OCCURRENCES OF 2020

OCCURANCES of 2019

10.17.20

"Not everybody should wake up," Question Beggar told an imaginary throng of reporters, swarming to cover his latest press shindig to celebrate the release of "Sleep On Through," available online pretty much everywhere. "Some people should probably stay fast asleep, and those people, we need to watch over."

After nodding sageley at his observation, several journalists searched in vain for the caterer with the bacon-wrapped sausages and checked their phones.

"This new single is possibly the most inspirational I've done since 'Crazy Can't Sing,' a few months back," he continued. "Just now, I realize it's a counterpoint, message-wise, to Harold Melvin and the Blue Note's classic, 'Wake Up Everybody'—which is a favorite of mine—but instead of telling the People™ to wake up, I'm saying, 'It's okay, keep sleeping.'" 

As the Scamdemic is becoming obvious even to the God Emporer running Texas, and the bars are finally opening again, Question Beggar found himself playing live once again, where he's already debuted the song, twice. 

"It went over okay. Nobody said anything," he added glumly.

OCCURANCES of 2017

04.17.20

“I'm always," mentions Question Beggar, casually quoting himself, "wary of my 'clever' song ideas, because they'll usually lack emotional interest. This time, however, the result was surprisingly emotional." He's bragging about the new single, "Yadretsey," which he composed by playing the Beatles' "Yesterday" backwards and interpreting it.

"When you hear the record backwards, there were a few pretty hooks but the song structure was just fucked up. So I kind of got a rough impression of the backwards melody and approximated it, forcing a little structure on it, repeating lines to make verses and stuff."

"I figured I'd have to write my own words, but I seemed to hear backwards lyrics that were quite good as is, and I used those. The lyrics I heard seemed to tell a story of a doomed relationship and a broken man, in New York City. All together the song was so good, it jumped the line of songs already waiting to be released." 

Which it has been. Wherever music streameth. While supplies last.

05.17.20

Sometimes, as an artist approaches his 60s—or, if sensible, WAY sooner—he begins to question why the hell he still even listens to pop music as he did when a teen. What's he get out of it? Is it habit? Complacency? What??

"I thought it over," Question Beggar replies in answer—although he is still amazingly sexy despite his elderly agedness—"and realized that when I sing along to a song, my neuroses get put on hold. From which, I drew the conclusion that singing drives my crazy crazy, perhaps because my crazy can't sing along. Hence, singing makes one feel better."

"Well, I know a song idea when I get one and I wrote those lyrics down in nothing flat. Wrote the music a few days later. I was preparing to just slay the open mike folk with it, and SPLAT: the Coronavirus Hoax shut everything right the fuck down."

"Unfortunately, with no audience as a quality assurance test, I'm flying somewhat blind selecting this for a single so soon. ('Crazy...' has jumped the line past many fine, certified-swell songs.) It feels inspirational, though, and I felt like I could risk posting a possibly-not-great song to add a little inspiration to the world at this time."

And he's right. So form a six-foot-separated line at your nearest music download site, while supplies last.

07.28.20

As if in answer to the popular question, "Can this year GET any worse??" Question Beggar surprises and delights hardly anyone with a very special new video release and Bandcamp-only single, "Ain't No Rona." 

Recorded live on the stage in his eponymous backyard shed, "Ain't No Rona" is an acidic little ditty powered by blind assertions and the hallmark QB biting wit, that, as Sir Walter Raleigh would remark, "hath pith." 

Asked to comment on this sudden release he was quoted as saying "No." 

08.17.20

Summer keeps burning and the hits keep churning! Undeterred by riots and pandemical hysteria, Question Beggar releases his 8th big single of the year, the catchy, stompin' "May She Stay." 

"It's a song of temptation," QB announced at the press conference held in the glamorous Ritz Imaginary Ballroom in downtown Nowhere. "It's also a song of monogamy, which doesn't get too many songs written thereof." 

The music video makes use of the classic cheez 70's movie-of-the-week, "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble"—where a young, still-Sweathog John Travolta plays a bubble, trapped in a sterile bubble trying to enjoy life.

"That film is more than a little relevant today. Today, however, we've all been made to go in the bubble for the sake of the Bubble Boy. It's all flipped around."

02.17.20

After "Tattoo Masterpiece" sold well into the single digits, demand was through the roof and almost existent for its follow-up, another open mike fave, "Drone Alone." 

Even before the single's debut, the music video was flagged by Google Ads for adult content, damning eternally Therisno Records' hopes of pushing views into the triple digits.

"I blame myself," Question Beggar commented on the Google rejection. "Adding the immodestly-dressed dancing chick was out of step with the #MeToo era of puritan blandness. But I think I made a pointier point with her about the thin line between surveillance and exhibitionism in world where stalking is about to be welcomed as a form of marketing." 

Ignoring the remark that sailed over everyone's head, he continued about the meaning of the song. "It speaks to the way no toy or fascination that men spend time on is ever okay with women. No sooner do the good times roll, than some dingey broad gets up in front of a council somewhere to have it banned. Not a single airliner brought down and yet  you gotta get a license for drones now. And I mean 'dingey broad' in the positive sense of the word." 

