Greetings! All of us here at Milton Music, home of Smart Barker, wish you a very happy 2023. Things have been a bit quiet here at this site, but plenty of music is in the works.
You can expect a new Smart Barker album this year. The recording is underway, with much of the basic tracking already completed. Oh, Let Us Dream A Trade is our fifth album and features new songs as well as a couple of older tracks that never got the full album treatment. You will be pleased to know that “Nude For Satan” is one of them. Mark and I are even thinking of it as possibly a “double album,” like Double Platinum or the Star Wars soundtrack.
We are pleased with the reception of All The Rivers In Hades. Some songs from it, particularly “Boomers,” “World Weary,” and “We Are Not Alone,” got algorithmed onto some Spotify playlists that resulted in some impressive streaming numbers (at least for us). “Boomers” is now the most streamed song of our career. There was also a fair amount of streaming on Apple Music. I don’t have figures for any of the other services. We still have actual CDs if anyone is interested. I’ll mail them to you for the price of postage—contact me.
I’ve got a new DR song ready—a silly cover of the very silly “I Like It,” by Gerry & The Pacemakers. It’ll be up on Soundcloud at some point. But I’ve also got a new side project to announce: it’s a musical collective called The Own Devices. It’s basically a cover band for streaming. It’s mostly me but features Mark and Tommy from Smart Barker along with other great musicians, some from such faraway places as Indonesia, Argentina, and Italy.
Also, some of you know that I have relocated to San Diego, while Mark and frequent collaborators Pat Manley and Stephanie Davis continue to reside in the Philadelphia region. (Our drummer, Tommy, seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once.) Considering that we made our latest record during lockdown, with the musicians recording their parts in isolation, we see no reason why we cannot continue making records with me on the West Coast. We gave up on begging people to come to live shows a long time ago.
Now, however, we will beg people to support the music on my Patreon page. Please consider donating at least as much as you would pay to see us play in some crappy bar in Philadelphia at midnight on a Wednesday. I promise to work hard to deliver some good stuff and will try to think of even more benefits for supporters, backers, patrons, benefactors.
So, again, we do wish you the very best for 2023. And we thank any and every one of you who pays even the slightest bit of attention to what we do. Rock on!
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