We'll beat Jeremy with a stick.

In brief

Here it is finished, wholly, and ready for your questionable pleasure. My First Sing-Along Dictionary, the little project that began with the 2010 RPM Challenge and wrapped up last week with the addition of a very special bonus track, may be heard, seen, reviled or marveled at—and either way, sung along with—at veryusartists.com/mfsad. You can listen right on the page and even flip through a digital version of the accompanying book. Or you can download them all, either one by one or in one big ZIP file, whatever your pleasure. It’s all there, all free!

Bonus!

“What’s this about a bonus track?” we pretend to hear you ask. Well you see, a few weeks ago Ross Horsley (a chief corrupter upon our impressionable minds, who also has a book coming about based on the My First Dictionary blog, by the way!) held a caption competition for the image to the left. And the winner’s submission was to be turned into a song—a bonus track for the album.

This is what we sent Richard, it's the only one like it!

Well, the mildly disturbed Richard Smith of Leeds was dubbed a supra-genius for his My First Dictionary-style definition of “anonymous,” and so Leicester’s one and only ButterflyPolite did us the honors with the Johnny-come-lately “This Song Is Anonymous (We Do Not Know Its Name).” It’s a laugh-riot. So do check it out!

Give us a shout out

Now, if you like our little record—and our little book—do us a favor and tell a friend. Better yet, tell an enemy. Tell a member of the Academy. We’d really love a Grammy, if only to further enrage Stephen Colbert for taking his Best Comedy Album award this year.

Thanks for reading. Very impressive. Now go download this album, if you haven’t already.  It’s free!

This past February, the Very Us Artists hatched a diabolical scheme with a like-minded fellow named Ross Horsley.  This ne’re-do-well perverts good, wholesome children’s illustrations from a simpler time into post-modern strokes of blue humor and black comedy.  The nefarious deed is made all the worse by labeling his mischief with the innocuous moniker, My First Dictionary.  How quaint.  How unassuming.  How devious.  And frankly, we love it!

For example:

But that wasn’t enough.  We couldn’t leave well enough alone.  We got the sick notion in our collective mind that these naughty “definitions” ought to be further demonstrated through song.  And so, My First Sing-Along Dictionary was born.  10 songs, each paired with a new bit of lexicographical roguery crafted by Ross Horsley, for your questionable pleasure. For free.

It begins innocently enough with “The Very Us Artists Have Cut A Record,” and every few days a new song will roll out until it culminates with an unspeakable end a few weeks later.  Fun for the whole family!  Well…maybe not the whole family.

Here are 5 ways to follow along:

Keep an eye on My First Sing-Along Dictionary’s home, veryusartists.com/mfsad

Visit this album’s home away from home at Alonetone (a damn fine place for musicians.)

If you do the RSS thing, subscribe to My First Dictionary here or just pop in every few days.

If you do the Facebook thing, go and “like” the My First Dictionary fan page over there.

And while you’re at it, get some likin’ on at The Very Us Artists fan page, too! Each song will be posted over there, as well.

While VUA has appeared to be in a state of protracted hibernation, seemingly dead to the world by the casual observer, there’s actually been a heck of a lot of activity going on in the den. And this beast will soon emerge, hungry for action and ready to play.  And there will be blood music!

For starts, veryusartists.com has been gutted and rebuilt from the ground up. It’s wearing the original skin designed by Joshua Wentz (albeit with a few nips and tucks here and there), but there’s a lot more functionality and fun to be had, thanks to Kevin Teague! A limited version is up and running right now, but one by one, new and/or revamped bits will be rolling out. Check back later. You’ll see!

William Ian Jaws, Visual Approximation

But most importantly, I’d like to announce that William Ian Jaws—or Bilian, if you please—has joined us as a fellow Artistic Director. I’ve personally been working on music with Bilian since the late ’90s, but it’s been well over a year now that we’ve been working together on VUA. You’ll find his indelible stamp all over various projects in the works, and VUA’s output will be the better for it! But now it’s official. You heard it here first. World, say hello to William Ian Jaws.  Just be careful.  He bites!

In the midst of producing the next VUA album, co-producers Bilian and John LaSala recently got Josh Wentz  on the horn for a bit of a chat and to preview some of the new music. And you can hear it on his new podcast, Radio non Grata.  Go have a listen!

This is a re-posting from our blog at The RPM Challenge (that yearly challenge to record a whole album in one month), announcing VUA’s plan for this year.  Click to read on: Read the rest of this entry »

Very Us Artist superstar, Joshua Wentz, puts out a quarterly ’zine called HEY! Quarterly. The latest issue, HEY Junction!, has just come out, and it features a heated conversation between HEY and VUA. Only one can survive. And it’s three against one.

