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Music + Funny
Cover Tuesday is coming at ya on Tuesday, March 11, with a new fun set of stoopit covers to add a little love to the world!
This month all songs will have the word ‘love’ in the title; it’s a simple theme so dig deep with those recommendations!
I hope to see you there at the live stream on my twitch channel, replay will be up for 7 days for those of you not able to join live 🙂
Cover Tuesday ‘Love’ Edition!
Tuesday, March 11, 8:15 NYC time
Twitch.tv/RobPRocks
You can’t make fun of American culture without making fun of the way we put commerce above everything. “The business of America is business!” said one of our presidents*. So I’m posting a couple of business-related songs from my recent special as standalone videos, mostly because they turned out really good and I’m proud of them, but also because they compliment each other really well in a one-two punch of satire, digging into some of our underlying cultural beliefs that have formed this culture we’re swimming in .
One of those cultural beliefs is found in the metaphor of the invisible hand—the belief that free markets are guided “as if by an invisible hand” to produce the most equitable distribution of goods and wealth and thus the best of all possible worlds. It’s a belief held by those politicians who tell you regulations are the enemy of progress, freedom, and prosperity. They have an unwavering and almost religious belief that if you let people and companies pursue their self interest things will just work out.
When someone tells you “we don’t need laws telling industries not to pollute, the invisible hand of the market is in control!” it sounds less like economic theory and more like there’s a shadowy villain organization like Spectre or Quantum called The Invisible Hand running things.
So that’s why I wrote The Invisible Hand in the style of a James Bond theme song, with amazing video design by Steven Rosenthal.
Another odd economic belief we have here in America is that corporations are treated like persons in the eyes of the law. It’s why a company like Hobby Lobby can say they have religious beliefs that allow them to deny birth control coverage in their health care plan. And it’s also how corporations get away with spending billions to support political candidates: their money is considered speech, to which they have a constitutional right because they’re persons!
This idea of corporate personhood gets so ridiculous I had to make fun of it the best way I knew how: with a sunshine pop animated video in the style of Schoolhouse Rock! Character design and illustration are by my good friend and great artist Dan Pavelich (check out his TeePublic store!)
If you want a little more backstory—and more jokes!—on these topics check out the intro monologues in the full special! Or better yet, check out the whole special! There are songs about the Satanic Panic, Henry Ford, 19th Century minstrel shows and how they kind of relate to current laws that try to control the way we teach the history of race in America…
*the full quote is “the chief business of the American people is business,” from Calvin Coolidge, 1925.
Did you notice that my new special has helpful chapter markers? The times are listed in the description and they’re linked so you can click them and jump to that section!
Or, even easier, when you’re on a computer you can hover your mouse over the timeline to view the chapter names and a preview screen. On mobile the chapter names will show as you scrub the timeline.
And below I’ve made a handy table of contents with links to the different sections if you want to get to your favorite section right this very minute! It also makes it easier to send your favorite part of the special to your friend! Think they’ll like the cowboy song? Boom, link straight to it! Want them to hear the background on William Miller and his failed Bible prophesy predictions? This link is here to help!
And please do keep sending the special around to your friends and colleagues! It’s truly the best way to get the word out on the special and for more people to know the weird backstory of things like Muscular Christianity or how much Henry Ford hated jazz!
