My good friend Jason Soloduik was loving life. He was in a great band with a bright future. He was touring all over North America, meeting people and just loving what he was doing. Then, one day, it all ended. And not only did it end, but it ended with no goodbye. He wasn’t given the opportunity to say goodbye to the friends he had made along the way.

Well, now he has gone back to his acoustic project, “What If This Dream Is All We Have?” and has recorded a new song called “This Isn’t Personal.” When I was designing his myspace, I listened to this song quite often to get inspiration. And yet, while I loved the song, because I was engrossed in my work I didn’t have the chance to listen to the lyrics. Well, now that the design is done, I have looked at the lyrics and find an amazing parallel in mine and Jay’s experiences.

“This Isn’t Personal”
written by Jason Soloduik

V1
Everything comes around
When the smoke dies down
To see their real desire

Time shared and given
Changed the life your living
Just to follow your heart

You do it discreetly
You do it so secretly
Then you go and change the world
***(It’s a Brand new Day) ***

CHORUS
How can you trust again
When you’ve been burned alive
You set your self up…believe these friends
Here’s your knife…

V2
So was it worth it
When you sold yourself out?
I should have seen it coming

Never thought some money
Or a little bit of fame
Would have broke this bond

Over the airwaves
Changing discs in lanes
I almost feel bad (look at what we had….)

BRIDGE
Its OK, Its OK
You got what u wanted from me
Its OK, Its OK
We will go our own separate ways
Its OK…It’s OK
I Wish You Well

You’re a great guy, Jay.

I happened upon this pretty cool offer today. It is a pre-made band website template + CMS that bands and artists can use to get started online. From the looks of it, it’s pretty easy to use. Just upload to your server, create a database, run the installer, and presto!

The download also comes with the original Photoshop files, which means you can customize the look to your band’s image.

Check out the link below to grab a copy.  It’s on sale now for $30 (reg. $60) during launch time.

I thought this was hilarious.

Check out this video of Jon Stewart making a typography joke (about 2 minutes in).

Hey everyone,

I know this has been a week late. Unfortunately, Justin wasn’t able to get me a full resolution shot of this picture until just a couple of days ago. However, now that it’s here I am so glad to see the fresh change to the site!

I will post some of the other submissions later this week, but for now leave a comment below to let me know what you think of the new background!

(Also: check out Justin’s blog for some awesome stuff about what’s going on in his life right now!)

So, this may be news to a lot of you, but for years I have had one dream car that I’ve yearned for. I have almost cried at the thought of owning one. And now, there is one so close to my reach, and yet I’m not going to be able to buy it right now.

Below is a picture of the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

So a lot of ideas and melodies have been running through my head lately, and I’ve felt for a while that I want to try some things I haven’t done before, while exploring some of the things I have done in the past musically.

So, today I started recording a demo. Now, some may be asking “wow, when did Pat buy audio/studio gear?” Well, I didn’t. In fact, I don’t even own one microphone. All I have is my Macbook with a built in microphone, a set of iPod earphones, and Garageband.

I’m pretty sure the stuff I’m recording right now isn’t going to be released (and by “pretty sure” I mean “very sure”). But today has been a good time of exploring some new ideas and simply getting them onto a hard disk so that later I can simply start where I left off and keep adding to it.  Right now I have a basic song structure, a song theme, and a fairly solid chorus.  I’ve programmed some loops and stuff that I will re-do when I can get my hands on Reason (an amazing program for creating loops. David Crowder Band uses it all the time). I’m really loving just hearing the horrible EQ’s, the very-not compressed recordings, the out of tune vocals. It’s just very organic.

Anyway, I may post a small clip to hear what I’m up to, but hopefully in the summer I’ll be visiting my good friend Justin Piercy to do some recording stuff. Until then, keep your ears clean!