bon jovi central park tickets

Seems the Bon Jovi Central Park show is a pretty hot ticket.

Just wanted to let you know that while we are definitely music website magnates, we don’t have any juice to get Bon Jovi Central Park tickets.

Sorry, but yer on yer own.

the world forgot… nathan moomaw

In the early oughts (who doesn’t love saying “oughts?”), I got heavily into Willy Porter. I saw him as much as I could and I hunted down about 25 live shows of his from 1990 – 1998, back when he had an ass-kicking funk ‘n’ roll jam band featuring Biff Blumfumgagne on violin.

Porter has since embraced his singer/songwriter guitar playing roots and has slowed it down a bit. (In fact, since he’s had children, I think he’s been working on a children’s CD… Incidentally, did Sinatra ever do a children’s album when he had Nancy?)

Here he is performing probably his best known song (for good reason), “Moonbeam”…

Anyway, though I continued down different musical directions, the combination supremely talented acoustic guitar player/great stage presence vocalists have always caught my attention.

Which brings me to Nathan Moomaw. I was spending some time over at theworldforgot.com which is a blog written by Billy (unless you’d like to refer to him as Liam). His blog is purely about music, and I often find some great recommendations there.

Last Friday, Billy wrote about Nathan Moomaw, a psychedelic, song-writing guitarist from the Bay Area. Moomaw recently released a CD called “26.” The concept behind the album is that he wrote a song during every month of this 26th year on earth, and then released all 12 songs on this album.

The songs are all titled by month and each one has the distinct sound you would hope for and expect.

Here’s Moomaw performing “September” with a really tiny guitar.

And this is the very Howie Day-like performance of “October.”

Also, here’s “January” and “April,” courtesy of theworldforgot. If you have time, check out this album. I’d also recommend adding theworldforgot.com to your reading list.

Allow me to introduce ourselves…

This blog’s been chugging along for over two months now, and I’m constantly surprised by how much fun it is to do and how much feedback I’ve been getting from you (well, maybe not you, but you know who you are).

One of the questions I get is who’s all behind this site.

There are three people behind NewTunes right now, me (Jon Friesch), Joe Kletzel (JFK… The President) and Joe Amstadt (nothing parenthetical to add).

After spending the summers of ‘88 and ‘89 in San Francisco, I moved there full-time in 1993. One of the best parts about San Francisco was the music scene. The Greek Theater in Berkeley, the Fillmore and the Warfield are all classic and excellent places to see a concert, and I definitely went to my share of them – Thomas Dolby, Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, Pete Townshend, David Byrne, Jerry Garcia, Jimmy Cliff, Robyn Hitchcock to name a few.

I worked for PC World magazine for four years, and I met my wife there. We moved to Madison, WI in 1997, and I went to work for the two newspapers and madison.com. I built the Marketing Department there and assembled quite a team – including Matt Everson, who designed our NewTunes logo and S.J. Barlament, who’s writing the copy for our site.

Last year, I moved on to Broadjam.com and spent six very important months there. Working at Broadjam was like going to graduate school. I learned an amazing amount in a very short time. This past March, the NewTunes opportunity came up, and here I am.

JFK, the President, has been part of NewTunes for over a year and has the distinction of having resided in every city in the continental United States (well, it seemed like every city when he was listing them off to us, but I have to admit I stopped listening after a while). He oversees everything that goes on and handles all of our operations and raised all of the money that we’re using to build this site.

JFK is one of the best people for whom I’ve ever worked. He has absolute trust in Joe and I and is in a perpetual good mood. On my way out last night, he thanked me for all of my hard work that day. This is not at all unusual for him to do, and he sincerely means and appreciates it (which is why I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t really work all THAT hard). JFK’s as honest as one can be and really sets the tone for how we want to interact with our customer base.

Joe Amstadt (the one who requires no parentheticals) is our developer and programmer. He’s the man behind our infrastructure, our technologies and our site. We’re working with a partner on the development of our website, and Joe is making that all possible.

Joe seems to be an expert in nearly everything he touches. He’s got a great eye for site usability and has done things with our infrastructure that have impressed both JFK and myself – although it probably all seemed second nature to him. My favorite part about Joe, aside from his concerns about absolutely everything, is his mutant ability to spot someone who is good at what they do. This is especially helpful as we assess technical people.

All three of us have profiles on LinkedIn (me, JFK, Joe), so if you’d like to see more, please check those out.

That’s the core team behind assembling the puzzle that is the NewTunes website. We do have some partners, as well, without whom this would not be possible. We’ll reveal them in due time.

So, that’s who we are… who are you? I invite you to introduce yourself via the comment area, or by email – jon@newtunes.com, to reach me.