3.13.17

Songwriter Monday initiated. In which QB churns out a new weekly song before the unbelieving lens of his iPhone and posts it straight to YouTube for your believable eyes, after some heavy editing and a week's delay. In this, the first installation, we hear a bittersweet ode to some priss at work a year or so back that jangled his neuroses by being confident in her profession. Hit material? You be the judge.

See it here, while the views are still in the single digits.

3.18.17

Saturday Shed Set initiated. In which QB plays a set of songs live in his well-proportioned backyard studio for all the world to watch at some later date. It's a set of songs he records, see, but what gets posted to YouTube is just one of the songs. Kind of string 'em out, you know? And, really, do you have time to watch a full set of songs? One should do you. Don't get greedy. 

In this, the first installation, he plays a "Some Idea" from his new Bandcamp EP, "Question Beggar." The idea is that he'll play these live sets in lieu of playing actual gigs, which he finds wearying, annoying and possibly superfluous to this internetified age in which we live in.

See it here, first, before any of your so-called friends.

4.5.17

Wideo Wednesday initiated and now official. In which QB takes a pre-existing recorded song from his prodigious catalogue and marries it to some haunting clip of super 8 home movies, posting it to YouTube for all the world to find. The first occurance of Wideo Wednesday occurred on 3.29.17, common reckoning, with the posting of the previously unreleased cover tune, "I'll Be Good to You." See that here.

The underwhelming response to that posting spurred on QB to make it a permanent recurring feature, and so, "Eternity in the 90's" —from the live-in-the-studio-no-overdubs album "Question Beggar" available FREE on Bandcamp.com —saw its posting to-day. See it here.

Both videos are sourced from a box of super 8 home movies QB scored at an estate sale 3 years prior. Little does he know and less does he care who these people may be. Some of them are certainly highly dead now, at any rate. 

video for “Plebes…”5.24.17

First Single Released: “Plebes Come to Boston”/“Someone Torn Between”.

The geniuses at Therisno Records finally got off the dime and released the first single from the as-yet-undisclosed album sure to drop sometime between now and the next millennium. “Plebes Come to Boston”—the A side—was recorded in Portland at Permapress Studios by indy legend Pat Kearns (Exploding Hearts, pAt mAcDonald) who produced, mixed and mastered. The full band you swear you hear on the record is just the Question Beggar bass with no overdubs and a drum track.

By the innovation of his 3 string bass invention, the stingy cheapskate QB was able to blast through recording 12 new tracks in 4 days while Pat just about melted his keypads tracking it all.

The B side, “Someone Torn Between,” was recorded and mixed in Question Beggar’s backyard shed for considerably less—for nothing, actually—by QB himself, along with an additional 12 tracks sure to see release when the record company is good and desperate. Pat Kearns at Permapress did master those tracks as well, however.

The video for “Plebes…” was recorded at Portland Cable Media with longtime QB friend Tim Kohl technical directing, then produced and edited by Question Beggar, using public domain clips from “Quo Vadis,” a trailer for “Julius Caesar,” “Cleopatra,” and an old Pontiac commercial.

A particular hoot are the animations at the beginning and end of the vid using actual focus group responses from Audiokite.com.

The single and B-side are now available on iTunes, Spotify and CDBaby.

video for “Everyone…” 6.28.17

Second Single Released: “Everyone Goes Away”/“Snakenavel, ID”.

"It's my 'origin story,'" says Question Beggar, referring to the latest A-side released "Everyone Goes Away." 
"It tells a partly-true story of how I learned to play a 3-stringed bass while left alone all summer during the school break."

Feeling the song needed a video that followed the story, QB spent a few weeks animating the story, including several artifacts from his own childhood.

"That Beatles tee? I had that. Wore it constantly. And the posters in my room...And those the actual names of my friends at the time—where they did vacation—and my best shot at re-creating them."

This A-side, like "Plebes...", was produced, mixed and mastered by Pat Kearns. 

Available on iTunes and Spotify.

9.13.17

"Western Man from Back East," a 12-song album, is now available for download from Bandcamp.com. Recorded in Portland, Oregon in August of 2015 at the legendary Permapress Studios—produced, mixed and mastered by the legendary Pat Kearns—I have no idea how to end this sentence.

Like most albums released independently, this one is also just one more work of astounding genius to be more or less ignored. But that won't stop Question Beggar from trying to assert there's some kind of meaning and value.

"'Western Man from Back East' is chock full of songs about fools coming to terms with their foolishness," QB said to no one there, recently. "All these fools—whether they deceive themselves or not—won’t give up their foolishness. Which I totally get. I won’t give up mine either, yet."

Buy it here, and you'll regret you didn't do so sooner than it was available.

UPDATE 9/12/17: "Western Man from Back East" is now available everywhere you can download music legally. Therisno Records is still working on placing QB's music on the illegal download sites, however they inform us that they only carry music people want to hear. Like that would stop us.