Category Archives: AngelaBlogs

A letter from Angela – with one week left for pre-orders

You have just over one week until the deadline (April 26) to pre-order our CD. Naturally, after that time you can order the CD in regular ways or buy it from us at our shows, but this will be the last time you can order our sweet pre-order packages.

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Our friends, the pirates (of PDXYAR)

We love a lot of things about Portland. It’s got good places for brunch. There’s a poutine cart about four blocks from my house. Also: things that aren’t food are also good.

Today I’d like to tell you about some of the people who make us glad that we live where we do.

They’re pirates.

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Californians: we need your help!

Hello California!

We are crowd-sourcing a tour to your beautiful state (and Southern Oregon) in June of this year. I am working on my cold e-mails and tweeting-planning part of this tour myself, but our plans will be much stronger with help from the local peoples (that’s you!).

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Our first live studio audience

We did a show tonight for DotConFest, a new all-online convention that’s happening all weekend (gaming stuff is tomorrow!).

Our show was a surreal and amazing experience, and I just wanted to share our thanks.

DotConFest: the convention in my basement!

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Song Fu 1: “The Way I Glow”

This month, we had to write and record a song “about bioluminescence,” because John Hodgman told us to, and we’re doing a thing called Song Fu, which, among other things, requires that we occasionally do what John Hodgman tells us to do. (This is a blog post I wrote explaining Song Fu.)

We recorded a podcast with Ken Plume & Molly Lewis about the songwriting process for this month. YOU CAN LISTEN TO IT. (mp3 link)

And you can listen to the song we wrote about Bioluminescence, and even download it, if you want:

It’s called “The Way I Glow.”

The Songwriting Process

When the prompt for this month’s challenge was announced, I immediately decided that I didn’t want to be “too literal” in the interpretation of the challenge. This is one of the many winning strategies that I’ve learned from the reality fashion-designer-TV show Project Runway: don’t be too literal about the challenge. (Also: be true to your own aesthetic, be nice to nice people, and don’t use tulle).

There were a lot of ways still to go with Bioluminescence, however. For example: did you know that there is a bioluminescent creature with a Latin name that literally means “vampire squid from hell”? It’s true. Ask Wikipedia.

“The Way I Glow” is a song from the point of view of a bioluminescent girl, who is heartbroken and angry and maybe a little confused about why this dude broke up with her.

We must thank the scientists on Twitter (and my Bio 100 teacher) who helped us understand the affects of Green Fluorescent Protein: I’ve learned, for example, that if you tried to make a person glow the way you make mice glow with GFP, it would mostly show up in a person’s mucous membranes–mouth, nose, eyes, etc. Learning! Yay!

Plugs & Links

Stay tuned for next month’s Song Fu. The prompt will be announced on the Song Fu website on February 6.

Just over a dozen songwriters responded to this month’s Song Fu prompt. You can see all those entries in the Song Fu forum. You should also listen to and spend money on the song Molly Lewis wrote for this prompt, which I will embed below.