Love Stinks, for Free and with DJs!

In addition to the Love Stinks playlist I spoke about yesterday, CDBaby is featuring my song "The House We Built" on their very special Anti-Valentines Day edition of the Music Discovery podcast. This is an awesome podcast that I listen to regularly, so it's quite an honor. Check it out.

Available here:
http://musicdiscovery.cdbabypodcast.com/

You can also listen and/or subscribe on iTunes:

See Me Live This Saturday!

Do you want to:

-Hear great new music?
-Bask in the glow of Mike Schmid (and buy his new CD)?
-Have some critically acclaimed Chinese food?
-Sit in a pew for no apparent reason and pretend you're having mixed drinks in church?

Well, boy are you in luck! You can do all these things this Saturday night at Genghis Cohen!

Details:
Mike Schmid @ Genghis Cohen
Saturday, September 6 - 8:30pm
740 N. Fairfax Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90046

New Album Now On iTunes

For those of you that prefer to buy music digitally, I'm happy to announce that The House We Built is now available on iTunes for your listening pleasure. Click the button below to open iTunes.



And after you hear the whole album, I would love it if you would leave a review!

Connie Kim @ Tangier - Prepare to Be Amazed

Connie Kim creates some of the most beautiful and unusual music I've ever heard. Her songs conjure a world of voodoo dolls, talking fruits and circus performers, as heard through an antique victrola. She's playing Wednesday night at 8pm at Tangier in Los Feliz. I'll be on keys, melodica and glockenspiel, and we'll be joined by a string section and band. She puts on a spellbinding live show. You won't be disappointed.

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.

Stewboss and Rob Giles! Fun Times!

Tonight, I'll be playing keyboards with the Americana band Stewboss at Universal CityWalk. We've been having a lot of fun in rehearsals, and I'm excited about the show. If you're into Tom Petty, Wilco or the Wallflowers, you'll love yourself some Stewboss. It's gonna be a beautiful night of rocking out, so come check out the show, stroll along the 'Walk, grab a churro, see a movie, or try flying in that weird fake skydiving thingy.

Monday night (August 11), Rob Giles is doing his monthly residency at Molly Malones, and he's invited me to join him on stage. I'll be playing some songs from my brand new, soon-to-be-released album, The House We Built. And honestly, I'm just so happy that I get to watch Rob play. He's pretty friggin' amazing.

And if you come to either (or both!) of these shows, please feel free to introduce yourself to me afterwards. I love meeting my readers. Cause without you guys, this would just be a diary.

Brick By Brick

Ryan Newman has begun work on the album art and I couldn't be more elated. Did he just get more brain cells than the rest of us?

We returned from our Highway Girl shoot in Vegas earlier this week. Got lots of great footage. While we were there, I wrote the final song for the album on my laptop in my hotel room. I do love technology! When we got home, I just dumped it to my home computer, recorded some vocals and VOILA -- done.

The last two days we've been shooting interviews with some really amazing artists I won't name here (that will be a surprise for when the show launches). Trust me, you like.

More shooting today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and then I'm off to simultaneously edit the show and master my album. Juggling is fun.

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.

The Big Payoff

I have lots of great pics and videos of the Houston rodeo, which will be up on the blog next week.

This week, I'm at South By Southwest in Austin. After months of hard work, the Samantha Murphy Show (which I'm directing and co-hosting) is finally premiering! It features great singer/songwriters and bands, as well as interviews with heavy hitters in music and technology. A new show will be up every night at smtvmusic.com. You can see two episodes as of this writing, and the third will be up in the morning.

We are spending every second shooting, editing and uploading. We're tired, we're sore and we're sunburnt, but if you enjoy the show, it's all worth it.

Here's the trailer:

Dining With the Dead

On Oscar Sunday, instead of going to an Oscar party (I was dying to watch the awards, but Tivo'd them back home instead), we went to a dinner party for members of the exclusive Pho list. I met tons of important people and embarrassed myself, as usual. The worst part was, the restaurant was playing the Oscars on all the TV's. And it was muted, with the captions on. So I would try desperately to avoid it, and then would accidentally catch a split second, and see the captions saying things like "and the winner of Best Costume Design is Sweeney Todd."

This happened more than three times.

By the end, I was exhausted from all the socializing (have I ever mentioned I'm a total introvert?), and dragged myself to bed...after taking one picture:


The Kabuki hotel really treated us well. And Monday morning, I woke up to this:

Ahh.

Monday brought the San Francisco Music Tech Summit, which was attended by many brilliant folks including the founder of YouTube, the former drummer from Creeper Lagoon, the creator of CDBaby and tons of musicians and web people. Quite a meeting of minds.

During the afternoon, we interviewed John Perry Barlow, one of the songwriters for The Grateful Dead. What a thoughtful, intelligent man.

We filmed and filmed and filmed some more. Interviews and panels and behind-the-scenes, oh my! Samantha hosted a panel sponsored by Digital Freedom:

She also played a show at the end of the day for the hundreds of smarties. And afterwards, we were personally invited to join John Perry Barlow (of the Dead) and Claudio Prado, the Vice Minister of Culture for Brazil, for some Korean barbecue. To hear these two trade stories was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Over the course of the day, we heard tons of great ideas, brilliant internet strategies and genius theories, all of which I promptly forgot by the car ride home.

I Am Not Stalking You

I realize that I'm way behind on my blog. So here's a little catch-up.

Last Friday, Samantha and I piled cameras, tripods, a keyboard, a guitar, suitcases, CDs, cables, a PA system, bags of videotapes and so much more into my tiny compact car for a business trip to San Francisco.

When we arrived six hours later, we immediately jumped into work. For the TV show, we were covering Jonathan Coulton's (or JoCo's) sold-out show at the Great American Music Hall. This show was quite important to him, as a massive and well-paid camera crew was filming it for his upcoming DVD, and we were filming the filming. Samantha and I are both big fans, and were very excited.

