Reunions, and Album download!! UPDATE!

It has begun.

After a most heinous 4-hour delay at the Peoria, Illinois Airport, the Stones have--at long last--arrived in the glorious warmth of Arizona.

Mat, Jon T. and I officially commenced the celebrations by eating good food, playing some tunes, and doing some archive work--all over the course of 2 hours.

Mat produced a virtually pristine CD copy of our final album, gloriously titled "Album" which was produced in 1997. We ripped the album at the highest mp3 quality possible and are making it available, for the first time ever, for mass distribution.


I have done some work here already discussing Album as a project, but what is important for this official "release" post is this:

Album consists of three kinds of tunes: favorites that we wanted to make available on CD, remakes of favorites that we wanted to make better, and four new songs.

Much more will be said about some of these tunes. But for now, as a gift to you, faithful reader, on this the first day of Thanksgiving-palooza, we present Only Anything's final "classic" release: Album.

Click the link in the left sidebar for all 13 tracks, plus a 14th, unlisted, live, bonus track!

Also, the photos (link in the right sidebar) have been updated and now appear in chronological order!

Upcoming Jamboree

In response to the last post: OK Jon, so the song is "folksy", let's not go throwing around the term country or our records are likely to get mis-categorized in the record shops. Every good hard hitting band does well to go off on a little acoustic tangent now and then. That's the reason why I have a mandolin in the closet and I'm dusting it off just for your song. So in case everyone is in high anticipation of hearing what Jon Stone sounds like singing country I'll dispell that notion and try to replace it with the slant of Only Anything getting down to some folksy roots, and it sounds like we'll be doing a little blues too.

Now to fill in a few details:
The other musicians joining the jam for this occasion may or may not include:
Jeff Scott (drums), Trevor Thompson (guitar), Dave Bertoglio (harmonica, guitar?), Jesse Henderson (guitar), and maybe some other suprise guests! assuming that they can be persuaded out of their turkey induced festivities.
I, having recently taken up drums myself, will be dabbling in that area but primarily will play my usuals: guitar and bass.

In tradition of old times, I will be creating my version of sheet music for my new songs which means an assortment of chord symbols, standard music notation, AABA type song structure diagrams and other notes usually intended to help the band learn my songs. I'll post them up here sometime this weekend for a sneak peak at what's to come.

Jon Thwaits

The upcoming jam...

We've been thinking about it for a month or two and have been stewing a few old ideas and sauteing a few new ones.

Our weekend meet-up is just a few weeks away and I've been awash with the remembrances of the struggle of the creative process. I have these two songs that I'm working on, one old, one new, as we had arranged. The old one is kind of typical, nothing special--it kind of has a Cure-ish twinge. I'm struggling with the melody and the lyric, so Jon's going to give it a spin. The collaboration potential is exciting for me.

It's the second one that's got me kind of perplexed. Blooming from a three-part harmony intro bit, drenched in reverb and Fleet-Foxy in-my-mind, when I got to the business of actually writing the song, I got thinking about road songs...

For some reason, road tunes have always really resonated with me, starting with James Taylor. "Sweet Baby James" is a favorite and more recently I've really loved this version of his tune "Traveling Star." A few other tunes come to mind: "Golden" by My Morning Jacket and John Mayer's "Stop this Train" topped my list of most-listened-tos last year.

Anyway, I had all that road-song stuff floating around and that with my recent foray into the blue, bluegrass, I wrote a bunch of roadie-sounding lyrics to the tune I'd been thinking about. Here's the thing, though: when I put them to music, what came out didn't really sound "Only Anything"--it didn't sound bluegrassy either. Instead, it sounded... um, (brace yourself, fans) like a country song.

I've been feeling pretty self-conscious about it. Jon T.'s new tunes sound so classic and classy... so totally OA.

On, the other hand, I am confident that with a band behind it, my tune might lose its country vibe and evolve to something a bit more... or rather, a bit less Kenny Chesney.