03.17.20

“Okay, so I totally wrote this song in my sleep a couple months ago,” Question Beggar explains in an exclusive interview with himself about the new single, “Zodiac (Show Me Where You Are),” released today, wherever music is downloaded, why supplies last.

“I woke up from an instantly forgotten dream, first thing and there was this tune—sounded like Synchronicity-era Police—running through my mind. Just, ‘Show me where you are! Show me where you ah-ah-ah-are…’ I grab my phone and sing it so I’ll remember it later. I wrote the words and music later that day and instinctively knew this would be the song that audiences would politely listen to while they check their phones for something, anything!” QB continues.

Mistakenly assuming that everyone is as idiotically obsessed, or even terribly familiar, with the signs of the Zodiac and their symbols, QB has written the lyrical namecheck of Horoscope signs by referring only to their symbols: crab, lion, virgin, etc.,. “I really think,” he told the mirror—not the newspaper, but the actual mirror in his shed—“if anyone who knows the Zodiac hears this song, they’ll be mildly intrigued.”

The music video—also released today—has nothing to do horoscopes at all, apparently—“Hey, there is a shot of a lion and a couple of clips of a bull. Well, a water buffalo, anyhow,” he interrupts himself, defensively—but the public domain film he hijacks, “Blonde Savage” is sufficiently cheezy to make a decent showing.

06.17.20

A double cataclysm for which the world will long remember the year 2020, Question Beggar has released Record of the Year 2020, Vol. 1—exclusively on Bandcamp.com—and not a week later, the hard-thumping single, "Get to Work." 

"Record of the Year is my e-z method to soothe my artistic guilt over not being able to offer this year's singles for free on Bandcamp. No doubt that's why they've sold so poorly so far," QB explains, using the shakey reasoning which has gotten him so very far in life. "Volume 1 covers the first half of the year, and, should I live and be able, Volume 2 will come out in time for Christmas. Only Bandcamp will see volumes 1 and 2, however. iTunes and Spotify and everybody else will just get one big volume in December."

"'Get to Work' is another song written while shut in for the Plandemic. I do some of my best work when I'm confined by the tyrannincal tendencies of an overreaching deep state. Like the last single, I've had no open mike audiences to test the song on for luv-ability, so this is another risky release," he imagined.

07.17.20

"No phony virus will stop me from playing live!" Question Beggar proclaimed at the kick off for his 7th single this year, "Vicki Lay Low." He thusly proclaimed because the phony virus has indeed put a stop to his weekly habit of playing open mikes. 

"So I'll be dedicating the proceeds for this month's single to help the survivors of this scamdemic who record at my personal studio," he said, being no help at all. 

When asked about the new single he said this: "It seems to be the story of a woman named Vicki who has unintentionally offended someone and—unknown to her—is about to be cancelled, and not culturally. Vicki's friend in the song tries his damnest to persuade her to lay low, but she seems to be having none of it. I actually got a few chances to test this song out on live audiences during that brief oasis between the first and second phony waves of Coronavirus in Texas. The song seemed to do well. No comments but one from the audience. After the first time I played it, someone called out 'Poor Vicki!'"

09.17.20

Today's release of Question Beggar's ninth big single this year, "I'll Get Around," stands in the invisible shadow of an even bigger non event: the arrival of the new, custom 3-string 4-string bass, built by luthier Jerry Guest of San Antonio. 

Question Beggar released the following statement:

"Two weeks ago, I drove down to San Antonio to pick up my new bass from Jerry Guest's garage. It's a lovely thing. The bass, not his garage. A woodwork contraption of mesquite, pecan, tigerwood, macacauba and purpleheart. 

On September 7th, I played it for the first time at Six Springs Tavern in Richardson, Texas, at Garrett Walker's Singer Songwriter Brunch. The bass looked fantastic, of course, but the sound was—to me—quite awful. Tinny, with a lot of string buzz. 

Luckily, with some corrective work from Snyder Custom Guitars, what has ailed the new bass has been fixed and it sounds quite fabulous now. I'm told it's not uncommon to pay vast sums of money for an instrument built from scratch and then pay more to make it playable, though, so no worries."

11.17.20

Winter threatens. Uncertainty grips the land. Where can the world turn now, but to…the blues! As if sensing the planetary psyche’s need, Question Beggar responds with a new single almost nobody expected: “Paycheck Sucker Blues!”

“No, I’m greatly concerned with the working workers of the work world,” responds QB, when asked if there isn’t some more compelling subject matter he could write songs about. “Employment consumes 100% of the working day, and work? Less than 3%. Now those statistics may be made up, but the phenomena of paycheck sucking—to say nothing of the paycheck suckers themselves—has been coldly ignored in popular culture in favor of outdated success literature.”

