Hi. Munro here. It looks like, going forward, I'm going to be in charge of BPM. Ichabod is having an existence crisis. That's fine, nobody liked him anyway. This site is a good source for links to music I've recorded over the last 30 years, including the work I did with Broccoli & the Purple Sky. I'm hoping to do more with the reviews, interviews, and other material and artists besides myself. We are, in fact, making changes here in the studio. After many years of spreading myself thin, I'm going to try to focus my attention on a specific goal. I've been studying music and working on my playing and reading abilities, and I'm going to try my hand as a for-hire studio musician. What I need to learn up front is how to get into the business. From there I will need to fine-tune my knowledge base to include the expectations of a professional working environment. I don't know why I'm telling you all of this. I will continue to work on my personal music, mainly to help develop my flexibility and technique. I've never been one to play with a lot of pedals and effects; you can tell from many of my recordings that I tend to play "clean" and straight, without using signal processors. For a peek into my thinking, I do that because, like with alternate tunings, I don't want to become reliant on things that won't necessarily be readily available to me. For instance, if I write a song that uses a certain sound effect, then I need to play it acoustically, or on a rig that doesn't have "my" effects, I might not be able to pull it off. So I keep it simple, so that playing it on a nylon string in a park it will sound basically as good as it did in the studio, because nothing will be missing. There's also an element of the fact that I do write a lot of my material on a nylon string acoustic, so converting it to a rock song doesn't need added processing. That said, I've decided that adding effects could make it more interesting, even if I don't rely on them. I play with this one guy, James (he's the most recent example, not the only or best example) who uses a lot of effects. He's a fine guitar player, but when he turns off all the pedals, the guitar just sounds so thin and boring. So I figure, if I'm a good guitar player and I sound fine without effects, maybe I'll sound fantastically better with them. So I've started investing in a small collection of pedals. I started with four, two of which have arrived already. Even with just an overdrive and a flanger I can make the guitar sound so much cooler. When I add an analog delay and a wah pedal to it, I will vastly increase the possibilities of what I can make the guitar sound like. So, besides figuring out how to break into the studio musician gig, I need to work on my pedal usage so I can utilize that aspect in my professional dealings. If I do get a chance to work on some other people's recordings, I will share whatever I'm allowed to on bestpolicymusic.com. Thanks for checking in.

Did you ever have somebody who didn't believe in you? Did you let it affect you? Did you let it get you down? We call ourselves Best Policy Music because we believe in honesty. So I'll be honest. There are people who don't believe in me. A part of me wants to take that to heart and to give up. But another part of me says, "what if I know something they don't? What if perseverance is what I need? What if these people aren't wishing for me to fail, but want to protect me from myself?" That would be weird if they don't believe in me. I mean, why would you wish for one thing or another for someone you don't believe exists? I don't sit around wishing Santa Claus would just stop embarrassing himself. I don't wish God would stop taking himself so seriously (though I wish some other people would). So, these people who don't believe in me literally don't think I exist. Does that mean I don't? I like to think that, here at Best Policy, we offer a home for artists who may or may not exist. I like to think that, someday, there might be a movie in all of this. It's a sad, tragic tale (assuming the tragedy shows up eventually, knock on wood) that people might watch just to make them feel better about themselves. It's not horrendous, genocidal kind of tragedy, like a world war or something, so it won't be overwhelming in its terribleness, but just enough for people to question, "is this real?" and "why did they make this? The fact that they made a film of this is as sad as the story it tells." It's awkward, embarrassing, and of questionable intent. Just like my life. I would live on in such a movie, not just in name and acknowledgement, but in feeling, in 'vibe.' So, I think I'm going to go ahead and cease to exist. Bye.

The studio has been temporarily dismantled to allow for some reorganization and some new furniture. The plethora of upcoming music we may have promised will be on hold until we have some custom furnishings built and installed, and then everything should be much more smooth and efficient. And justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and every other person wrongfully killed or abused by police. Overhaul the system! Racism out of law enforcement!

Munro's got a new song out. Yes, NEW. Just wrote it, just recorded it, just released it on Soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/daddymunro/dont-need-a-dime It's more country than anything you've ever heard him do, but he says, don't worry, he's not taking the easy way out and going country. It's just how it came out. He doesn't even add the inflections or half-step key change that are clichés of the genre. It just kind of sounded that way with the open chords and the 6/8 time and the lamenting lyrics. We'll post the song here too, soon. The last Live from the Office Lockdown Livestream was last night. We tried to do it on our usual Wednesday night, but it went out with no audio, so we bugged him to do it again Thursday night. That video is now up on our YouTube channel as well. As he says in the video, that was the last of the cataloguing of his old material that he wanted to do. He's talking about getting back to generating new material, as the new song suggests. For that reason, we will cease the hour-long performances rehashing the bands of the past. Look for shorter streams with new music going forward. We may also branch out to something other than Office performances on acoustic guitar.

Munro has performed two more Live Streams from the office. The videos are available at munromusicland.com and at Best Policy Music's YouTube channel. In addition, we located and uploaded the original The Bottle Talking demo recordings, both here and on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt-eGopx1bU). Hear the original recordings of Luckiest Man Alive, Less, and Perfect, along with 6 additional "lost" songs from that period between 1994-1995. Munro was working at the movie theater, and he was hopelessly crushed on a girl he didn't really know. The Bottle Talking takes you through the evolution of that crush. Join us next Wednesday at about 7:30 for another Live from the Office event on Facebook.