"Today I'm OK" on The Real World

My happy bouncy sing-a-long, "Today I'm OK" is featured on the July 15 episode (tomorrow night) of MTV's The Real World. Should be on at 10pm, but check your local listings.

So You Think You Can Dance

I'm so excited to announce that my song, Wave Goodbye, will be featured on the June 3rd episode (tomorrow night!) of So You Think You Can Dance on FOX. It's Vegas callbacks night. Maybe somebody will get sent home to my tune. Or maybe they'll just dance gorgeously to it. Who knows? Set those Tivos!

All-Covers Singalong this Friday!

This Friday, March 20, is my All-Covers show at Genghis. I'll be playing with my Small But Mighty Band (Jan Stolpe on guitar and Mark Stanley on percussion), and we're gonna put our own spin on Elvis Costello, Tom Petty, Billy Joel, The Beatles, Elton John and lots more fun stuff.

I'm really excited about this one. It's gonna be a great time. Come on out and sing/shout/laugh along.

Genghis Cohen
9pm
$7
740 N Fairfax Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90046
http://www.genghiscohen.com/

Away

I'm headed up to Washington to spend a week with Noah! Will take lots of pics and videos. In the meantime, here's a cover. Bear with me, I just started playing guitar recently.

Orbiting

Bad Girls Club...again!

My song, "Little Noah," will be featured on next week's episode of The Bad Girls' Club. No idea how they're gonna tie that song in. If you're as curious as I am, tune in Tuesday, January 13th, at 7 or 10pm (depending on where you live - check local listings) on the Oxygen network.

Podcast Features

The first episode of F-Stop Beyond, a photographers' podcast, has featured "To Show You My Love." Check it out here. Also, the ETC podcast has featured me again, this time using "Born Yesterday." You can check that out right here. Both songs are from my "High Cost of Living" album, available on iTunes and CDBaby.

All Night Yahtzee Rocks The Socks

I love my fans. They are quite a creative bunch, and I always enjoy seeing what they're up to. This video was just brought to my attention by Aaron Picar. Please to enjoy "To Show You My Love" as performed by All Night Yahtzee.

Pre-Order My New Album Now!

My brand new album, The House We Built, is available for pre-order at CDBaby.com. You can purchase it now, and it will ship to you on Tuesday.

You can also hear clips of every song on the new album at mikeschmid.com! Just click on the MEDIA tab.

I am very excited about this incredibly personal project and I would love your support!

Once you receive your copy of the album, let me know what you think by writing a review at CDBaby, or commenting here.

Today I'm OK

My new album, "The House We Built," is coming out August 19th! But you can hear my new song, "Today I'm OK," right this second at www.myspace.com/mikeschmid.

Go ahead, judge a book by it's cover:

Back To Kazoo

When you write a song and send it off into the world, you never know how people are going to react to it, or what they're gonna do with it. Sometimes, your least favorite songs end up in TV shows and films (no one's complaining). Other times, your favorite songs end up like this:



There are actually three more videos like this. Found them while poking around YouTube. It makes me so happy to see my fans having fun with the music.

(Thanks to YouTube user claris2991 for letting me post her video.)

Building The House

My new album, "The House We Built," is slowly coming together. In my downtime between the Miley gigs and The Highway Girl tapings, I've been recording new vocals, tweaking mixes, throwing on a little tambourine, and just generally polishing the recordings. Nine songs are now completely finished. I'm writing two more to round the album out, and I plan on getting those two down and having the whole kaboodle ready to send to manufacturing in the next few weeks. Still on track for a summer release.

I've just hired my good buddy Ryan Newman (an unfairly talented visual artist) to do the artwork and packaging. So it's gonna look as good as it sounds.

I'm very excited about this record. It's an extremely honest portrait of what I've gone through in this divorce. The album I had to make at this point in my life. I can't wait for you to hear it. And you will soon.

Now I've gotta go ride some faders.

My Civic Responsibility, and How It Shamed Me

After postponing jury duty several times (once for Noah's birth, once for the tour, and another time for the tour extension), my time was up. I had to go in.

Back in Boston, I was called into jury duty one day, and during the wait I wrote three songs ("Normal," "Starfish" and "I'm a Moron," which were later featured on my albums) and then all the prospective jurors were sent home. I knew I couldn't hope for such a productive and legally uneventful day this time. But whereas last time, I was ready to be put on a jury and miss school, this time I needed to go home right away, as it was Wednesday and we had our Kids' Choice Awards show on Friday.

Those sadistic government folks demanded I be there at 7:30am. They hate joy. And probably ponies and puppies as well.

After several hours of boredom and guilty feelings that I was far too tired to write a song, my number was called. I had to join a panel. This required a few more hours of boredom in a hallway people cluster:

Around 2pm, this motley bunch of about thirty grumbling panelists was finally escorted into the courtroom. Every single one of us had our fingers crossed under our seats that we wouldn't be called up to the jury. Twelve people who weren't me scuttled to the front.

The case was explained to us. The defendant was accused of domestic violence towards his wife and small child. He was also charged with telling his wife not to call the police, which I didn't realize was even a crime ("Honey, I shrunk the kids. Don't tell the police." -- CRIMINAL!). The details were gruesome and the outlook was bleak for everyone involved. The kind and elderly judge ran us through a questionnaire, which basically asked if we could all be objective and not be swayed by our emotions. The twelve in the box said yes.

