Go For Throttleup - WTF is that?!?! Hi - Thanks for being even vaguely interested in our stuff! We appreciate anyone who takes the time to listen, even if they ultimately wind up not liking it, or just like it in small doses, or whatever. We're perfectly OK with being fully 'audio ala cart' - take what you want, enjoy it how you wish. We're not for everyone, never meant to be. We're never going to sound like Abba or Steely Dan or any recent pop princess - don't want to. Those are great bands, but not what we're looking for. For us the dirty grit, the absurd concepts, the back & forth of creating, the little bobbles of timing, the (possibly-erroneous-but-never-admitted) oddly chosen or timed chord changes, the trying to do something in the real world that presently only exists in our heads, are the fun stuff. Yes - We could go back and Autotune the vocals to machined "perfection". We could re-record every single little bobble of intonation and phrasing, digitally edit the timing, compress and sweeten every track, then tweak, futz, and fiddle every last little bit of humanity out of it. In short we *could* technically make our stuff sound exactly like what's on the radio. And hey - the radio is OK. It's audio Budweiser, Coors, &/or Miller. It is what it is - and it ain't bad at all. We're more like the homebrew stuff that smart but odd guy who works out at the research facility makes for himself. Sometimes, it sucks. Sometimes, it rocks. It occasionally manages to do both at the same time. But it's nothing like what you get elsewhere. Go For Throttleup is an original music project by Paul Haggard & Keith Duke. It picks up where the previous project - Just West of Hell - had been the creative outlet for Paul, Keith, and the late Tony Miller for the previous 20+ years. With the loss of Tony in January of 2009, it has taken awhile to be able to put things in some sort of emotional/personal/creative perspective. Paul & Keith have moved 'the new stuff' over here to the "Go For Throttleup" page to continue our creative endeavors because - much like some kind creative appendicitis - this stuff has gotta come out. It's baaad if it stays in! So we try to spend some time each week, creating our particular brand of silly madness. The new paradigm(1) is not the same - it *couldn't* be the same. There's a big old Tony shaped hole in our lives, and his friendship, wit, and musical contributions are never going to be duplicated. But damned if I'm going to quit doing what we'd been doing for about the past 25 years now. It's funny - in that odd-not-humorous way - that these days when we're coming up with new stuff, that a lot of it does come from the simple question: What would Tony do?(2) Sometimes, it's enough to set Paul and I to literal cackling laughter - trying to imagine what cool/snarky/funny/awful/over the top *something* that he would have come up with. So many of the germs of song ideas in JWoH were his, that Paul I have been working overtime to come up with more new weirdness for Go For Throttleup. And so - because after all we *do* have a damned good idea about what Tony would do - we've been writing about all sorts of icky, creepy, pissy, funny, weird combinations of things: Nazis, aliens, dominatrix biker chicks, demons/devils, criminals, racists, anti-Semitism, exes, the abuse of power by politicians and/or religious figures, rightwing nut jobs, leftwing nutjobs, nerds, stupid people, eugenics, euthanasia - you know the same stuff we have always written about. That hasn't changed a bit. And there are occasions where I would swear that either Paul or I really are channeling Tony strongly enough that - just for a second - I can just hear him laugh at some bit of absurdity that one of us has just spewed out... In 2009 we didn't play from January to about April. I didn't pick up a single instrument, write a note or a lyric. Then in April, Paul & I started trying to see how this would work out with just he and I writing/recording. I some ways, it is similar. In some ways, vastly different. It has been a season of growth, change, and of experimentation beyond even our normal experiments, as we hae struggled to find our stride, or 'new groove', as it were. We have written quite a bit - as of Dec 31st, there are 51 finished songs in the can. Not too bad for less than eight months, once a week, Keith (1) Yeah, paradigm. As in "a complete and utter game change". It's a great word that the biz-buzzword jackasses have tried to destroy. Deal with it, I'm not misusing or overusing it here. (2) We pretty much always ate dinner together before we would disappear into the Den Of Hate to work on our stuff. The ritual was we all piled into the truck (hey it's Oklahoma!) and he would ask "What do you guys want for dinner?" The usual reply was "Man, anything except Mexican - I had that for lunch". To which his reply was always "Mexican it is!"