Join the office Christmas party at the PEL network. The hired band is Mark Lint’s Dry Folk, playing their entire album, and the guests are considerate enough to only talk between the songs. BYOB! Mark holds mini conversations on philosophy, art, and life with all the PEL and PMP co-hosts, plus special guests Ken Stringfellow (a guy who played with REM and Big Star also sang Continue Reading …
Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: “Structure of a Tragedy”
This is my first song written in quite a while, and the most essay-like. In case you wanted to actually read the essay, here it is: The structure of a tragedy is firm, and there will be no change You need some grievable lives, bigger than life, but still relatable There has to be a situation where, it’s like they’re programmed by Their characters, good characters, to do Continue Reading …
PEL 10th Anniversary “Brave New World” Song
I wrote a tune to potentially play at the live show. This did not happen. I thought it probably wouldn't happen for the recording either, but on Saturday morning after doing my editing pass on the episode, I overcame my various blockages to emit some guitar, bass, vocals, more vocals, drums, and more guitar, and here's the result: A novelty song born as I was prepping for a Continue Reading …
Mark Lint’s Dry Folk Album Now Available in All the Right Places
New PEL music has arrived! You can now easily get the new album of my tunes, including "1984" as inspired by the PEL episode and "The Other" as inspired by all that weird continental feminist philosophy about encountering the Other (with Lucy Lawless singing that one). You can hear it on Bandcamp (free streaming in full!), Spotify, Apple music, or Amazon. I've also added it Continue Reading …
PEL Music: Lucy Lawless Sings “The Other,” Plus “1984” and More (Earn a 1-on-1 with Mark)
Yes, I was able to get Lucy Lawless of PEL fame to sing on a new Mark Lint PEL song: "The Other," which you'll hear at the end of our episode 203, since, you know, women are scary with all that threat of re-absorbing you into your Mother's womb, according to Kristeva (sort of). My direction to her was to sing it like a succubus (thus my choice of this rather old picture) or Continue Reading …
Support the Arts: First Mixes Done for the New Mark Lint Album!
Please wander over to patreon.com/marklint to help support the new album. This first completed song (well, it's not mastered yet, but we mixed it today at Paradyme Studios, which is 95% of the technical work) is a new version of an old tune (a 2002 home demo of it was featured on PEL Ep. 65), set to be released properly for the first time. The tune is about feeling the Continue Reading …
Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: Dawning on Me
Listen to "Dawning on Me." I had the pleasure of recently interviewing Ken Stringfellow, best known for his band The Posies, but also a touring member of R.E.M. and part of the revived (1993–2010) line-up of Big Star, and this song is really about the latter band. It's stylistically influenced by their acoustic ballads (like "Thirteen," thus the wording of the second line of Continue Reading …
Song Self-Exam (Pilot and How-To): “Write Me Off” by Mark Lint
As an accompaniment to the Nakedly Examined Music podcast, I'm launching a project to collect song explanations from our musician listeners: Song Self-Exams. Now, I've long been doing something like this intermittently through my Nakedly Self-Examined Music posts on this blog, but video, where the song and the explanation are on the same video, is better, I think. Here's my Continue Reading …
Holiday Special 2015: Mark Lint’s “Songs from the Partially Examined Life” with Many Guest Greetings
PEL gets nostalgic, playing songs and bringing back guests from yesteryear. Both beloved former guests and some new behind-the-scenes friends of PEL chatted with Mark about what they're up to, and each of them took on a song to try to make sense of. Some of the many projects we discuss include: The 2016 PEL Calendar, with sweet philosophy art by Sterling Bartlett and Continue Reading …
Mark on the Gig Gab Podcast
I got a chance to sit down and chat with my old bandmate (he played drums in The Fake) Dave Hamilton (who hosts three different podcasts!) to talk about my ill-fated musical "career" and my relationship to the many great musicians I've played with, most of whom were able to play out more and make more money with their other projects, leaving me in a few cases the last man Continue Reading …
Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: “Reason Enough”
Listen to "Reason Enough." Do you ever feel like you just don't accomplish enough to justify your continued existence? Like on a daily basis, you're just trudging around getting food, sleeping, watching TV, surviving like an ant (well, an ant who watches TV)? Well, guess what (asks this song)? Life doesn't require any kind of fancy justification, and you should just lighten Continue Reading …
Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: “The Past Is Not Real” and “I Insist”
Listen to "The Past Is Not Real" and "I Insist." These are my last two recordings, released on episodes 122 and 120 respectively, and they represent my two ways of making music of late, with "The Past Is Not Real" being me playing all the instruments, and "I Insist" using a virtual band made up mostly of ex-band-members now living around the country as well as some PEL Continue Reading …
Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: “Antigone”
Listen to "Antigone: Choragos Speaks". As with No Exit, I wanted to write a theme song for our little production here. Though it was my original intention to elaborate this as a disco/techno thing, it spun itself out as another folk dealie, and I ended up playing all the instruments myself. I got to perform this live for a large family group right after writing it, and Continue Reading …
Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: “Sleep”
Listen to "Sleep." Also, listen to the solo version from Spanish Armada (1993). This is a love-turning-to-stoicism song, written and recorded originally for my first solo album in the summer of 1993, with an easy-but-impressive-sounding finger-picking style that I had just figured out at the time. It's got some of my better lyrics and a good dose of sincerity, and is one of Continue Reading …
Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: “Jesus Noise”
Listen to "Jesus Noise" (or right-click/shift-click this link to download). I'm really not sure when the beginning of this song came into being: a couple of years ago, I think, but that could have been when I reminded myself of it, and it could have been from 2000 or before. I know it sort of made me roll my eyes: Who needs another song name checking Jesus, much less a Continue Reading …
Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: The Default Relation
Listen to "The Default Relation" (or right-click/shift-click this link to download). WARNING: This has a lot of swearing in it. This is a brand new song, and my first country song in a while, for which I quickly drafted a country band consisting of Chris Chamis on drums and Ben Kelly on lead guitar and keys. It was inspired both by reflecting on failures of communication, Continue Reading …
Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: Run Away
Listen to Run Away (or right-click/shift-click this link to download). I've previously written about this song, and how I wrote it when I was 16, and it was the first song of mine that was any good, and we performed it at the high school variety show. The "final" recording version from that came out in 1989 (listen to it here). But I couldn't help but think something had Continue Reading …
Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: “Stoobis in the Sky”
Listen to Stoobis in the Sky (or right-click/shift-click this link to download). For our episode on the sublime, since the 12 Days of Xmas was going to be way too long, I opted to complete a song that I'd been wanting to finish for a while about my dog Stoobie, who hit the high trail in the summer of 2011 after 16.5 cute but irascible years on this earth. I wrote this a Continue Reading …
Musical Anarchists Wanted Immediately: 12 Interminable Days of Xmas Project
Update: this project is done: go listen! I need collaborators for an evil Xmas prank/art piece to be completed ASAP, so if you know good musicians who record themselves at home, please forward a link to this post on to that person. You know how "The 12 Days of Xmas" is about the most boring Xmas song ever? So, so long, going on and on. Well, I've had a long-standing joke Continue Reading …
Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog: “Point of Confusion”
Listen to "Point of Confusion" By Mark Lint. The first respondent to my call for musicians and other artists at the end of ep. 105 was the Swedish musician Daniel Gustafsson, who immediately contributed around eight different tracks to this song including nearly all the keyboards and all the electric guitars. You can hear a few of his instrumental compositions here, here, Continue Reading …