| Song | Genre | Subject | time |
| Prologue | intro | 0:00-1:30 link | |
| Were Those Really the Days? | Brill Building Pop | Nostalgia and revisionism | 1:30-3:45 link |
| Satanic Panic intro | The Satanic Panic | 3:45-6:04link | |
| Satanic Panic | Heavy Metal | The Satanic Panic | 6:04-9:34 link |
| William Miller & Prophesy | The Great Disappointment of 1844 | 9:35-12:35link | |
| The Great Disappointment | Emo | The Great Disappointment of 1844 | 12:35-16:06 link |
| National Anthems | Star Spangled Banner | 16:06-18:37link | |
| Alternate Anthem | National Anthem | Burning of the White House in 1814 | 18:37-20:55 link |
| Adam Smith and economics | 20:55-21:43link | ||
| The Invisible Hand | Spy Movie Theme | Laissez-faire Capitalism | 21:43-24:46 link |
| Henry Ford and Jazz | Henry Ford’s anti-jazz anti-semitism | 25:00-26:51link | |
| Beep! Beep! Outta the Way! | Early Jazz | Henry Ford’s anti-jazz anti-semitism | 26:51-29:12 link |
| Stephen Foster | “Plantation” Songs | 29:12-30:58link | |
| Plug Your Ears and Sing! | Stephen Foster | White Fragility and Education | 30:58-33:28 link |
| The Frontier Myth | The Frontier Myth | 33:28-34:26link | |
| The People Who Were Already Here | Western/Cowboy Song | The Frontier Myth | 34:26-37:24 link |
| Sunshine Pop! | 37:36-38:00link | ||
| Corporations Are People Too! | Sunshine Pop | Corporate Personhood | 38:00-40:34 link |
| Muscular Christianity | masculinity crises | 40:34-42:57link | |
| Work That Bod | Disco | Muscular Christianity | 42:57-46:45 link |
| 1990s Nostalgia | 46:45-48:51link | ||
| The Ballad of Lou Pearlman | 90s Boyband Pop | Lou Pearlman’s Ponzi Sceme | 48:51-52:12 link |
| Remember it Better | Heartland Rock | Closing Credits | 52:12-56:53 link |
The new video special is out! It’s available on YouTube right this very second and I’m super excited for you to see it!
It’s just over 2 years to the day since I first performed this set of songs to see if there was anything to this idea of doing a whole show of satirical comedy songs based on U.S. History and culture. The show went well and inspired me to do a fully-arranged studio album of the songs and to create a solo theater show around them.
Taking that show to the Edmonton Fringe last summer allowed me to really tighten and punch up the monologues and to perfect the overall flow of the set. At the end of the fringe run I knew I had to create a version of the show that could live online for everyone to see.
And now, it’s here!
Using the full arrangements of the songs from the album and some fun animation, graphics, and live action, I have what I think is a really solid comedy special. It’s not a live concert video like most standup specials, but being a musician in the comedy world has always led me to do things a little differently. A friend who’s a huge movie and TV buff said it sounds like it’s my Elephant Parts, which was a sketch/music/video comedy film by former Monkee Mike Nesmith, and if you know it, it’s a perfect comparison.
Give it a look, I think you’ll like it! And if you know any comedy and/or music nerds, pass it along! Word of mouth > algorithms!
We have a date!
My new comedy music video special The American Songbook: Redacted will be premiering on YouTube May 22! At 9pm eastern the new special that’s part Schoolhouse Rock, part The Daily Show, and part Friday Night Videos, will premiere on YouTube with an online watch party kicking off an hour earlier.
The night before, Tuesday, May 21, there will be an in-person premiere party where we’ll watch the special, have a few beverages, and enjoy some swag at Crystal Lake in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The party starts at 7pm and we’ll start the screening at 8.
I’m really excited to present this project in this form, it’s the culmination of the work on the album, the live shows, and a few of the individual lyric videos from the album. I think this video and format is the best way to experience these songs and stories, and it’s the perfect distillation of two years of work. I can’t wait for you to see it!
In fact, here are a couple of trailers I made to give you a feel for what’s on the way:
The American Songbook: Redacted Comedy Special will be coming out this summer!
I’m very excited to be putting all of the work from the live show and the studio album together into one cohesive film available to anyone who can click on a video. Soon everyone can see the material as I envisioned it: funny songs—with intricate, genre-specific arrangements—and joke-filled monologues giving background and context on the topics covered!
I’ve been working diligently on the project all winter, putting together new animated characters, new videos, and the monologues that were honed over the festival performances last year! I’m happy to report that I’m in the home stretch, or at least the home stretch for completing the video. Getting the word out will be an entire project unto itself, but I’m excited about the possibilities of self-released comedy specials and I’m optimistic the special will find a receptive audience.
It will be a little bit different from traditional standup specials, the ones that are shot in a theater or comedy club with an over-hyped crowd. This one is going to be filled with music videos and in-studio intros and monologues—it’ll be part Schoolhouse Rock, part The Daily Show, part Friday Night Videos. At first I was calling the project a “video album” but after consideration I think “comedy special” is more accurate. It is, after all, nearly an hour of comedy presented as a cohesive whole. A friend of mine said it best: “it’s a comedy special. It’s a weird special, but it’s a special.”
