The Nutcracker Buck Sessions

Though I had vowed to take the blog off-line after it was done, obviously that hasn’t happened.  I found I would have to do it page-by-page, post-by-post, and I didn’t have the energy for that.  And the appeal to aesthetics I cited as my rationale for taking it down isn’t that strong of a principle, I’ve discovered.  So I’ll leave it up until I forget to pay the bill, or until I take it down.

Meanwhile, I’m putting this page up to orient anybody who stumbles across the site.  “Buck’s Home Page” and “The Nutcracker’s Edict” give the overall story of the blog, which otherwise consists of 52 (more or less) entries over the course of about a year–one song and video per week, all but about four of the songs being originals.

Here is a sampling of the highlights:

Week 43:  “What I Did Instead” — By consensus, this one seems to be people’s favorite song.  It probably is the song that would be least out of place on the radio if performed by a real singer.

Week 46:  “The Last Buffalo” — A story song that came  out pretty well.

Week 4:  “In Our Neighborhood” — My favorite one, though hardly anybody else seemed to like it.  The recording quality’s not so great.  I like the video.

Week 33:  “Lego Town” — I’m proud of the chord progressions in the bridges.  It’s a slight song but put together pretty well.  On the rare occasions that I perform publicly, this is usually the one I do.

Week 26:  “Big Highway”— Almost certainly the worst-sounding song of the whole series–badly played, badly recorded–but the write-up is the one that best sums up what I was trying to talk about in the whole blog.

Week 13:  “Miracle on the Hudson” — This one still gets traffic from being linked on my friend Michelle Richmond’s San Francisco Chronicle blog.  It’s an acknowledged homage (i.e., ripoff) of “Wreck of the Old 97.”

In Memoriam:  Neil MacCormick — My remembrance of my father-in-law.  There was a song and video but I took it down when somebody made a nasty comment about it.

That’s probably enough.  If you want to just see the videos, it’s probably easier to go to the YouTube channel where they are all posted under RodeoToad1.  There are also some Star Wars videos there my son made, and also a video my daughter and I made about Carly and Baby Bear going camping and scaring away all the animals.  You can also see a clip of that opera I was going on and on about, the one Mel and I wrote (Sylvan Beach), which was performed at the University of Louisiana at the end of March.