“Now, me? I’m a workaholic of the First Division. I don’t see problems, I see challenges. I keep my attitude positive and my nose to the grindstone, so writing this song took hours of research and bucketloads of imagination. I had to literally put myself into the body and soul of a paycheck sucker: feel what they feel, see what they see, slack off as they slack off. Right away, it was clear that only the blues or slow polka could capture accurately their flashy lifestyle of high activity and zero productivity.”

“What I came to find was that, rather than being an act of defiance or despair, paycheck sucking is based more in being a team player, and a deep understanding sympathy with everyone else in the workplace who can’t give a shit about the corrupt goals of the empty execs playing Roman God above, excepting that one chick that martyrs herself staying late all hours and working weekends because she thinks the business will fall over dead without her. All paycheck suckers understand that incompetence and failure in the workplace lead to more work for everyone, as long as no one is called to account. That’s heroic, when you think about it.”

It is. And more than deserving of a smokey little number like this one, that is ALL killer, NO filler.

11.28.20

In a weird year, we get weird album releases. To say that the release of the new Question Beggar album, “Record of the Year 2020” is a non-event may be callous, but is technically accurate. Although the album of singles—plus four bonus tracks, sort of previously unavailable—dropped for the first time on the big distributors (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, etc.,) on November 28, 2020, the album had already been released in two parts on Bandcamp, back in August.

“It was a tricky situation,” Question Beggar explains. “I love Bandcamp and I was bummed that all the singles were coming out everywhere else first. I hadn’t released anything on Bandcamp since 07Q in July of 2019. So, in May, I released the first six singles and two bonus tracks as ‘Volume 1’ of Record of the Year 2020. On November 28th, I released Volume 2, or at least that’s what the page on Bandcamp says. For some reason, I think I just went ahead and released it in mid-August. Nobody downloaded it, so—whew!—I totally got away with it.”

“Usually when an album is a collection of singles, you call it a ‘greatest hits’ package or something. To me, the songs don’t seem to relate to one another in a thematic way, so that’s very ‘Best Of.’ There are also some shocking omissions, that were very much a part of this year: the protest single, ‘Ain’t No Rona,’ and the five other live-in-studio Facebook videos, ‘No Snow Blizzard,’ ‘Deacon Blues,’ ‘No Time Left for You,’ ‘Old Days’ and ‘Then Came Miracle Freedom.’ The first was an original, about the first lockdown, the others were covers, and the last, a medley of covers. I need to find a way to release those, I just don’t want to mess with the publishing royalties and such.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for QB to get around to doing that anytime soon. Unless you bug him about it. He really will do just about anything for the fans.

12.17.20

We managed to catch Question Beggar in his backyard studio shed—where he’s working on learning the ropes of his new custom bass, The Grumbleduke, and how it relates to a whole new crop of songs for next year—so we asked him to say a few words about 2020 and his latest single, “Song of Last,” which drops 17 December, 2020, wherever music is sold online, while supplies last.

“The new single is a collection of ‘last’ moments. Things that happen in life for the last time. Those ‘last’ things may or may not actually be sad, but the finality of anything always seems like a loss. Like the way this song is the last single this year, and the last single using my Danelectro Longhorn bass. As far as I know. As ‘Song of Last’ points out, sometimes we think something is ‘last,’ and we’re wrong. Next year all my recording will be done with The Grumbleduke, and I’m looking forward to seeing how that goes.”

“2020 has seemed like four different years to me. The first three months were when things were great and nothing was shut down. Then there was March/April where everything was shut down and things seemed scary, but then nothing happened. That seemed like a year in itself. Then May through October was like this off/on, closed/open kind of feel where the veneer on the scamdemic was wearing very thin, and then the final year of this year: post election miasma, where it looks like we’re on the brink of Big-Brother, V-for-Vendetta tyranny, in a banana republic with no bananas.”

“There’s only a couple of weeks left in 2020, but is there room for another year to squeeze in before 2021? I’d be a cynic to say yes and a fool to say no, as the Shadow once said. In a comic book I read in 1976. He was teamed up with The Avenger. And maybe Doc Savage, too? It was cool.”

“Anyhow, currently, I’m weighing a few different options for 2021, should we all survive to a meaningful extent. I’ve rewritten 8 new Beatles songs and in February, I may resurrect Shed Set Saturday to record and post the live videos. Maybe as ‘Mop Top Midweek,’ and post on Wednesday? Also, I’m considering going to local studios to have my new singles this year recorded, instead of producing them myself. I’ve been thinking that this new custom bass might benefit from an outsider’s perspective of my outsider art. There’s also a possible reality series about songwriters that I’ve applied for. I’ll let you know if that goes anywhere. If I don’t, it didn’t.”

And with that, Question Beggar booted us out of studio without so much as a “thanks for coming by,” and be in no doubt that he’s sent us no Christmas card this year (he never does.) At this point, I really can’t say that pretending to be a journalist covering this guy is getting me anywhere at all, so I might not be back next year. I have gotten some nibbles for work on Indeed, though, so we’ll see what the new year brings. Later.