So stay tuned for my weird special featuring a set of satirical songs inspired by lesser-known history and cultural trends. And here’s a sneak peak at a couple of the new characters!
If you guys enjoy The Opposite of Afterglow half as much as I enjoyed making it then it’s gonna rock your socks off, because I had a blast putting this together. I started working on the first tracks a little over a year ago with some ideas for a few new songs. The more I worked on it the more ideas I had and soon I realized I could have a full new album on my hands.
At the time I was working on lyric videos for The American Songbook: Redacted, and preparing the live show for a run at the Edmonton International Fringe Theater Fest, so I took my time with this project. I didn’t give myself a deadline for the album and as a result it had room to breathe and grow. I think that comes across in the sound. It’s cohesive and confident, it has a solid foundation but it takes some turns and hopefully has a few surprises.
You can buy the album digitally at bandcamp, and there is a very limited number of CDs available at our online store. I originally planned to release the album digital only, but I really wanted to have something to hold in my hands when it was done. Besides, these streaming services can all disappear without any warning and then where’s the music?
But while those streaming services are around, please stream the heck out of it! It’s at Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and I’ll track down the others soon.
In fact, I’ll put a bandcamp player right below so you can listen right on this page! Give it a spin!
Pre-sales for The Opposite of Afterglow, The Green L.E.D.s second full-length album, are now live on Apple Music and bandcamp! Any orders between now and the release date of Nov 17 come with immediate download of the preview single “Celebrity’s Kid” and count toward release day purchase stats, which is important to all the algorithm bots and such.
To celebrate, I posted this video of me doing a 4-part a cappella version of “Celebrity’s Kid!”
I’m also excited to announce that instead of being a digital-only release, I decided to get a limited number of actual CDs made!
The good people at Atomic Disc do such good work (and they do it frighteningly fast) I couldn’t resist getting a few actual CDs made. It’s just so much more fun to have a tangible product in hand after all of the work I put into the album. They’ll be available at my online store starting the week of Nov. 17!
And with the pre-sales officially started over at bandcamp, you can stream Celebrity’s Kid right now! I’ll even embed a player right here!
I can’t wait for you to hear the whole album, I’m really loving how it sounds and proud of the writing and arranging. Let me know what you think!
The mixes have been mixed, the masters are mastered, and the files have been sent through the net-o-sphere to all the digital music sites in the known universe! That means The Green L.E.D.s’ new album will be available to everyone on Nov. 17, 2023!
And did you notice that link above, on the name The Green L.E.D.s? That’s right, to celebrate the new album I put together a new website [ooh, aah]. I figured that with a second full-length album coming out I might as well make the project web-official and secure a domain. And thanks to the ease of WYSIWYG cloud-based design tools the site was up and running lickety-split!
If you’re a Spotify user and want to support the album right now, you can pre-save it to your library with this link. That way the album is automatically added to your library as soon as it comes out, and since first day numbers really impress the algorithm bots, pre-saving is a huge help.
And if you’re curious what the new album sounds like, check out the advance single that came out this summer on the Shake It Down Tonight EP. In fact, I’ll embed it below so you can listen to it right here.
I’ve been working on this album in the background since late last year, taking my time to get it right, and it’s been a really fulfilling and satisfying process. It provided me a nice escape from all the work I was doing on The American Songbook: Redacted videos and festival run, and allowed me to stretch out and explore some musical ideas away from comedy. I’m really happy with the songwriting and the way it sounds and I can’t wait for you to hear it, so smash that link (as the kids say) and add it to your library toot sweet!
Ticket links are now LIVE for the American Songbook: Redacted at The Edmonton International Fringe Theater Festival!
I’ll be doing 7 performances of the show at the lovely Chianti Yardbird Suite, a jazz club in the heart of the Old Strathcona Neighborhood, not far from the epicenter of the fest. Here are the dates and times:
Friday, Aug 18, 2:30 pm
Sunday, Aug 20, 4:30 pm
Monday, Aug 21, 9:45 pm
Tuesday, Aug 22, 12:30 pm
Wednesday, Aug 23, 11:15 pm
Friday, Aug 25, 7:15 pm
Sunday, Aug 27, 5:15 pm
Tickets for all shows are available here.
I’ve been honing the show for this festival and I’m really excited about it. There’s even a brand new song! And don’t forget the merch and swag! So much merch and swag!
