I haven’t been all that musically active lately, except that I’m going to try to cover a very rare Jeff Lynne song called “Poor Little You.”

Otherwise, I’ve started to design t-shirts and sell them online via Cafepress.com  The shop is still in development, however, I do have a few designs up already.  www.cafepress.com/teedragon/

Here is a photo of one of the shirts.

A few weeks ago I purchased g-force media’s software plug-in of Mellotron samples. I’ve been happily playing around with it–if in fact you bought a real physical Mellotron today, it would cost somewhere around $5,000. The Mellotron was an early version of a sampler. If a band wanted orchestras or choirs on their record but couldn’t afford the cost, they would use a Mellotron. The Mellotron looks like an organ, except when a key is pressed a tape plays the samples of choirs, orchestras, flutes, etc. You’ve heard Mellotrons as the flutes on Strawberry Fields Forever and Stairway to Heaven. The Moody Blues practically made a career out of using the contraption. Mellotrons were not really that stable and so the tapes would sometimes dip in pitch or sound a bit warped, which added to the appeal of the sounds for me.

I just returned from Missouri where severe thunderstorms are as common as telemarketing calls I get on my voicemail everyday. Since I haven’t been back there for about 3 years, it was refreshing for me to see some rain as a nice contrast to the dry Phoenix climate.

On the song licensing front, we met with a publisher a couple of weeks ago who is interested in Broken Nights. This is an exciting prospect, so we are keeping our fingers crossed for some good placements.