Following my Miami adventure, I hopped on one of those magical flying machines and, a few happy hours later, during which time I finished composing an album I’ve been working on since 2019, I found myself in Texas, for the first time since we got locked out back in May ‘21.
I’d been invited to appear on Blaze TV’s (https://www.blazetv.com/) new late-night TV show Normal World (https://www.theblaze.com/podcasts/normal-world), with the esteemed Dave Landau (https://davelandau.com/) and Quarter Black Garret (https://linktr.ee/14BlackGarrett). The Blaze Media compound is located in the site of a former Paramount Studios lot, where they filmed Robocop and Barney The Dinosaur, amongst other things, and it is an utter treasure trove of epic sets (including the original All In The Family set, still intact and beautiful), epic memorabilia, epic giant robots, and the most epic and byzantine ceiling rig I have borne witness to in years. The place is like fifteen Batcaves. I bumped into mister Pimp In A Blimp...
Timelapse of me drawing my new avatar
Tools: Procreate on iPad with Apple Pencil
Own the NFT at https://opensea.io/akirathedon !
BACK WITH ANOTHER BANGER FROM BERTON AND THE DON!
TELL THEM NOW!
With lyrics adapted from Berton Braley's poem of 100 years hence!
STREAM https://go.meaningwave.com/TELLTHEMNOW
Art by me!
Own the NFT! https://opensea.io/akirathedon
I worked in a bunch of factories when I was 16/17, after I'd left home.
Sauce factory. Cardboard box factory. Car door handle factory.
The former was the hardest because I was working in the freezers, packing bags of sauce for 12-hour shifts with nothing but local commercial radio and the speed-addled ramblings of my co-workers to entertain me.
The cardboard box factory was the most fun because I got to slide down this three-storey chute into a skip full of cardboard and jump up and down in it to squash the cardboard down. I'd always leave the place shredded with paper-cuts, but that made me feel like a warrior.
The car door handle factory was the worst because it was the most boring - literally just picking a spring out of a greasy bucket and jamming it into a wedge of plastic then passing it to the old lady to my right, for 12 hours, in a giant air-hangar looking-ass hall with a great big clock looming over us, that ticked with all the lugubrious lurching urgency of a ketamine zombie outside a ...
“Why shouldn’t the soul of a mortal be proud?
Life goes, it is true, like a swift-flying cloud
But while it's still going before he has died
A man may do many things worthy of pride”
With lyrics adapted from Berton Braley’s poem of the same name, MEANINGWAVE is proud to present a new single…
WHY NOT
(https://go.meaningwave.com/WHYNOT)
Why Not? (https://go.meaningwave.com/WHYNOT) is but one of hundreds of poems written by the perennial zone inhibitor and Appreciator Of The Wonder Of Being, and published in magazines and newspapers between the 1910s and 1940s. It is classic Braley, an anthem for the glory of man and all his achievements, past, and yet to come. And now you can sing it.
Oh, and that cover art there? That’s a picture of me back in ‘91 when I was around 11, which is my son’s age.
WHY NOT (https://go.meaningwave.com/WHYNOT) is out now. Download (https://akirathedon.bandcamp.com/album/why-not) or stream on your platform of choice now ...
Been in the studio since 4am, guess what album I’m working on?
I shall be sticking to this new schedule ‘till the album’s done, at least, and then we’ll see. Heck, maybe I’ll like it. I liked it today, I gotta say. There’s something magical about going to the studio in the dark, getting an amazing new song mixed while most people are still sleeping, then stepping back outside to find the sun rising. Oh! What a glorious thing!
(https://go.meaningwave.com/OhWhatAGloriousThing)
I worked till 10:30, then cracked open a White Monster - another experiment - and walked down to the gym in the blazing Mexican sunshine. Jamie was leading a Crossfit class, and happy to see me as ever, and I was happy to find the entire squat/bench area unoccupied, and got some work in on my lifting. I don’t know if it was the early start, or the new song, or the White Monster, but despite having been away from the gym for ten days due to a cold that I had no desire to disseminate, I was able to lift slightly heavier ...