Replacing my blog at http://pablosmoglives.wordpress.com
22 Aug 2021 1 minute read 0 comments Nathan Payne
Not everyone who can play has a talent for songwriting. I've known many great players over the years, great musicians who were masters of their instruments, who couldn't write their way out of a wet paper bag. They all make the same mistake: Think...
19 Aug 2021 3 minute read 0 comments Nathan Payne
Looking back is more than merely inadvisable, apparently. It's not so hard to avoid, when you realize how many bullets you dodged. Like I used to tell people when I was a cabdriver, who thought it looked like "fun," driving drunken, abusive halfwit...
17 Aug 2021 2 minute read 0 comments Nathan Payne
One of the reasons I came to Mexico is burn-out. As a musician, I've been living on the front lines of the socialist "give your work away for free" movement for nearly 20 years. I sympathize with everyone who's lost their livelihood since the Freed...
16 Aug 2021 3 minute read 0 comments Nathan Payne
Looking back is rough. What happened to time? Where did all those people go? Why must everyone end up on the bottom of the sea, floating alone through the halls of the Titanic? Don't tell me it's only natural. We have a super-nature to which dea...
13 Aug 2021 1 minute read 0 comments Nathan Payne
Looking through my folder for songs to sing in my last video (Songs From a Cornfield), it occurs to me why I haven't written anything in awhile, with the exception of a few songs in Spanish. I don't bother finishing anything I don't like, much less t...
8 Aug 2021 4 minute read 0 comments Nathan Payne
I recently watched Less Than Zero for the first time in decades. Supposedly, Bret Easton Ellis wasn't in love with the film when it came out, but I think it's a classic. One of those perfectly-cast snapshots of the time in which it was made that so...
30 Jul 2021 2 minute read 0 comments Nathan Payne
I saw the most Mexican thing I’ve ever seen the other day. I walked across the street to look for something to eat, preferably a taco cart, or someone sitting on the sidewalk with a cooler full of tamales, and found a pet shop instead. Instead of p...
23 Jul 2021 4 minute read 0 comments Nathan Payne
Hello again so soon, indeed. The purpose of this email is to direct you over to my SubscribeStar page, so if you want to avoid all the fun and get straight to the point, well, you probably should never have opened this email. But your hateful, cont...
17 Jul 2021 1 minute read 0 comments Nathan Payne
Today is the 10-year anniversary of the release of Broken Bird. Conceived as a spoken-word album (thus the title, which rhymes with "spoken word"), it had other ideas for itself, and morphed into an album about being a broken bird. During recording...
16 Jul 2021 2 minute read 0 comments Nathan Payne
To Whom It May Not Entirely Disinterest, I have a theory about love songs. It isn't ironclad. The theory is that any song that claims to be about love but fails to express the pain and horror of sliding downward toward hell is disingenuous pap th...
