Song We Like: Goodbye Johnny by Quinn Powers

The maximum-integrity HLYCRP editors broke our own rules about covers for this one (it was written by Jeffrey Lee Pierce & The Gun Club). All covers should be like this: Quinn Powers took a song by someone else and made it totally about himself. It’s lighter and prettier than the original, and totally, completely, 100% different.

Song We Like: Evil by the Mongrels

A deceptively-complex song, in which the mongrels’ satan/not-satan singer digs into some big poetry about religion and commerce, while pretending to be just some Irish fucker at a bar (they’re not Irish, they *claim*). Nice work.

How to Get Likes on Facebook for Cheap

,

If you’ve been paying attention to the HLYCRP facebook page, you notice that our likes have taken a sharp upturn. You were probably like, “Have they gotten cooler? Or has Cinnamon Kennedy finally hacked the system of Mark Zuckerberg?” The answer is the latter. I figured out how to buy likes, and here’s how you do it (this is so boring, please pretend that John is playing guitar in the background):

-Go to Facebook ads manager

-New campaign

-Set the region to ‘global’ (btw their interface is crazy and upsetting. You might need to watch some youtube videos to get this far.)

-Add a couple of keywords. We chose ‘musician’ and ‘rock music’

-After much experimenting, we found that Facebook heavily favors dumb pictures and dumb text. Ours says ‘Do you like new music? Then Like our page!’ with one still image of John playing guitar. It works improbably well.

-Launch. Bam. Facebook will take a hundred years to approve your ad (particularly if it has the word ‘crap’ in it), and then you’ll start getting around 200 likes a day. The inclusion of places like the Middle East, India and Africa will have you paying less than $.01 per like. You can probably afford that. Next week I will address the question of whether Facebook Likes, particularly those originating from halfway around the world, actually mean anything, whether they do any good, and whether there is a point to spending $.01 on them. My answer to this will be (spoiler alert): maybe.

Song We Like: Flying Saucers/Heatwave by Mega X

The beauty is in the details! It takes musicians who’ve been doing this a while to come up with something so perfectly balanced. This is a great song for the soundtrack of your high-drama life. (His teeth were perfect! He was wearing a jacket made of spun glass!)

Lyrics as art: “Dysphoria” by Elliott Kage Jones

“Dysphoria” by Elliott Kage Jones, winner of the coveted Cinnamon Kennedy Lyrics Award

Song We like: Night Lights by Day & Dream

This is shoegaze: it goes on and on, and the colors all fade into each other, and we’re dreaming. The whole album is like that. Very nice. It’s so hard to believe that this many layers of sound were created by two people that I’m going to have to see them live to figure out how they do it.

This is shoegaze: it goes on and on, and the colors all fade into each other, and we’re dreaming. The whole album is like that. Very nice. It’s so hard to believe that this many layers of sound were created by two people that I’m going to have to see them live to figure out how they do it.

Be nicer to Bandcamp!

Bandcamp is like the proverbial hometown girlfriend. So easy, and so eager, that often when bands get ‘real’ they stop honoring it with their presence. Bandcamp doesn’t have a playlist feature, and they make you hold the music you buy in weird places (on their site or on your hard drive), and their internal search engine is dreadful. However, the beauty of Bandcamp is its inherent friendliness (much more to artists than to consumers). They make it really, really easy for bands to upload music — the hardest thing you have to figure out is how do an aiff format — and as such, it’s a democratic and a really nice place, for established and especially for unestablished musicians. Bands, don’t forget your roots! One-man-bands, your stuff doesn’t have to stay on Soundcloud! Yes, put your stuff on the big platforms, but don’t forget about who made you, and who taught you to do a 1440×1440 jpg. Bandcamp.

Song We Like: Losing Form by Polly Panic


In these post-Polly-Harvey days, a girl like Polly Panic needs to do more than just whack you on your head with her cello. She needs to whack you on your head with two cellos, that are mic’ed up to sound scarier than Metallica. We love it.

Episode 46: Quinn Powers, Illiterate Light, The Mongrels, Mega X, Day & Dream

John gets his DNA touched, our new way of finding bands, and MORE about Johnson City. Also, what you need to know about gofundme (and those kinds of things). Also, obviously, great music. (Follow us on Facebook! Instagram! Twitter!)