Spiderfingers

An awesome shot from flickr user tevee123, taken at the Phoenix show.  Go HERE to see many more incredible shots from that night.

Coming Soon to a Town Near You!

Yes yes y'all! We're gearing up for an incredible Miley tour this fall, and as always I'll be blogging it all from the road like a nerdy little newsman.

I'm so excited about this tour. It's gonna be a blast! I'm going to do some things a bit differently this time though. For instance, this time I plan on:

-not coughing up a lung the whole friggin' time
-not getting violently hit by a car
-not being such a saaaad little emo boy
-not spending any time in Rochester

Hope to see you at a show. While you're waiting for the best night of your life, you may wanna brush up on the rules for attending a Miley concert.

Mike & Co. on Bellaziza's Favorite Things!

I'm so happy to announce that I am now writing for Bellaziza's Favorite Things, a blog all about life with a baby. Full of product recommendations, parenting advice and general wisdom with a very personal spin, it's a great place for me to talk candidly about my experience as a single dad.

Here's my introduction. Keep your eyes (and your bookmarks) on the site for more!

Very excited to be a part of such an awesome team.

AOL Sessions

You can see video of the Billy Ray/Miley AOL Sessions show HERE.

Setlist:
The Climb
Full Circle
Butterfly
Back to Tennessee

You Can Still Watch

The RawRhythms show was a lot of fun. The always lovely Molly Jenson even stopped by.

You can see the show in its entirety here.

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.

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!

Bioshock Day Is Coming

What is Bioshock, you might ask? It's an Xbox360 game. But that's not all, it's an amazingly creative and original work of art that I've been tracking for over a year. Also, it's the "spiritual successor" to System Shock, one of the most incredible and acclaimed games of the 90's.

It takes place in Rapture, a utopian underwater city, built in the 1950's by a genius named Andrew Ryan. He created it as a home to a select group of artists, scientists and industrialists, who could work in peace in a totally idealistic society. He calls it "a city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the great would not be constrained by the small; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality."


As with any utopian society, it couldn't last. The city was destroyed by the very people chosen to populate it. And the game begins in 1960, with our protagonist on a routine plane flight that crashes into the middle of the ocean. Swimming from the wreckage, he finds himself at the entrance of the now ruined City of Rapture, knowing that going in is the only way out.

The game forces the player to make many moral choices. For instance, there are Little Sisters (not quite real little girls, more like little zombies) who harvest Atom, the city's energy force, from corpses they find. They are protected by Big Daddies, who are huge and have drills for hands (you don't wanna mess with those)! Do you try to take the Atom that the Little Sisters have harvested, and fend for yourself when the Big Daddy comes after you? Do you protect the Little Sister when somebody else tries to steal her Atom? Or do you just leave it all alone to the natural balance of Rapture?

In the words of Andrew Ryan, "If your life were the prize, would you kill the innocent? Would you sacrifice your humanity? We all make our choices, but in the end, our choices make us."

The game finally comes out a week from today! And yes, I'm going to have to take the day off to explore.

2K Games stated that there would be no demo for this game, much to everyone's chagrin. Well, two days ago they surprised everyone by unceremoniously dropping a demo on Xbox Live. And once the news media found out, people all over the country nearly crashed the servers by downloading in droves.

And the demo. Oh, the demo. It is so good. It begins where the game will begin, in the plane crash. The first thing to notice is that it's absolutely gorgeous. The water textures nearly popped my eyes out. I just stared at the ocean for awhile. Second, I noticed that it controls like butter.

Exploring Rapture for myself, for the first time, brought me a sense of wonderment I haven't felt since I was a kid. Water pours in all the cracks, as if the city could wash away at any moment. Old jazz music still plays in the lobby, tattered "Happy New Year 1959" posters are barely hanging from the ceiling. And then it all gets creepy.

I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say that I'm going to play through the (woefully short - 45 minutes-ish) demo a few more times before release day next week, simply because I want to revisit this amazing world again and again.

See the awesome trailer here.

I can't wait till next Tuesday.

Funny Games 2: The Return (AKA We're Out Of Ideas)

In addition to Sleuth, Michael Haneke is remaking his own film, "Funny Games." The original is a tense classic that makes a very powerful statement. It still holds up extremely well, as it only came out only ten years ago. Now, granted his filmmaking has changed quite a bit in those ten years and I'm sure this version will be different, perhaps better. Also, the last one didn't feature any names, and this one features Naomi Watts, Michael Pitt and Tim Roth.

But I can't imagine, in ten years, completely retreading the entirety of my "High Cost of Living" album. I've already made that statement. It's out there for anyone who wants to hear it. Isn't it time for me to make a new statement?

Why would Michael Haneke, an incredible filmmaker, duplicate his own film? I mean, they're even using a blueprint of the original set to make sure the new one has identical dimensions! The producers have stated they're remaking it shot for shot. (That worked so well when Gus Van Sant did it with Psycho -- booooo). Haneke says, "Localization is required to fully understand the Funny Games experience." Heaven forbid we be exposed to another culture, or get to know some new actors. Why do this? Oh right, money.

I get it, it's the American remake. That wonderful new tradition. Are people really so stupid that they can't watch a ten year old movie from Germany? Read a few subtitles? Oh really, they are? Could they watch an English dub, then? Do we really have to reshoot the entire thing just for these idiots? Oh really, we do? Fantastic.

Why don't we remake Paris Je T'aime already then? And it can take place in Chicago. And the segments will be directed by Brett Ratner and Michael Bay. And no one with an IQ over 15 can get into the theater.

Let's just have a moment of silence for all the terrible American remakes of great foreign films, with watered-down themes and missing subtext:

Open Your Eyes - Vanilla Sky
Spoorloos - The Vanishing
Les Diaboliques - Diabolique
Ringu - The Ring
Shall We Dance
Mostly Martha - No Reservations
Godzilla
Honoguarai Mizu No Soko Kara - Dark Water
Insomnia
Ju-On - The Grudge

And there are so many more. Let us mourn.

Juno

From time to time, I am fortunate enough to be part of a test audience for an unfinished feature film. I've seen some pretty amazing movies, like "About Schmidt" and "Stranger Than Fiction," and some clunkers, like "Darkness Falls" and "Slither." But if I get to see a movie for free, a year before it comes out, I don't care if it's good or not.

Last night, Samantha Murphy and I went to see an upcoming film called Juno. It stars the ridiculously talented Ellen Page (who caught everyone's attention with her shocking performance in "Hard Candy" last year). She's even better in this, as a high school junior with an unexpected pregnancy. It also stars the hysterical Jason Bateman and Michael Cera (both of Arrested Development), Jennifer Garner, Allison Janney and Rainn Wilson (who's oddly in just one scene). It was directed by Jason Reitman, who also made "Thank You For Smoking," which was one of my favorites last year.

There's no release date set, but it's being released by Fox Searchlight, and you MUST go see it. It's a miracle of a movie. It's like a hug. I enjoyed every single second of it. The tone was special. It reminded me a bit of "Little Miss Sunshine," the combination of edgy dark humor and sweetness, but it was a true original, from the first frame. I can't wait for this film's release, cause I wanna see it again! Keep your eyes open.

Also, next month marks the release of "Superbad." Nic and I saw it back in March and it's hilarious. The trailers make it look mildly amusing but I promise you it's a riot from start to finish. It (just like Juno) features the impossibly funny Michael Cera. It's even better than "Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle." Go see it.

Thus ends the movie raving and excess linkage.