Wherein Phil ruins a romantic moment with science. Give a listen to my new track “Halfway To The Stars”.
I’ve long been a fan of old jazz torch songs. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald doing “Stars Fell On Alabama” was probably what I was listening to right before writing this. Sentimental, great melodies, all that stuff.
But I’m always a little too logical and scientifically minded when it comes to this stuff. (Honestly, if stars DID fall on Alabama it would probably do a lot of damage. A loss? That’s for your to decide.)
So you can hear me do a little crooning on here and finally using that college degree in jazz guitar I worked so hard for. (After giving up on a Physics degree – And now it all starts to make sense.)
You can listen to Halfway To The Stars below and click the “buy” button to have to keep forever and ever like a trinket your grandma left you in her will.
The other day I added “Burning Sensation” to my Facebook/Instagram store and Facebook kicked the cover image back because of a “sexually explicit pose”.
That’s right… I’m too sexy for Facebook.
I requested a review with the message “There’s nothing sexually explicit about this image.”
It got kicked back again with the message “You cannot promote images of alcoholic beverages.”
If you’re drinking liquor that looks anything like that hot sauce, you’re… drinking hot sauce.
So I submitted a picture of me pulling a face next to some hot sauce bottles. They insisted I looked like an 80’s beer girl poster. I’m sure you can see the similarity in the two photos.
But the good news is “Burning Sensation” is available in my FB/Insta store anyway, because their AI wasn’t as dumb the 2nd time I submitted it.
If you’ve been following my Instagram over the last few weeks you might have seen this little holiday series I created. If not, I’m compiling them here for your giggling pleasure.
I wrote a bunch of these a couple years ago and had planned on doing them as video sketches. Tough to do this year. But when I ran across them in my notes I thought they might make good meme-style jokes too. So there ya go. 🙂
You can click on each one to see if bigger.
Do you frequent any of the social sites with handy dandy icons below? Me too!
Last year I was playing a casino in Oregon while touring Burning Sensation before we filmed it. And I did the joke you see in this video from the special.
Now, this particular town would aptly be described as “hella white”. And during the second show that night an African-American woman came in and sat with her friends at a table right in front of the stage.
This joke doesn’t always fly in mostly white rooms. Which is why I added that tag. A lot of people in towns like this just haven’t ever communicated with black people or spent time with them.
So when I did this joke the black lady in the front laughed… hard… doubled over. Her friends laughed. That spread the laugh to the tables near them and it petered out the further it got away from this one lady in the front row. Best result I could hope for in that room.
After the show she came up to me and said “Thank you for doing that joke tonight. I really needed to hear that. My daughter is in second grade and her school just called me today to say that her hair is distracting the other students and I need to do something about it.”
WHAAAAAAT?
Curiosity was being mistake for distraction. Instead of using it as a teaching moment for the other students, they wanted this lady to cover up her daughter’s hair or do something else to make it “less distracting”.
I guarantee if it was a little white kid with long hair like me in that second grade class they wouldn’t have said anything.
Her story made me make sure to do this joke in every “hella white” room I play. Because I want to make them curious about the joke. I’ve also had plenty of people come to me after the show to explain it to them. And they’ll say “I had no idea that was a thing!” And then they’ve learned something that night and that makes me happy.
The laughs are great. And creating some curiosity in the world is great too.
“Santa’s Working From Home” is out now! I couldn’t let this shit show of a year go by without a new Xmas song, so here we go.
During a pandemic even Santa Claus has to work from home. And he’s not really handling it all that well.
This is the first time I’ve written a song I hope is totally irrelevant as soon as possible.
We filmed some pretty ridiculous video clips you’ll see floating around the web over the next month too.
“Santa’s Working From Home” is now available on your favorite music streaming site or given it a listen and download in the player below.
And if you’re Xmas shopping and want to avoid giving Amazon more money this year, take a look in my shop and pick up something nice for the people who share your sense of humor. 🙂