I even have a button giveaway exclusively for this festival! The fest is a “no handbill zone,” meaning no flyers! So I’m giving away buttons with a QR code for the show’s website. Track me down at the fest and I’ll be happy to give you one. And if you ask nicely I may even be able to give you a comp ticket to the show, just let me know you read this post 🙂
See you in the wilds of western Canada!
This past Friday the new single and EP from The Green L.E.D.s was released worldwide! The EP features 4 songs and is available on bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube music, and most other digital platforms! Here, have an embed of the whole thing:
I am really excited to have a new Green L.E.D.s single out and I’m really happy with the way the lead track turned out!
It is definitely influenced by my power-pop roots, especially in the chorus and the backing vocals, and I think it fits in well with the angsty-yet-hopeful vibe of the previous Green L.E.D.s album. “Shake it Down Tonight” will be on a full album by The Green L.E.D.s due out this October.
This EP also features a fun cover of “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” by Michael Jackson (with some obvious other influences), a mellow bossa nova B-side that I had a lot of fun working on, and a live-in-studio version of “I Can Feel It (Can You?)” which was the first track I wrote under The Green L.E.D.s name and is still one of my favorites.
If you’d like to support the project you can buy the EP on bandcamp, or on Apple Music, and if you follow and like The Green L.E.D.s on Spotify or Apple Music it’ll really help other people find it!
Enjoy the tunes and let me know what you think!
“Were Those Really the Days?” the new opening number for the stage version of The American Songbook: Redacted, just went live on bandcamp! It’s now part of the full studio album, available individually, OR you can get a free download code with any merch purchase between now and the start of the show’s run at the Edmonton International Fringe Theater Festival!
As the staged version of The American Songbook: Redacted evolved, through the development of the lyric videos and the refining of the stories and jokes between songs, I worked to come up with a new opening number that would capture the energy, intelligent silliness, and the vein of dark satire running through the show. I’m really happy with how “Were Those Really The Days?” hits all of those notes, with its nostalgic wall-of-sound production and its allusion to how people use false (or at best idealized) memories of the past to influence the present.
The sharp-eyed among you may notice that the previous opening song, “Remember It Better,” which hits the nostalgia theme through the lens of Heartland Rock, now closes out the album. I still really love the song and I think it makes an excellent epilogue for the project. If and when I get the budget to do a proper video special of the show I imagine this song running over the closing credits (complete with a Cannonball Run-esque blooper reel).
If you’re free in mid-August, come on up to Edmonton, Alberta, and check out The American Songbook: Redacted at the Fringe. I’ll be performing at the lovely Chianti Yardbird Suite, which is a nice mid-sized jazz club and the perfect environment for this show. Until then, enjoy “Were Those Really The Days?” and “Remember it Better” as the nostalgic bookends to a satirical look at American history and culture!
We just added some cool new merch to our online store! We’ve got a spiffy embroidered patch, an awesome 4-button pack of 1.25″ buttons, a nifty keychain, and a fun sticker sheet, all inspired by The American Songbook: Redacted, my latest album and the solo show I’m taking to the Edmonton International Fringe Theater Festival in August!
In fact, it’s the trip to Edmonton that inspired this epic merch drop. I was pondering putting together a kickstarter campaign to help support taking the project to the Great White North, but it felt weird to do a big drive for a live event where there was no ‘thing’ to send to supporters. And since my favorite part of kickstarter campaigns is coming up with the fun extras people can get with different levels of funding, I decided to just make the cool stuff and sell it directly without guilting anyone into supporting a campaign.
But wait, there’s more!
Between now and the festival, any merch purchase will come with a free download of the newest song from the show! The song will be released July 7, only on bandcamp, so it won’t be on any of the streaming services.
And if you want to support the show without a merch purchase, you can always pick up a digital copy of The American Songbook: Redacted, or any of my other digital albums, over at bandcamp, where they let you support the artists by adding to the asking price.
It was a lot of fun putting these items together. As soon as I got the patches I put one on my Dickies jacket, and then a navy trucker hat, and both look super cool. The 4-button pack turned out even better than I hoped and will definitely stand out on the merch table, the keychains have my favorite show logo, and the 5-sticker sheet was great to put together because I could put a bunch of sticker ideas in one place!
