KIRBY KRACKLE. Issue #63

I’m sitting here in Edmonds waiting to pick up my dog from getting his full body Brazilian and listening to Bob Marley. In the past few years, Marley has turned into one of my top 10 favorite artists off all time and I can’t believe I hadn’t discovered my love for him earlier in life.

Parents: Make your kids listen to Legend as part of their daily chore routine, but if they’re Caucasian don’t let them grow dreads. THAT doesn’t look good on any white boy. Moving on …

Last week I said that I’d shed some light on a new project that I’m recording in "The Orange Room" at the same time as COLLIDER is working on our new album. . The new project I want to share with you goes by the name of
KIRBY KRACKLE, and here's a little back story on how KK came to be….


If you’ve been reading this blog for a while it’s pretty obvious that I’m a hardcore comic fan and a fan of that corner of Pop-Culture in general. In 2004 right after the dissolution of my band Laymans Terms I began playing around with the idea of writing music based around comic books, their story lines, and all that encompasses the world of our four-colored friends. I shared my idea with some who I thought would dig it and tried to feel out if anyone other than me thought the idea had any merit. I was greeted with as many
“Hell Yeah’s!” as I was blank stares, and shelved the idea for starting a new “traditional” rock band in the short-lived ULTRAVIOLET.



Fast forward a few years, and the idea came up again while talking to good friend and COMIC STOP co-owner Brian Meredith. We both got excited about the idea again being that it hadn’t been tried before except in the vein of 3-chord spazz outs by a few bands yelling “Spiderman! Spiderman!” over and over again. We thought it could be done better, and both agreed that the material deserved much more respect than that. A few months later Brian came up with the name referring to original MARVEL Comic’s artist Jack Kirby and the common description of his “energy” based drawings.

Fast forward to Winter of 2008 when COMIC STOP co-owner Jim Demonakos and I sat down to flesh the idea out and to see how it would really work, if at all. Maybe there was a reason it hadn’t been tried before? At first I found it really hard to wrap my brain around a completely different way of writing, but it seems that in the last few months we’ve hit our stride. Jim and I are so excited to be writing and recording songs about a subject we’ve loved our whole lives, and if you’re a fan of comics, movies, and games we know you’ll love these songs as well. It’s bizarre that it’s an almost completely untapped corner of music and if it’s true when they say they say write what you know, then between Jim and I we know A LOT of geeky shit. Does this replace my current music styling? Not at all, but I’m excited to have another outlet and to make this experiment finally happen.

Today, KIRBY KRACKLE launches our myspace site www.myspace.com/kirbykracklemusic from where you can hear our first Demo offering for the song, “One Of The Guys”. We are currently recording our debut E.P., and plan to have it released by the end of the year. We’ll also be launching a new blog in the next few weeks that follows our progress with the project, and that is where I’ll be doing most of my talking about KK from now on, so stay tuned for where you can find that. A HUGE special thanks to JG Roshell from COMICRAFT for designing the KK logo you see above. JG and COMICRAFT have done many big mainstream comic title logo designs, and you’ve seen their work on TV having created the “Heroes” logo for NBC. Thanks guys!

Other than KK you can imagine things have been pretty intense focusing on recording two albums, and we’re getting close to finishing the first studio offering from COLLIDER. Whew…off to work. :)


Excelsior!


KS