To read this remotely-conducted bloodbath, get yourself a copy today. And the logomachical showdown between him and us is only a drop in the bucket of all the cool stuff you’ll find between (and on!) the covers. There are contributions from several other Very Us Artists in there, too. It’s only $12 and all the proceeds go to charity, specifically The Anti-Cruelty Society. Being rather unfond of cruelty, your animal friends will admire you for it.Order HEY Junction!or even better: Subscribe to HEY! Quarterly(Either way you’ll be a hero to your animal friends.)

On February 1st, the Very Us Artists entered the annual RPM Challenge to write and record 10 tracks or 35 minutes’ worth of music before the month was up. We met—nay, surpassed!—that challenge and made quite a few new friends along the way. The result is eleven—count ‘em: eleven!—albums of brand new music from several Very Us Artists, most of it free for download. Below is ours. A quick review of many of the other then can be found right here: VUA’s Challengees

Roughly Produced Masterpieces is our wildly eclectic offering, 16 tracks strong, with contributions from merely six previous Very Us Artists (though for John LaSala and Jeremy Simmons, this marks their first solo contributions.) Five others are folks we’ve been actively courting to get on a VUA album, and the remaining five are new artists we met through the amazingly positive and encouraging RPM community. Our cover art was an original painting by Christine Pollock. We took exhaustive pictures and sent RPM the original, making it a truly unique album.You can download all the music and read up on all the music and the artists who created it here: Roughly Produced Masterpieces

In case you missed it before, future Very Us Artist* Jeff LaSala’s first novel, The Darkwood Mask, commissioned by Wizards of the Coast for their Eberron “The Inquisitives” series, has been officially released today. There’s even a chance that if you were to pop into your local big box book store you’d see it on the shelves in the fantasy section. It’ll look like this:

You should read it. It’s really great! But don’t take our word for it. Prove it to yourself. Of course, it’s also available on Amazon and places like that too.

And why not read the first chapter for free? Here it is: sample chapter

So, a super-big congratulations to Jeff. We’re quite proud.

*At some point in the future, somehow or other, Jeff will likely become a Very Us Artist. As gazing into the future is speculative at best, it’s hard to say just how this may come to pass. But being John LaSala’s kid brother, a little bullying and arm-twisting shouldn’t be ruled out. So, taking advantage of the time machine we’re using to produce The Future Is Now, let’s just say that in the future, Jeff is a Very Us Artist. Thanks for playing along.

This February, VUA encourages musicians everywhere to participate in an exciting project called the RPM Challenge. You can read all about what that is here, but in short, it’s just a challenge to write and record an entire album in the month of February. The goal is to write 10 songs or 35 minutes-worth of music, burn it to a CD, and mail it in by the end of the month. You don’t need to create a production masterpiece. It is just a challenge to see if you can pull it off.

While some of us (see who!) will be doing our own solo albums for RPM, this year The Very Us Artists will also be doing one…VUA-style. This album will be a bit different from our regular “Opus” albums, but it should be fun and relatively easy. When it’s over, we’ll post our album online for free download.

Here’s our page.

And here are the only two rules:

1. Write and record one or more songs during February and send us your WAV file(s) by the 27th.
2. Like other VUA albums, this will have a theme, but it’s very loose. The album will tentatively be called Roughly Produced Music, and all you have to do is make sure that the name of your piece is a feasible explanation of what RPM stands for. For example, “Remember Plastic Mustard?” or maybe “The Relentless Pursuit of Monkeys.” Beyond that, everything else about the music is up to you.

Want to contribute? Let us know!

If this whole RPM Challenge idea intrigues you, and you think you can do a whole album on your own and still submit a track for the VUA album, then go for it! We’ll promote your album right along with our own, starting by putting you on the VUA’s Challengees list, so let us know!

And hey, tell a friend!

VUA founding member and frequent contributor Carpentron (aka Chris Torgersen) has been awarded Track of the Day status for today, January 10th, for the entire Rock genre at GarageBand.com. This is the third time his song “Existential Lullaby” has received an award. It was also Experimental Rock Track of the Week last September and Track of the Day the previous May.

The track has been working its way up the charts there since early summer and is currently ranked ninth on the Experimental Rock chart (247th in Rock). You can check it out, along with others from Carpentron, at either of these locations:

Virb.com
GarageBand.com.

Also, John says that this Perry Bible Fellowship cartoon always reminds him of “Existential Lullaby”:

(click to enlarge)