I’m in the middle of a song honeymoon. It was another one of those ideas that I tossed off in one of my columns that was too good not to write: “I Wanna Be Your Henchman”. It’s a rockin’, twisted take on – well, I’ll let you figure it out, because you’re bound to hear it soon enough, because when I’m in a song honeymoon, I just want to play the song every moment, of every day, for anyone who will listen, because I’m just that much of a genius. Read more »

My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I are pretty particular with our moviegoing. Ten bucks is starting to feel kind of expensive, so we try to be discriminating shoppers. Sometimes we guess right – we’ve seen movies like “Bandits”, with Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton and Cate Blanchett (ooh, rent “Bandits”, really, really), which were wonderful and nobody else got; and sometimes we guess wrong – “Up” was a lovely, poignant movie, but I wasn’t really in the mood for poignant that afternoon. But there’s only one movie that made us want to throw something at the screen, we were so insulted at its stupidity: “Hancock”. Read more »

I loathe musicals. Really, really hate them. I remember one summer afternoon of my youth when I turned on the television and “The Philadelphia Story” was on, but it wasn’t actually “The Philadelphia Story”, because Bing Crosby wasn’t in “The Philadelphia Story”, and there he was socializing in the drawing room with – Frank Sinatra? And then, oh, my heavens, they’re about to start singing, for no discernable reason. Except, of course, that it’s the only reason to have Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra when you could have had Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, and if you’re younger than 30 and you have no idea what I’m talking about, you’re just going to have to take my word for it. Read more »

Faithful readers will recall that last time out, I castigated the Nameless Coffeehouse for booking me for a gig that they never told me about. I’m pleased to report that I did, ultimately, get an apology from someone at the Nameless – not due to my deathless journalism, alas, but thanks to a musical colleague who was kind enough to provide me with an alternate email address for someone in a position to say something. It turns out that the Nameless is facing some organizational challenges – and it got me thinking about the fragile nature of organizations in general. Read more »

Several nights ago, I was – I’m kind of ashamed to admit this – Googling myself on the Intertubes. There aren’t a whole lot of Samuel Bayers out there, and at this point, I’m intimately familiar with most of them. I must have been bored that particular evening, because I got about 25 pages in, and I found the oddest thing: a link to my name, on the bill for the May 2 show at the Nameless Coffeehouse. Read more »

Branding. Most of us don’t think about branding much. Sure, we find ourselves irrationally loyal to Schmoozer’s Coffee, with its dark, rich aroma, as opposed to Loozer’s Coffee, which smells like rancid dishwater, although in fact they’re both manufactured identically in the same factory in Tierra del Fuego by the same fourteen-year-old girls. But as for ourselves, well, we’re just paying our mortgages and repairing our cars and worrying about the next Bernie Madoff and what in the world is going on with KG’s knee. Who the hell needs a brand? Read more »

My mother, for those of you who don’t know by now, was a poet, a marvelous poet. When she died in September 2006, a number of us simultaneously had the idea of putting together a volume of her poetry, and so when I was home after the funeral, my wife and I collected all her manuscripts and records and computer files and Xerox copies of her published poems and hauled it all back to Boston. After collating, sorting, and cleaning everything up, we had about 600 poems, well over a hundred of which had been published. Four of us teamed up to choose the poems for the volume, and by January of last year – more than a year after she died – the project was finally done. Read more »

A couple years ago, my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I were chatting with an old friend of mine. My friend has a best friend whom we will call The Lawyer, because, well, he is. My friend had been attempting to give The Lawyer some advice about The Lawyer’s novel, which he’d been working on, diligently, for more than a year. He hadn’t shown a word of the novel to anyone; it was a coming-of-age story about a girl – never mind the fact that he wasn’t a girl, and he probably hadn’t actually known any girls of the appropriate age since he’d been of that age himself. My wife, ever helpful, attempted to provide my friend with the rudiments of useful advice, based on her substantial experience as a professional writer; I, on the other hand, simply dismissed The Lawyer as a kook. Read more »

Here’s what happened to me in January: I had a gig down in Lakeville on January 9, where I played to a full room and got five names on my mailing list. On January 12, I was the feature at the Front Street Coffeehouse in Salem, got five names on the mailing list, sold five CDs, and got a song request, via email, before the gig from someone who isn’t even on my mailing list. On January 23, I split a night with Rob Mattson at a new venue in Upton, with another full room of people chatting, snacking, and enjoying the music. Read more »

Recently, I was driving home from the aforementioned Somethin’s Brewin’ Cafe in Lakeville, where I was plugging my gig this Friday, and I was reveling in the fact that I had come up with not one, but two really good ideas for songs, and suddenly, as I merged onto I-93, I had a third idea even better than the others. By the time I got home a half hour later, I’d written the first verse and chorus. Read more »