their alternative pop songs are still hard to resist.

Spiritualized- Another British band, only they combine space rock with gospel. Jason “Spaceman” Pierce is their creative director/ singer/ mastermind. Their music is wonderful to chill out to.

My Michigan band Peddlers partook in a battle of the bands in Lansing, MI in October 2006. Local news covered the event and interviewed us. I stumbled into the feature not long ago and thought I’d share.

Watch the video here.

Pumpkin time. The Mrs. created this one.

My friend Megan Lovett is a photographer. She walks around DC capturing interesting images and posts the best on her website. The image below was taken by her. For more of her work, go here.