Phone interview today with some guy named Andrew Beckett from Dallas, TX who is writing a new book on independent artists including upandcomers and some more notables like Johnny Cash or Aimee Mann who were once major artist s but who are now or once were indis. He thinks that independent music is on it's way to exploding now the way that independent film did a few years back. an interesting tat a tat. 

Tomorrow we are scheduled to perform at a peace rally. It may only be three of us on stage because some of the guys don't want to support a peace rally now that we are at war. I think that the general objection is that it appears that if you support peace or are against this invasion, not war, then you are un-American or supposedly don't support “our troops.” I am so thoroughly bored with responding to stupid ideas like this that I'm just not going to say anything. 

A lot of people are being pussies if you ask me. Voicing their opposition to the war but then not wanting to speak up in public about it. Now is the time when we need to stand up and voice our opposition the most. I understand the fear. I mean, God, who wants to wake up one day in prison or get the shit beat out of them or get killed or whatever. If the sixties taught us anything it taught us that the people speaking up did not matter too much here anymore like it once may have in pre-grassy-knoll-times and that if you did speak up too much you got pepper sprayed, shot at, beaten, battered, harassed, imprisoned, and of course killed. So yea I know how my bros are feeling. It's some scary shit. And the more this invasion/not war, drags on, the more pro-war people are starting to get around America. You can feel it in the air. Now that our own soldiers are getting killed, our people are getting more and more vigilant and jingoistic. Less open-minded. It's becoming more and more of an us against them mentality. Even though in the bigger picture of course it has nothing to do with us against them. It's a few men in our government against a few men in their government. But now thousands of innocent people are getting murdered all caught up in this thing. Us and the Iraqis are just people trying to get on with our day to day lives. 

But speaking up against these atrocities is something that if you do believe in you should just do. bite the bullet. Take the plunge. Stand up. And speak out. So tomorrow we go up as a band united, just not a full band perhaps. 

Fleshed out a great song called if your baby could. Can’t stop hearing it in my head. On such a roll these last two years. .

Later today we did a photo shoot for the www.ourmessagetotheworld.us site. Tried to do it front of the federal courthouse, but they had it all blocked off for security reasons. No pictures. So we chose another location. Eventually a security officer came up and made us stop there too. but we got some good shots.