Strollerderby interview
Brett Singer did a mother's day piece on the parenting blog Strollerderby about my series of posts on the Victorian mother song genre.
Most groovy.
SJI transcription
Saint James Infirmary blog has a kind post about this blog and the soupgreens project as a whole which includes a partial transcription of the O'Reilly interview:
I don't think that people are going to play Beatles songs. I think the Beatles are going to disappear from memory - because they're going to be locked away. You really can't get to the stuff. And instead the music that was available for free use, that was under a Creative Commons license, that was very clearly in the public domain, or that was made before the recording era, I think that's what people will be using. They will be doing the five trillionth cover of 'Home On The Range' instead of a much better song, like 'She Came In Through The Bathroom Window,' because that's what's in the culture, and passing back and forth references to the same material but used in different ways. That's what you're doing when you're making cultural artifacts. I think people will look back at these lost items and say, 'These were such great songs! What happened to them?'
2007 Digital Insider interview
This podcast interview I did with David Battino of O'Reilly about a year and a half ago predates this blog, but it's a great explanation of what this project and site are about, so I figured I'd blog it within the "bio" category on Soupgreens.com. Click through to read David's notes, or, if you're reading this in the context of soupgreens.com, hit the play button to get straight to listening.
(mp3) Cover Yourself (A Radical Approach to Copyright) | O'Reilly Media
swashbuckling interview on LoveToKnow.com
Kevin Casper of LoveToKnow has posted an interview with me in the guitar section there:Just when you thought you had heard everything the guitar had to say, a modern swashbuckler uncovers a plan for reviving historical guitar music. Los Angeles-based guitarist and folk music historian Lucas Gonze uses the internet to travel back in time to the pre-recording era of American popular music. Gonze visits the dusty corners of virtual libraries to rediscover the compositions of the19th century on a mission to both subvert stifling internet copyright laws and to bring life to forgotten musical artifacts that have been silenced for over 100 years. LTK Guitar sat down with Gonze to discuss the origins of his unique project and to learn how he adeptly brings this compelling music to life on the guitar.
This came about because he saw me play a gig and thought it would make a good article for guitar players.
Link: http://guitar.lovetoknow.com/Reviving_Historical_Guitar_Music. (PDF).
Alvin and Lucille *new and improved*
I have hooked up a page on this site for my Alvin and Lucille
jazz act. I wanted to give the music a home outside of the Myspace page, which never really got traction.
The best new features are:
- The MP3 player works.
- Better support for remixers via lossless (AIFF) versions of the parts in isolation.
- FLAC and Vorbis versions of the songs.
- Flickr slideshow.
To listen you'll have to click over to the page.
Alvin and Lucille page
There's now a Myspace page for "Alvin and Lucille", the jazz act I do with Tequila Mockingbird. We needed an online identity, and especially a place to put our recordings online so we could do bookings a little more easily.
As always the music is under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license to enable remixing and sharing. The mixes generally have the guitar and vocals hard-panned to the left and right so you can sample one or the other without any trouble. You could sing karaoke or use the guitar as a backing track for a sax solo by turning off the channel with the vocals. Or you could turn off the track with the guitar and snag some of Tequila's beautiful voice as an a capella vocal for a remix.
The jazz material is a different animal than the Americana I do here, so I'm going to maintain this site independently, and I'm not going to link directly to the MP3s because I think they need to be a separate listening experience.
Tequila's a killer singer and I think the music is great. Check it out:
Rise of the multi-bio
Musicians must have bios. It is a rule. And if one is good then more is better, so my bio is going to be a bunch of blog posts within a "bio" category. Whenever I write about myself I will put it in this category.
Here is some biographical information: on the day I am writing this, I am 42.
Soup Greens is a blog by Lucas Gonze
Soup Greens is the name of a musical act and a blog about old music.
The stage act is acoustic guitar instrumentals of American pop music from before the recording era. Here and there the act has singing. The guitars are a 1928 Gibson L3 and an 1890 parlor instrument.
The blog is this web site.
The person who does the blog and the stage act is Lucas Gonze, aka me. I live in Venice Beach, which is by the ocean in Los Angeles, California.
To contact me, send an email to lucas@gonze.com.