happy thanksgiving

the holiday season is fast approaching. actually, it's here, but i'm still catching up, so i'm a couple days behind. In honor of those holidays, the spirit of giving, and the love of music I'd like to announce my participation in this charitable, musical endeavor.

Flannelgraph records has organized a compilation of exclusive, instrumental holiday music, of which all of the proceeds will be donated to charities chosen by the artists. I have a brand new song on the comp and the charity i'll be donating to is Bloomington's own Stepping Stones.

I've become somewhat familiar with Stepping Stones in my tenure as a Bloomington government employee. Stepping Stones provides temporary transitional housing for young people in my area who are dealing with homelessness. The staff is very enthusiastic and realistic and I believe their work has a lot of potential to make a huge difference in the lives of folks who would otherwise be faced with hopelessness. I'm excited to support their cause, and i really would appreciate your help in raising some dough for them. Check out the song, check out the other charities, and please throw a few bucks at us if you can spare before you head out for Black Friday shopping.

-edit-
my track is #2, "Oak Park Lanes", by the way

collecting dust

In 2005, during some down-time, I recorded an EP's worth of improvised, experimental guitar jams. After sitting on them for a while I released those tunes in a limited edition of 100 3" cd-rs under the name "Mike Adams & His Dust Collectors", the idea being that i didn't really know what to do with such music so it usually ended up lying in a drawer for a rainy day. Up above here is my first attempt at a full-length "Dust Collectors" album. Once again, it's been finished for quite a while, but I'm just now getting around to making them available to all interested parties. No physical version of this music exists, mainly because, once again, i'm kinda stumped and strapped for time in that department.

My main goal with this stuff is to stretch a little bit, artistically. Most of my time with music is spent writing and recording in the "indie-pop" genre and this stuff is just an exercise in what my mind can come up with outside of those (pesky) parameters. I consider working on this more like a sketchbook than a finished piece, but often times i find that the feeling of discovery that goes along with this music is a little more rewarding. Well, maybe not more rewarding, but rewarding in a different way than i'm used to. Like how your mom used to have some big, curly, poofy hair-do the whole time you were a kid, but now she just got it cut into a short, jagged uneven kate-plus-8 kind of thing. it's just as bad, but it's also different and feels like it has some new energy.

One thing i've really wanted to be able to do since i started working on music like this, in this way, was to try to marry this method with my comfortable methods of writing more pop oriented songs. I think the closest i've come to that so far is with "Oscillate Wisely", which is coming out in January.

Hopefully, as i keep looking for inspiration down these kind of improvisational paths, i'll be able to keep it loose while i also steer it gently toward the more rigid songwriting side of things and bring the two modes of discovery together.