It was interesting to meet his fans. I wasn't surprised at all that they were all nerds, as his music is total geek-rock (and I mean this in the nicest way). However, Samantha and I were both very surprised that they were all rude. Not sure if it was a San Francisco thing, or a nerds-who-have-never-seen-sunlight-and-have-no-social-skills thing, but every single one that spoke to us was shockingly unkind.

Despite all the angry dorks (or maybe because of, who knows?), Jonathan put on a fantastic show, filled with references to robots, zombies, monsters and concluding with the announcement-masquerading-as-spectacle, where Jonathan and various popular bloggers played his song from Portal, "Still Alive" in Rock Band (surprise, everyone!). The collective geeksplosion of brain matter was sort of gross. But fun.

(A fan gave him this creepy doll, which they created, based on his song, "Creepy Doll." How nice...and obsessive.)

The whole night helped me realize that although I am a geek, there are perhaps levels of geekiness, and those people are on some crazy "we-go-to-Comic-Con-dressed-as-Joss-Whedon" level.

After the show, we headed backstage for an interview with Jonathan. At this point, I should mention that Samantha told JoCo in her previous interview with him (which you can now hear at smtvmusic.com) that I am a huge fan. I was not present for this. She went further, saying that I'm basically stalking him. She has continued to joke that I am in love with him every time she's talked to him in the months since then. She even put the horribly embarrassing picture from this previous entry on her Flickr page. He's a little freaked out, I'm guessing.

For the record, I like his music. That's pretty much it. I don't want him to do my dishes or wash my laundry or clean my toilets. I just want to listen to "Still Alive" every now and then.

That said, Jonathan seemed downright afraid of me from the word go. This made us both completely uncomfortable. But we did our best to create a little video content...

...that I probably won't be able to use. I'm scheduled to edit this footage tomorrow, and I'm honestly dreading even looking at it. Surely, I look like a complete idiot. Either way, you'll be able to see for yourself when it airs later this month. [Sarcasm activated] I can hardly wait. [Sarcasm deactivated].

Wow, I really am a geek.

The Highlight of Your Week Is Coming Up!

Do you live in or near San Francisco? Well, lucky you! I'll be playing Paul Schreiber's house concert in San Francisco on Feb 23rd. Who's Paul Schreiber? Well, other being a programmer for Apple (which is pretty cool on its own), he happens to host the coolest house concert in San Francisco. He's previously had amazing artists like Adrianne, The Weepies and yes, even the fabulous Samantha Murphy.

Your mind will be blown. You'll eat tasty food. You'll hear old songs, new songs, maybe even crazy Willie Nelson cover songs performed blindfolded and drunk. But probably not the last one. If you'd like to attend, please RSVP at http://concerts.shrub.ca/

I hope to see you there.

Oh, and if you don't live in San Francisco...well, lucky you! I'll be playing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on February 27th. Some chick named Miley Cyrus. Never heard of 'er. Hope she's good.

Re-assimilating

It's been really hard to settle back into a routine since I've been home. I was all excited to be in one place, waking up in the same bed, that I just sort of assumed I'd be able to get back on a schedule. But I've been working a lot, and not sleeping much.

I did feel a little better today, because Samantha forced me to drink a nasty warm maple syrup tea with lots of spicy cayenne pepper and lemon. Disgusting, but just as she said, it picked me right up and took away my congestion. Good thing, too, cause we had a lot to get done today.

We spent the day shooting some host segments for the TV show. We'll be going live with our very first episode at South By Southwest next month, so we've got a limited time to create and edit the pre-taped segments.

I have a nice yard in the back of my house that doubles as a park, an alley, a zen garden, an orchard and a patio. It will be heavily featured.

Tonight, I spent several hours editing interview footage we shot last August of Inara George (The Bird and the Bee) and Mike Andrews (Donnie Darko), at the Bessie Smith tribute. Good stuff, and you'll see it soon.

But right now, I'm exhausted. I need to rest up for my bright and early appointment with the doctor.

Look At Samantha Go!

My dear friend and business partner, Samantha Murphy, has just done a spot for DigitalFreedom.org.

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.

James and John Part Two

So it turns out, the other night after my little run-in with John C. Reilly, Jaime ended up hanging out with him in his hotel room along with band members Mike Viola, formerly of the Candy Butchers (of whom I'm also a big fan) and Inara George (who we just interviewed for the Samantha Murphy Show in August). Small world. Apparently, they're touring as a band, promoting the Judd Apatow-produced movie "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" (which I saw back in July - funny stuff).

Why do I always miss the good parties? Oh right, cause I go to bed early.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Snow Day!

People have asked about the song playing on this page. Yes, that's me singing. This song, called "I Wanna Get Along," is from "Snow Day," the Christmas EP that I released last year. You can read more about it here, and you can buy it on iTunes. Click the button to go there:

If you'd like to buy the EP for someone special, click "Gift This Music" in iTunes. Make this wintry season a little more musical for under six bucks, and the songs "Snow Day" and "I Wanna Get Along" are also available as ringtones, if you're so inclined. Enjoy!

Anybody Know Anything?

I was nominated for a Los Angeles Music Award in the category "Best Pop Artist," as well as for my song "Dear Me." The awards ceremony was last night.

Anybody know who won? (I mean, I'm assuming if I haven't heard anything yet, that it wasn't me. But I'd love to know who did win).

Music Connection

This month, Music Connection magazine is running a review of my monthly residency at Genghis Cohen (which of course I won't be playing again till I get back in January). Specifically a review of our October 5 show. It's universally positive and you can read it here. My favorite part is where she says that I "exude honesty and pain."