My first real show at a club in Cambridge, MA is coming up soon and I really hope to see you there! I’m going to be recording the whole thing, so please help me fill this place and leave a good impression on the city I now call home.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to UStream this one or not, so your only chance to come check it out will be at the show itself. If you’re within driving distance of Boston, please come out and have some fun with me!

Here are the details:

• All-Asia Bar and Grill
  Cambridge, MA
  www.allasiabar.com
• Thursday, June 11 @ 7pm
• Cost: $6

More details at eventful.com Hope to see you there!

So last night I had a dream that I won a black Chevy Silverado pickup truck. Brand new, too. In fact, my brother won one as well… but he got a diesel model and mine was a gas model. I was ticked off about all this, complaining to the contest people that my brother doesn’t even know what biodiesel is, let alone has any intention of making it and using it.

On top of all that, the badges on the truck (you know, the little Chevy logo and the nameplate and all that) kept falling off, like they were held on by Elmer’s glue or something. The rest of the truck was rock solid (even though it’s a Chevy), but I was fairly pissed off about the cheap badges.

I guess the moral of this story is that no matter how bad the pollen gets, taking antihistamines before bed is a really bad idea.

Once upon a time I tried to book a full-on tour of house concerts, not realizing that two evil monsters stood in my way: The monster that spread most of my fans out all over the globe and the monster that jacked up gas prices over $3 a gallon. This summer I’d like to try something a little less ambitious but a lot more plausible.

If you’ve got a big living room and/or a backyard that you’d love to turn into a concert hall for an afternoon/evening, I’m interested in playing there. Right now this will have to be limited to my local area- let’s say within 100 miles of Boston -but we’ll see how things progress from there.

If you’re interested, please take a look at www.matthewebel.com/houseconcert/ and get in touch with me there!

I love backpacking. There’s something about immersing yourself in the wilderness with only a few lightweight tools that teaches you how well you could survive losing your house. Camping is part recreation, part training exercise for that day when our power grid totally collapses or China invades and we have to live like Montana separatists for a while. If you’ve had a little practice, you are far better equipped to survive when those skills are truly necessary.

Now apply that obvious metaphor to our economic situation. Being laid off is seen as a serious emergency to many families right now, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me. But how would YOU fare?
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I was a little disturbed this morning to see this pop up on Yahoo Answers. Someone, apparently, was looking for free downloads of one of my members-only tunes over at Matthew Ebel dot net. Granted, people have been stealing music since the invention of cassette tapes, but asking about it on Yahoo Answers? Really? I’m almost insulted. Shouldn’t you be trolling Pirate Bay forums or some other 7334 haxx0r chan board out there or something?

Unlike the RIAA, I’m going to assume that this question was prompted not by a desire to steal from me (I’m not kidding, folks, some months it’s literally a 99-cent difference between paying bills on time or late). Since Night Train is a Members-Only song that has now expired, there really is no way to legitimately buy it at this point. As a music fan myself, I’ve been stymied by this phenomenon quite frequently when looking for tracks on iTunes or Amazon.

I’m working on a solution right now.

If you’re an All-Access or VIP member over at Matthew Ebel dot net, please do me a favor and read up on the proposal there. It’s your site as much as it is mine, so please give me your feedback over on The Blog.

Hopefully I’ll be able to provide legal options for people soon, preferably without sacrificing the cool exclusives people have enjoyed for the past 6 months.

Fans of Team Fortress 2 from Valve Software now have a chance to win a full year of the All-Access Pass from Matthew Ebel dot net (a $99 value) and show off their movie-making skills.

All you have to do is make an in-game music video (aka Machinema) using “I Blame The Spy” and you could win a full year of free music from Matthew Ebel dot net!

Full contest details available at www.matthewebel.net