adamwarrock:

I hate being so out in the open with my business, but I was told by my friends to just shoot this out to the Internets. 

I am in the process of booking a pretty baller ass Fall tour with some friends of mine. We’ve been talking with some small sponsors for the costs of the tour (so I can potentially bring some international friends with me), so if you are a small website, business, or whatever, and are interested in being promoted by our tour INTERNET PROMO MACHINE, please contact me at adamwarrockmixtape[at]gmail.com. We have very affordable rates, and you get to have access to our sweaty, rabid audiences. 

Doing it like this allows us to build business relationships, as well as avoid daily tweets about kickstarters or basically begging you for money constantly. That sucks. You don’t want that, right? You just want us to bring the THUNDER, don’t you?!?!

Cities scheduled (tentatively):
Chicago, IL
Madison, WI
Ann Arbor, MI
Cleveland, OH
Philadelphia, PA
Hartford, CT
Boston, MA
New York City, NY
Baltimore, MD
Richmond, VA
Chapel Hill, NC
West Columbia, SC
Atlanta, GA
Charlotte, NC 

One of the things Mr WarRock is ashamed to tell you is that *I* am one of said friends involved in the aforementioned baller-ass Fall tour.  This is a chance to bring me to your face, America!!  (P.S. I actually am locked in to attend your face no matter what happens so you better scrub it up.)

From left to right: Shane Hall, Jesse Dangerously, HW, and Mikal kHill.

I like how kHill’s arched brow seems to say, “Why yes, I am the beardless wonder. Does that… intrigue you?”

I started writing a blog about all the food I’ve eaten on this tour the other night, but I haven’t finished it yet.

I’m about to play my last show with Shane & kHill for this go-round, at a “hackerspace” called TESLA at 97D Webster Street in Worcester, MA, which not only is a place to hack but has a forge for blacksmiths and kind of intimidates me.  We’re going to rap and play 8-bit video games and be friends.  Thank you, America.

Tomorrow night I’m kicking a solo rap show at a karaoke bar in Syracuse on my way back into Canada.  THAT’S JUST WHAT I DO.  Then it’s mad karaoke all night, obvz.

This is really fun.

It’s true, the rumour you’ve heard… I am venturing out on a United States tour once again!  Shane Hall and Mikal kHill are accompanying me, by which I mean carrying me in their iron horseless carriages from the south on up.

Here are the dates, with a few more still to be shored up:

Feb 3 - Columbia, SC @ Conundrum
(Mikal kHill, Tribe One, cecilnick, Shane Hall & MC Stealth)
Feb 4 - Orlando, FL @ Back Booth
(Jesse Dangerously, MC Wreckshin, Rainbowdragoneyes, Mikal kHill, Shane Hall)
Feb 6 - Charlotte NC @ The Milestone
(ThoughtCriminals, Jesse D, Shane Hall & MC Stealth)
Feb 8 - Baltimore, MD @ Bohemian Cafe
(Collectible Humans, Jesse D & Shane Hall)
Feb 9 - Philadelphia, PA @ Little Bar
(Voss, Sketch Lightly, Mikey Mo, Jesse D & Shane Hall)
Feb 10 - Brooklyn, NY @ moon-ii [319 Rutledge St]
(Schaffer the Darklord, Jesse D, Mikal kHill, & Shane Hall)
Feb 11 - TBA (New England somewhere)
(Jesse D, Mikal kHill, & Shane Hall)

Thanks to Rusty Shackles for the dork-faced poster!  I think I’m Bowser.

HW’s “Shithead” acoustic version; guitar by Shane Hall, human beatbox by Jesse Dangerously.  From the abortive Cleveland stop on our insanely fun “Break A Branch Off The Crazy Tree And Beat Your Dick To Death With It” tour of spring, 2010, where our venue got changed to a Starbucks and we wound up doing a Ustream (and pizza party) in HW’s amazing fan Chris’s apartment before I got on my 3 a.m. plane to Austin for SXSW.

Catch the vibe, ride with it!  Plus get psyched, America, to see me and Shane with Mikal kHill next month, touring up from Orlando through (hopefully) Columbia,Roanoke, Charlotte, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Rhode Island or Boston or something.

I like that days three and four of the itinerary are basically Charli Baltimore!

If HW wasn’t such a hateful beast, we’d have him along for this tour, too.  By “hateful beast,” I mean “busy at school.”  But kHill is launching his sad as hell new album, dust., so you’ll be crying too hard to feel sad about anything but the web of misery that permeates all of our thin mortal existences.

Mikal kHill and Romero Shaw just made an EP together called dust.  It’s pretty bleak, but very good rap music.  Is it possible to be bleak and stirring?  If you think it isn’t, check this video and make sure.  If you think it is, check this video and feel validation.

Or just go snag the whole thing here: dust by Mikal kHill & Romero Shaw (2011)

Today, Adam Warrock and Mikal kHill released their joint rapper/producer (in that order) mixtape, The Browncoats Mixtape.  It’s based on one of my favourite TV shows of all ever, Joss Whedon’s space western Firefly, so I was going to be excited on the day that it dropped anyway, but the thing that really gets my pulse racing is when an album has talented people behind it, a great coherent theme (or not), beats that thump and well… perhaps most of all…

…me.

I appear for a verse on the track based on my favourite episode of the show, the one that never fails to make me cry like a kid being made to get into or out of the bath: “Out Of Gas.”

I was so lucky to be invited!  I mean, I was lucky they barely objected when I all but stormed the song with guns blazing.  I was living in an abandoned spaceship myself at the time, and the rest of the crew had made it in their escape pod to a safer place and I was just kind of freezing to death and watching the oxygen dip low low low.

I wrote from the perspective of the crew in the show (oh that did it… that one sentence just all at once made me realize I have participated in fan fiction. oh god dammit.), and to really harp on the theme of the episode, I put the affection and concern felt between them in that crisis at the forefront because it was what I needed in my drifting pod, too.

It may sound weird, but for the very end I knew another reference I wanted to pull into the mix because it gave me just the right feeling when I would hum it to myself - the hook from Lil Kim’s “I Came Back For You!”

I was kind of huddled in that nav room from the show, just really hoping someone would come back for me.

And I didn’t die out in space, so I guess someone did.

Caught unprepared,
We left reluctantly; scared, everything up in the air.
We were stuck if she wasn’t repaired.
The one thing we spared was sentiment we hadn’t time for,
Air was thick with sediment, and evidence to bat an eye for.
As the temperature dropped therein, tempers just stopped flaring.
Warmth became immeasurable, it was never less cool to be not caring.
Always shook off any trouble with a crew like yours,
Til we took of in the shuttles… two by four.
Ooh, my lord! Swing low, sweet miracle,
No doctor, no mechanic, no shepherd with parables
No mercenary, no pilot, no lieutenant, no dependent child,
No companion… you were abandoned.
But Captain, you commanded every trick that there was.
Stirred part of her heart. Left it slick with your blood.
Fixed it with love, and you would do the same for us,
So here we are, and here we’ll still be when you wake up.

We came back for you!
The cargo bay of our spaceship vacant of all hard cases!
We came back for you!
All our fam on every world, all we got is our word.
We came back for you!
Sorry you were waiting on us; so glad you weren’t taken from us!
We came back for you!
Flying chrome, the sky is home - you don’t have to die alone.