“OK, HERE’S THE PLAN,” VIDEO

Valerie Gregory-Woolsey just told me she desperately needed some lyrics. I’ve heard that some people think of me as a “words guy,” even though my real medium is dancing, so here is a video of my song, “OK, Here’s The Plan.” The song is from the upcoming Karl Straub album, Tsunami of Crumbs. It’s about a group of darkly-clad women planning a nefarious break-in. 

The video went over budget by approximately 1.5 million dollars (Australian), because it took several days to get the cat to lick himself on the beat. (Or herself. How would I know? I’m a words guy/dancer, not a cat wrangler.) 

  Music and video directed and produced by Jeff Lang, in the living room of Jeff and Alison Ferrier.

With Danny McKenna, drums, Ben Franz, sneaky bass, and Karl and Jeff on guitars. Karl sings and wrote the song, “OK, Here’s The Plan,” copyright 2018, Karl Straub.

SOME WORDS ABOUT ANGER

I’m angry right now. I’m angry that the GOP cheated us out of our president’s Supreme Court pick, and angry that they are (presumably) preparing to claim that it’s different now, and this approaching election does NOT mean that they should be treated the same way. I’m angry about various other things, too, the same as many of you. I’m angry that so many Americans are comfortable with the authoritarian tendencies of the Trump administration, and angry that many Americans continue to claim that a Hillary Clinton administration would have been worse. I’m angry about the irrational demonization of people who want to live here but don’t want to make their families wait years for it to happen legally. I’m angry that “family values” aren’t valued when they drive the actions of desperate non-white parents. I’m angry that so many white Americans have such difficulty seeing non-white people as their equals. I’m angry that so many white Americans feel that “whiteness” is being threatened somehow, or that heterosexuality is likewise under siege, or that masculinity is a thing that should never have to accept criticism. I’m angry about all of this, and much more. But I’m also painfully aware of all the times anger has let me down.

"THEY DANCE REAL CLOSE THERE," STUDIO RUN-THROUGH, VIDEO EXCERPT, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

Video of Karl in the studio, guitar break during run-through of "They Dance Real Close There." Danny McKenna, drums, Ben Franz, bass. Producer Jeff Lang caught a brief excerpt on his phone, showing Danny and Ben playing. I'm outside of the shot, in the vocal booth. I asked Ben and Danny to make me sound like I wasn't just noodling, and they figured out a way to do this. The final version has a long improvised guitar solo, and the one shown here is slightly different. Ben overdubbed a beautiful pedal steel guitar track on the final, so this excerpt is different in that respect as well. It's just guitar, bass, and drums. Jeff had played me a Richard Thompson live cut a day or two earlier, with a super long guitar break that just kept building and building. This was my attempt to do something similar. (from the upcoming Karl Straub album, "Tsunami of Crumbs," engineered and produced by Jeff Lang at the Enclave Recording Facility in Melbourne, Australia.)

NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: “NO MORE ENGAGEMENT”

New Straubinical Facebook policy: 

I have no plans to unfriend anyone, but I’ve recently seen some friends online making it clear that they don’t have a problem with the whole “America puts children in cages now” thing, and they’re more outraged about the continued non-locking-up of Hillary Clinton, and it seems to me that this is a good time to start implementing my new policy. 

  From now on, I have no intention of engaging with people politically on Facebook. To my conservative friends: I have no problem with you commenting on my threads, and you should feel free to be honest, for those times when the hypocrisy of liberals makes you angry in a way that caged children don’t, but I’ll be letting your comments stand without intervention from me. 

  To my liberal friends: I’ll still be posting from time to time about my continuing view that public shaming and lecturing of conservatives and/or racists is counterproductive, but I assume that many of you will continue to believe that it’s the most productive way to improve our country, and I’ll be content to let your comments to that effect stand without argument from me. 

  I’m going to do my best to post stuff I write, and let people weigh in as they see fit, and I appreciate very much when people read my blather, but at this point I see myself as a writer and not as a person who argues with everybody in the public square. 

  Final note: it’s quite possible that I’ll forget what I’ve just said, maybe repeatedly, but you should assume that’s due to the Australian jet lag I plan to be suffering from at least through the end of the Trump era.

TSUNAMI OF CRUMBS

The Karl Straub album I just recorded in Australia is a ways from being completed, but that’s because mastering needs to happen, as well as CD pressing, and a few more songs need to be mixed by Jeff before any of that can begin. I’ll also need to do some research amongst Karl Straub fans and friends to see how many people will want CDs, how many will be happy with a download, etc. 

In the meantime— here’s some background information on the project, and a checklist that will serve as a teaser while you wait for the album to surface. Once the album is out, people can use this checklist to enhance the Straubinical experience. 

In the past, I’ve done a lousy job of promoting my work, and (following the early Graverobbers days, where I recorded fairly regularly) a lousy job of documenting it as well. I hope this album, packed with 19 songs, will make up for some of that. 

In 2001 or thereabouts, I met Australian songwriter and guitarist Jeff Lang. I’d heard about him from the fellows in Last Train Home, and when I met him I was subbing on guitar at an LTH gig. We hit it off right away, following the exchange of a few smartass remarks that afternoon, and me mocking him briefly from the stage later that night. (He’d turned up in a sharp looking outfit, and I told him he looked like Clarence Darrow during the Scopes Monkey Trials. He wasn’t familiar with the reference, although I learned later that he and I are both connoisseurs of idiocy, whether historical or contemporary.) 

  At some point later, he was in town for a while and I got to know him a little better. I was impressed by him recognizing that I’d been playing guitar in the DC Telecaster tradition, or trying to. This intrigued me, as I was well aware that most of the people I went to high school with in Alexandria knew nothing of this local tradition, while Jeff was an Australian and had obsessively studied Roy Buchanan in his youth. Buchanan’s influence on me was more indirect at first, since I never saw him play, but I had spent many hours soaking up the work of Evan Johns and Danny Gatton. From Evan, I’d learned that rock and roll lead guitar could be squalid, trebly, and lyrical. From Danny, I’d learned that you could mix as many American guitar styles as you wanted in every guitar break.