Saturday, December 25, 2010

The League of Extraordinary Hub Caps











When Earwig is on tour we will occasionally get lost. It happens. While trying to locate the club one night near Cleveland, I was having no luck at all. I’m a big believer in synchronicity and intuition. So sometimes, when I’m in a pinch, I just leave it up to the universe to point me in the right direction. Lost and sitting at a random inner-city intersection, I decided to do just that. I wondered, should I turn Left or Right? I asked the universe for a sign. And then I noticed something shiny calling out to me from the parking lot across the street. It was a hub cap, gleaming in the sun. I took that as an omen and went to investigate. As I turned into the lot, I realized it was a gas station and so I decided to go in and just ask for directions. The gal behind the counter knew exactly where the club was and even ended up coming to see the show that night! I picked up the hub cap and brought it along on the rest of the tour for good luck. Ever since then, when I’ve been mulling over decisions or in need of direction, I’ll often see hubcaps on the side of the road that seem to help me resolve my problems or choose what to do. I started picking them up and have amassed quite a cool collection. I just mounted a bunch of my intuition hub caps on my garage to display them. Some of them are pretty cool looking. While we were working on Gibson Under Mountain, I collected a bunch of hub caps on my drives to and from Columbus. I would put them up in the studio in the vocal booth and even kept my favorite, one very special silver hub cap, up over the mixing board while working on the final mixes.

Want to win yr very own Earwig T-shirt? Well, just tell me what make of automobile my favorite hub cap comes from. You can tell from the picture and the image/character on it.
HINT: The hub cap in question is pictured in my last blog post from 2009.
Send the answer in an email to lizard@lizardfamily.com

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Songwriting 101












Earwig is taking it easy this December so we can all re-charge our batteries, visit with our families, eat cookies and all that jazz. I’m using this time to write songs for the next record, which we’ll start working on next year. We’ve got a couple of new songs under our belt already, one of which “I Don’t Want to Go”, is performed live here (LINK). All of the songs on Gibson Under Mountain came to me in dreams. But when I sit down to write in a more conventional way it helps to have lots of inspiration laying around. Right now I’m reading The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and Tertium Organum by P.D. Ouspensky. Just a couple of books to try and broaden my view of reality and hopefully influence some new hit Earwig songs in the process. In addition to having a guitar, Casio keyboard and hand held tape recorder all on standby, I usually fuel my efforts with a strong batch of coffee when I get up. I like being hyper in the morning.