Merry Christmas! Some news....

I meant to post this earlier, but I discounted the prices on all three MP3-CDs for the holiday season. So if you need a last minute gift, consider some Stinging Rain MP3s. (Of course, you can get us on iTunes also, but not discounted....)

We continue to keep friend of the band, David Bailey, in our prayers. David survived brain cancer surgery again, and is recovering. Keep up with the news about David here.

Lastly, I signed the band up for a page on amaze.fm & put a few tunes out there, so maybe we'll get some new fans.

Merry Christmas & Happy 2009 from the band!

Another Windfall Bonanza

Boy, oh boy... the hits just keep on coming, baby. April 2, 2008 marked the milestone of getting all 3 albums online. Shadows was posted early that morning and I did some work on the descriptions for the Stinging Rain group page. Then I sent out an email to about 130 folks who, as I put it, "who might care to learn that Stinging Rain's full catalog is now available for digital download via MP3."

Then yesterday I unearthed a treasure which had been sitting in a file cabinet for 14 years and through 5 moves. I had known there were a few old show posters somewhere along with Stinging Rain newsletters, mailers, etc. from "back in the day." But I had no idea how many. I found 2 manila folders stuffed inside a hanging folder for an alternative country rock band for which I used to run sound — the Blackwells* — in the mid-90s. This is way cool! There are clipped reviews, calendars with pay-dates, song lists from gigs (I'd clean forgotten that we used to cover "Nothing Is Alone" by Toad the Wet Sprocket) and notes I'd made which range from the enlightening to the humorous. For example, a note I'd scribbled on the back of a postcard states bluntly "Sent a tape to this a__hole".

In fact, the importance of this discovery could rival the sending of the aforementioned Brown Suitcase emails. I say this with great trembling, naturally.

But check it out. Here's a blurb written circa 1987 for the GCC Collegian by none other than Bill Deasy.

My favorite find has got to be the gig calendars. The hardest thing for me to remember is when things happened. Now I can meticulously put the pieces of the "what happened puzzle" together and possibly turn the collage into some type of historical account.

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* - There are/were at least three groups named the Blackwells, but I'm talking about the Pittsburgh-based Blackwells. Their lead singer, Marc Nelson, is in another band now and you can hear one of their old songs, "Ashtray", if you visit their myspace page.

The Dream is now available on iTunes

Click the image to go to iTunes page for the dream. I am sure that at some point this will get old and I will no longer be impressed by seeing our tunes available for download. And without promotion it's not like anything will be "flying off the shelves."

Of course, those quote marks show the beauty of it. There are no shelves, dude. There's no big decision about whether to add anything to inventory or give a no-name band a break. There's just a bunch of servers and surfers. And inventory will never, ever run out or get stale. That means that hey, given enough time and a modicum of interest we might yet sell a million downloads. Who knows?

And thanks again to Derek Sivers for making CD Baby, his dream, a reality. Thou art the man.

Man.

News, Digital Update & Other Coolness

I forgot to mention it, but I ended up figuring out how to burn an exact duplicate of Shadows of Reality with CDA tracks and everything, so I was able to send that in without sacrificing my final copy. It's being processed currently. The Dream is in the queue at iTunes and although it's not available yet, I expect it to be available there any day.

Here's a shot of the boys in action at Bethany. Circa 19??


My Face of Stephen google searches are starting to turn up more relevant stuff, e.g., we're on the PayPlay site now. I did a few promotional forum posts and they're starting to show up too, so good. So we're slowly pushing down some of the static in the searches. I also added the CD Baby pages to technorati so I can track links. When I finally get all 25 titles -- MWA-HA-HA -- available via iTunes I'm going to do a big "spam" email to a whole pile of fans and aquaintances, just to get the word out.

And here's a last but not least a bit of coolness supremo: I set up a page on Purevolume.com! It's kind of a respectable version of myspace for bands, indie mostly. I put a non-downloadable sample MP3 from each CD and a bunch of photos on there as well. We'll see what happens. So far I'm only out of pocket on this for a net of $140.00 and way too many hours, but I'm having fun.

Search Engine Static

It's fun to guess how our band experience would have been different if it had somehow miraculously occurred 10 years later in the midst of the Internet Age. But ultimately, all such futuristic speculations are a fantastic waste of time, as proved years ago by the Jetsons.


Furthermore, this is why these goofballs writing books about "robot love" should be ashamed of themselves. Well, among other more obvious reasons.

And we should never forget our oft-repeated maxim, "A second can change time."

As it stands, I've been googling the terms "Stinging Rain" for years, finding meaningful hits here and there, cutting out references to the lyrics to "Bullet the Blue Sky" and the 6th track on Capercaillie's self-titled album. I remember one listing on eBay cracked me up -- someone was trying to push a CD of "the dream" for $150.00. Needless to say that auction ended with no bidders. The Gathering Field page was a fun hit when I found it by including the phrase "Grove City" in quotes. Hitting the page of this compilation, "In the land of Milk & Cookies", brought back some scary memories. A few good ones, too, I'll admit.

Then along comes Misery Signals and their song "The Stinging Rain". If your curious, watch a few seconds of this.



Sorry -- there was really no easy way to break it to you. If you want to read the full lyrics to this screamo anthem, go here. I'll include a pertinent sample:

Gentle were the words that set her free
She became the stinging rain
She became the hurricane
No love lost
Purge you animose
That serpent coiled within my stomach
Temperance fell from her without weight
Gone with the storm
We are not meant to contain the sadness of this world
I whispered in her ear and drew her close....

Yeahhhh.... OK. Truth be told, it actually hurts my voice far more than my ears. This kind of material is also referred to as "Math Rock". But I wouldn't recommend playing this for your preschooler to improve his/her future test scores.

And just in case some Misery Signals fans find their way over here to gripe: the suicide hotline number is 800-784-2433.

Found the ol' Wiki site

One semi-bored night about a year and a half ago, I started a Stinging Rain Wiki, and I just found it again today. Fun stuff. There is a great page on this guy. I also threw the images up on the site for fun.

At some point I'll put some more scans up, if I ever get around to scanning all the great pics that are... well, they're somewhere, let's put it that way.