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This American Life Live Promo Spot

Featuring “Climbing The Mountain” by Yours Truly, P Bear.

Season Two Begins.

Podington Bear is back! Starting today, a new surprising season of Podington Bear begins. New songs will be posted every Friday.  These songs will be collected and issued logically as albums, for which preview mixes will be added to the podcast stream indefinitely.  (Like albums #1-13 presently.)

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Sound of Picture Vol 1 now available in the HUSHshop for free/donation! Just click over to HUSH Records for the first edition of Sound of Picture in convenient zip album form.  Then reveal your album art window in iTunes to see each of 20 photos corresponding to the instrumental tracks.

Get it here.

The Ballad Of Zack McCune – An RIAA lawsuit tale.

Hello folks,

Something nice in the inbox today: A video series making good use of my music and the Non Commercial Creative Commons license I offer to all, on a topic I find very engaging.

In April of last year, Zack McCune was sued by the RIAA. He ended up $3,000 lighter (he settled), but with a much richer understanding of the contemporary debate surrounding music, copyright law, and file sharing. Part I gives an intro to his story, while Part II explores the disconnect between young downloaders and the recording industry. Part III, presented here, concludes Zack’s misadventure and examines where it led him: to the Free Culture Movement, which advocates more flexible intellectual property law.

This video was produced by Nikki Leon and John Randall. You can watch a high-resolution version here.

You Tube – Our Story

Those of you who caught my post about the season finale to This American Life may recall I said it was one of the best 60 minutes of television I’ve ever seen. The episode conveys a rich sense of, um, lifespan by weaving together footage from a half-dozen or so people of varying age named John Smith, the most popular name in America. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The following video does something similar, culling entirely from YouTube, and without the arbitrary fix on the name John Smith. It’s a vivid collage of tender, funny, and character driven snippets that’s so much more than the sum of it’s parts. I’m happy to have two songs sandwiched in this soundtrack.

This is the kind of stuff I love being associated with. Big ups to editor Denrae.

On Rocketboom

I have been licensing tracks to Rocketboom for a while now, usually as bed music. In today’s episode, the video and music seem to dovetail with particularly nice results. Have a look. The track is “Pythagorean Theorem”

Podington Bear on This American Life TV, on the net.

This is just a post to let you know you can get a pretty good This American Life TV fix without paying the Showtime premium thanks to the internet:

Showtime is screening the complete first episode on their website:

This episode features my songs “Excape from LA” (sic) and “The Album Leaf” in the soundtrack.

Also, this dazzling animation by cartoonist extraordinaire Chris Ware and animator John Kuramoto features “Squirrel Commotion” in the second half. I’m just pleased as punch to have my music paired to these poigniant and amusing storylines and rich, vivid imagery.

Excape From LA (sic):

Excape from LA

The Album Leaf (from the artist portrait series album Homage Fromage):

The Album Leaf

Squirell Commotion:

Squirell Commotion

The grand total is 13 songs appearing in the 6 episode series. I guess there were five in the season closer, which I haven’t seen yet. Have you?

***update: I saw the last one hour episode, “John Smith” recently and think it’s one of the best 60 minutes of television I’ve ever seen.

P Bear Film Fest

Friends,

I was happily surprised to find the following on YouTube. I enthusiastically support the use of my songs for video work, personal and commercial. Here’s some of both. Keep them coming! Let me know how I can help.

I really like this one. It is short and sweet. Well acted and cut and I think it dovetails with the music nicely:

This one I posted about before. My first paying gig. This director’s cut features a little more slapstick ‘puppetness’ than the version on the Paul Frank website.

This looks like fun:

And this is a nice abstract one featuring the pretty lights of the world’s tallest ferris wheel.

On Video

Many people have asked about using my music for their videos. I make my music free for any syncronization with any non-commercial video on the internet, and for works in film festivals, via a Creative Commons License. These are simply a couple of examples of work that I particularly admire.

This is a video for The Whitest Boy Alive’s (featuring Erlend Øye) standout track “Golden Cage”, illustrated and animated by Geoff McFetridge

Also in deservence of praise is the work of Australian director Stephen Watkins in his video series Backspace:

Episodes 1 and 2.

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