Look them over and let me know what you think! And if you order between now and the festival I might just sneak in an extra Songbook or Green L.E.D.s sticker as a surprise!
It’s becoming more real every day! The planning and organizing are ramping up for The American Songbook: Redacted’s trip to the Edmonton International Fringe Theater Festival! And to help raise money for the tour I’m selling Band Candy!
No, wait, that’s not it. It’s merch!
Official show merchandise will go on sale sometime in June, but here’s a sneak peek at a few of the cool items that have already come into the RobPRocks warehouse (my hallway bookcase).
There are official tour jackets and hats! Jackets and hats not included because It’s a patch! A very cool, 3-color embroidered patch, 3.5″x2″
Sticker sheets! A sheet of 5 stickers related to the show: the show’s logo, Plug Your Ears and Sing!, “Trust The Invisible Hand!” Now That’s What I Call Fraud, and Corporations Are People Too!
Bigger “Corporations Are People Too” sticker! 3″ trapezoid shape
Custom guitar picks! Color show logo on .80mm white Derlin guitar picks. I was pleasantly surprised when I gave a few to fellow guitar players and they said “sweet, this is the gauge I use.” Functional AND promotional!
I have some more items in the design and production pipeline so get ready to hit that virtual merch table in June! All proceeds will go to me getting to and from Canada in one piece!
One of my favorite tracks on The American Songbook: Redacted studio album is The Invisible Hand, a 60s-era James Bond style theme song about Adam Smith’s famous metaphor for laissez faire capitalism. The joke being that “invisible hand” sounds like some kind of underworld organization that you’d find in a James Bond movie (fwiw I wrote and performed the song before a secretive organization named The Invisible Hand appeared on the animated spy comedy Archer).
When it came time to record a studio version of the song I wanted an arrangement that sounded as much like a classic James Bond theme as possible and I’m really proud of the orchestration and performance I put together.
When I did the song live in the debut performance of the The American Songbook: Redacted, I had a very simple slideshow animation projected on the screen behind me. My good friends Peggy O’Brien and Steven Rosenthal, amazingly talented filmmakers, asked if I had thought about doing a video montage in the style of a James Bond title sequence. I said I had but added that my video and after effects skills probably weren’t good enough to do something worthy of the arrangement I hoped to put together.
Lo and behold, they offered to put together something, and what they delivered was so unbelievably cool that I wanted to do more with it than project it behind me in the live show. With their permission I put lyrics over their great visuals to create a lyric video for the song. It’s the 4th lyric video from AS:R after Satanic Panic, The Great Disappointment, and The People Who Were Already Here, and it will be released on Thursday, January 26 at 9pm NYC time, 0100 Friday, 27 of January GMT.
There may be a live stream on premiere night, I’m still figuring out what to do (and I need to reconfigure the laptop I used to stream all those Cover Tuesday shows after an operating system upgrade) so stay tuned, I’ll update here and post on the various social medias that I still can tolerate (post, mastodon and instagram).
Update! (Jan 26, 2023, 2pm EST)
The premiere is tonight at 9pm NYC time and I’ll be doing a 30-minute pre-premiere live stream to talk about the video, James Bond Themes, and maybe even laissez faire capitalism if people are into it! Here’s the lyric video will be here, and will go live at 9PM, and the pre-premiere live stream will be on YouTube and Twitch! Come through if you can!
It such a cool video, I can’t wait for you to see it! Until then, check out the cool arrangement in one of the embedded players below 🙂
One of my goals for The American Songbook: Redacted is to take the show to performing arts festivals and I just secured my first slot! It’s in the Edmonton Fringe Festival, one of the top 5 fringe festivals in the world and the largest, longest-running fringe theater festival in North America. Not a bad start!
Fringe theater festivals are an amazing experience, with theater companies from all over the world descending on a city and filling it with creative energy and a variety of diverse and unique performances. I won’t have to explain to anyone that my show is different from what they’re used to because things at a fringe festival are supposed to be different from what people are used to. You do juggling while explaining particle physics? Great! Shakespearean mime? Awesome! Comedy songs satirizing U.S. history and American culture? Perfect!
The festival runs from August 17–23, 2023, and I’ll update with dates and venue information when it becomes available. I also have applications in with a few more festivals so hopefully this is the first of, if not many, at least a pleasant handful. See you next year, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada!
