Here’s the long overdue author’s commentary on “Debaser” — my personal favorite of the Duty Calls shorts! First up, the cover image. Since the story includes a wiki known as Cyclo, I mocked up a relatively faithful version of a mobile Wikipedia page. Liked it so much I dropped plans to have a designer punch…
Author: LBDG
Hunter Bruce James: Secrets & Graves
Wait ’til you hear his crime album tentatively/hopefully coming next… That’s how I closed my unsolicited, unofficial liner notes to Hunter’s debut album Stages & Phases a scant three months ago. I should’ve said wait until I hear his crime album. Of course I knew he had enough songs for another. Before the end of…
A Kinder, Gentler Jamaica
Spotify’s “Release Radar” alerted me to a new song by Benji Hughes, but when I checked the playlist I was confused to find an old song with rad new artwork and an expanded title. “Jamaica” appeared on the 2014 album XXOXOXX, later retitled Another Extreme when re-released to streaming in 2020. I’ve always imagined it…
Comps, or Ready to Not Gone Die at 27
Spotify for Authors has a neat insights section that tells you what other authors listeners of your audiobook also played. The first report for Local Boy Done Gone had these: Ernest Cline makes sense. Ready Player One has been a comp of Timely Persuasion for decades with the heavily referential pop culture similarities, so it’s…
Audio Book Done Good (ABDG)
On July 30th, 2019 I emailed Brian Ibbott from Coverville and asked if he’d narrate the Timely Persuasion audiobook. Who better to read a geeky, pop-culture laden tale where cover songs play a key role? Less than 24 hours later he said yes. Just shy of seven years, one pandemic, 314 more episodes of Coverville,…
Hunter Bruce James: Stages & Phases
I first met Hunter James over a decade ago at Aviary in Austin—a wonderfully weird wine bar / home decor store hybrid we both frequented most Fridays. Started talking about music when my wife’s revolving collection of Hurray for the Riff Raff t-shirts signaled we had overlapping tastes. At some point I learned of his…
One or Ten For Me and One For You: 8 More Shows with The Pink Stones at SXSW 2026
They said it was a record that would never be broken: One band, eight sets, five days of SXSW. Never say never—especially when it comes to a music based challenge involving your favorite active live touring band (I think). I was on a mission to make up for my shoddy attendance last year when Benji…
Donuts & Deadbolts Commentary
Remedied being way behind on serializing Duty Calls stories by releasing two together as “Donuts & Deadbolts” — the first in almost 6 years! Now I’m remedying being behind on commentary posts too… Why a double feature aside from playing catch-up? The donut story was too short to charge a buck for, and linked enough…
2025 DFRAAs (best music of the year)
And the winners of JLC’s 2025 Dangerous Folk Rock Appeal Awards are… ALBUMS 1. Stick— Jim BobEasily my favorite solo album by the former Carter USM frontman since 2007’s A Humpty Dumpty Thing (and his most fun record since In A Big Flash Car on a Saturday Night), Stick harkens back to the turn of…
Thank The Lord… it’s The Pink Stones Musical
My brain went and did that dancing about architecture thing again, this time envisioning one of my favorite albums of 2025 as a musical by stringing the songs together into a narrative. Unlike L Extreme, here the idea was to fill in the spaces between the songs with segues to flesh out a story. The…