I thought, hell no. Dude looked guilty. Supremely guilty. Like wife-and-child-beating guilty. His head was in his hands. And his attorney was a superslimeball, while the prosecuting attorney was a warm sweetheart. This does not help my brittle impartiality.

You don't have to tell me. I realize these are superficial things. I'm aware of that. But guess who makes emotion-based decisions? *hand raises*

For one reason or another, several people in the box were let go: one person used to be a cop, one person barely understood English, another just seemed really stupid.

As each new person was called from our panel to replace the nixed ones, I tensed up and prayed they wouldn't call me. Over and over they didn't.

This continued for hours until there were only five of us left in the panel. My number was called.

Boo.

I slunk up to the box and sat down. The judge asked me several questions about my background and then inquired if I had any objections that may prevent me from being impartial. I mentioned that I had a problem with the "innocent until proven guitly thing," as I had already made up my mind about who was guilty and I was going to have a very hard time being convinced otherwise. Fearing that I hadn't quite knocked it out of the park, I said that I have a real problem with domestic violence. (Of course, in retrospect, this is totally stupid. Who likes domestic violence? Who says, "I want a greek salad with red wine vinaigrette and a sprinkling of domestic violence?" or "Let's go out for dinner and a movie, and then we can come home and you can beat me?" Umm, no one. That's who. Dummy.)

The judge mercifully let me go. And while everything I said was completely true, as I walked out on my civic duty, I felt dirty.

Maybe one day I'll be called back in, when I don't have to work right away, and I can be a Righteous Crusader for Justice, slaying criminals with my brute lawfulness. Just not right now.

I avoided eye contact all the way out of the building.

A Night by the Fire

So, after the embarrassment that was the Jonathan Coulton interview, Saturday couldn't really get a whole lot worse. That day, I was scheduled to play Paul Schreiber's house concert. Paul works as a programmer at Apple, and he hosts these house concerts every month or so. He's earned quite a reputation as a tastemaker, previously featuring artists like The Weepies, Kyler, Adrianne and our very own Samantha Murphy.

He's also earned a reputation for being a ridiculously hospitable host. Paul spent the day preparing chocolate cake, donut holes and banana bread from scratch. This guy's not kidding around.
He set up his bedroom as the green room, complete with tea, magazines, paper and pens for my set list -- you get the idea. I felt very much at home.

And the place was packed. I played two sets of 45 minutes each. It was great fun to play for so long, because I was able to pull out some songs I don't often play, like "The Road" and "Ferris Wheel."

I got a great response from the audience, who were a great bunch of listeners. Sometimes it's hard to tell if a crowd is diggin' it, but they seemed pretty into it.

Miley's Last Day Song

Yes, it was no secret that Miley was excited about the tour ending. Here's a little song she made up for the occasion (on the way to soundcheck):

6:41 pm

Okay. We have an idea. If Miley wants to surprise us with Clear, we are gonna surprise her with our surfboard picture on the big screen! We're running it past the necessary parties right now.

6:12 pm

We're having an awesome time ditching catering and eating by the water. The whole band is here and we're reminiscing. I'm gonna miss these guys.

Oh also, we just got a text. We ARE doing Clear tonight. Rock on!

4:48 pm

We're soundchecking right this minute. I'm typing as I play.

Everybody's got their camera's out. It's like the last day of school. Except most of us are sad.

Miley wants to do some different songs tonight, so we just played through Clear and Bigger Than Us. Only problem is we have all the video and stuff locked in.

So, no changes here.

Kind of a Big Deal on Broadjam

Apparently my song "Forget You" was the most downloaded song of 2007 on Broadjam. This is pretty amazing and strange to me for a few reasons:

1.) Broadjam is a gigantic site with tens of thousands of musicians featured.
2.) There was a lot of good music in 2007.
3.) The song "Forget You" was just a demo that I never intended to release, recorded only as a tool for another recording artist (my sister) to learn the song. But my demo was featured on "The Black Donnellys" on NBC, and all of a sudden people just started downloading it and never stopped. I have recorded a brand new version of it with a string quartet for my upcoming album.

As Chuck Lee Bramlet said about songwriting, "You never know which one of your bastard children is going to wander out into the world and make something of itself."

Too true.

How To Fight Loneliness

Christmas is less than a week away. How did that happen? Last time I looked around, it was October. This tour is like a tunnel.

Now all my friends and family are going to hate me because I won't even have a chance to do any Christmas shopping until the 23rd. Bring on the late presents!

Boo.

But you, my loyal blog readers, will get your gift on time. Let me ruin the surprise. It's a song. Okay...a sad song. As it does get lonely on the road, I've recorded a cover version of Wilco's "How To Fight Loneliness." I put this one together in my hotel room in Philly the other day.

To listen, just click the link. To download, right click the link (ctrl-click on Mac) and choose "Save Link As."

How To Fight Loneliness

I know this song's a little bleak for Christmas, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. Just a small thank you for taking the time to read my blog. Happy Holidays to you all.