I was digging through my hard drive this week and I came across a whole bunch of scattered songs I recorded over the last few years, then pretty much forgot about. They’re all in various stages of execution and completion, but I figured I might as well put them somewhere. Originally I planned to go back and clean then up a bit, but tracking down all the original project files and track recordings strewn across four hard drives proved to be too impossible.

So anyway, here are three for now. All instruments and vocals are me.

• Building Fences (download)
• The Slow Creeping Realization (download)
• Tell Me (download)

As I find more and tag them, I may make additional posts. There are probably a couple dozen in total, including instrumentals and bizarre random stuff.

So far, so good with the weekly schedule. We recorded the second episode of Idle Thumbs last night and got it published this morning.

This week features plenty of hands-on reporting on Diablo III and StarCraft II, as well as discussion about the various Blizzard announcements (some of which are a little controversial) and a bit from TGS. There’s also plenty of hands-on from LittleBigPlanet and Fable II. Hands-on is in the air. ‘Tis the season.

Also, I composed and recorded the track “The Fanboy’s Lament,” this episode’s namesake. It can be heard during the podcast in context, with the discussion of the events that prompted it, or downloaded directly from the Idle Thumbs front page. The goal is to feature this kind of musical interlude from time to time on the show if people enjoy it.

Be sure to subscribe to our RSS if you haven’t yet, and we do have iTunes up now. Tell your friends about Idle Thumbs! We don’t really know how to promote this thing.

And feel free to send questions, comments, or feedback to questions@idlethumbs.net — we’ll read and address it on the show.

This isn’t game-related at all, but I might as well put it somewhere!

For many years, I have been writing and recording songs for no real purpose other than my own recreation. It’s always been out of my own apartment, which means it’s a fairly lo-fi, amateur endeavor. This is fine, except that it precludes drums, which I can’t keep in my apartment because neighbors apparently just don’t have the ear to appreciate them.

Anyway, today I was able to go over to a buddy’s apartment and lay down some drum tracks for a few songs (his neighbors must be more enlightened than mine). It’s the first time I’ve actually committed drums to a recording of mine, and I think it could have turned out better, but it’s just nice to finally have been able to actually get all the intended parts in there for once.

On this track, in all, I play acoustic guitar, piano, drums, and keyboard, along with vocals. Everything except the drums was recorded over a year ago as I recall (without a metronome, which made today an exasperating exercise).

(Download above track)

Update: I have added some vocal harmony here and there, and adjusted some slight timing issues with the drum track.

Anyone who has played the Xbox Live Arcade board game adaptation Catan, about which I have previously posted, is surely familiar with the neverending admonishment, “Not now with you.” For reasons completely beyond my comprehension, NPCs will often not simply reject your resource trade offer, but will spew that rejection alongside a finger-wagging emoticon. There seems to be no rhyme or reason behind it - my friends and I have tried to apply all sorts of empirical theories, to no avail. Alexander (The Great, presumably) seems to be the most dogged of these naysayers.

Anyway, after a few hours of Catan last night, I couldn’t get that endless drone out of my mind, so I constructed this unnecessary non-sequitur:

(Download above track)

A little over a year ago I put together some music for a game project that didn’t end up panning out. I hadn’t come across them until the other day, when I was sorting through my old hard drive and figured I might as well release them to The Internet. Bear in mind these are sketches, so they aren’t that polished and they end pretty abruptly.

(Download above track)

(Download above track)

(Download above track)

(Download above track)

(Download above track)

A little while back, some Shackers entered a contest whose entrance requirements were to write lyrics for a song about video games–the criteria were pretty open, the entries just had to have verses and maybe some choruses. Song stuff.

Anyway, quadeh’s entry won, and I wrote and recorded a song based on his lyrics, as well as the lyrics of several other entries. For reasons I no longer recall, the content never really officially wrapped up, but I did release a few tracks to the Shack community. Today, out of the blue, I cleaned up my recording of quadeh’s song a bit, and now you can listen to the new and improved version here.

It can be streamed above, or downloaded directly. Entitled “Gordon’s Crowbar Blues,” it chronicles the early exploits of everyone’s favorite theoretical physicist button pusher/homicidal maniac.