The Beatles were for sale - I give it away!

It's one kind of shock to find you've become a fixture on Russian file-sharing sites; it's another to find other people making money off a freebie CD-R you used to give away at live shows in Baltimore.

So, in the interest of undercutting these plunderous leeches, I've cast dignity & profits to the wind and posted I Used to Write Jingles For a Living in full, free to download, over at Last.FM - go get 'em, tiger.

Und für die Wahrheit verraten, yes I did actually used to write jingles for a living. For proof, a few melodic husks peeled off my soul are still kicking around the Discovery Channel, if my royalty statements are to be trusted. Then I was unceremoniously & acrimoniously shunted out of the company the last day before the company's winter break - thus depriving me of the Christmas party, a week's paid holiday, and any chance of getting a job until well after the post-holiday economic lull. Not that I was terribly upset: I regarded my superiors with as much contempt as they regarded me; I was the low man on the totem pole, which meant I was as much a janitor as an engineer; and there was nothing creative about being A Creative, since the instructions often boiled down to, "Just make it sound like that Coldplay song."

So the second Friday of December, 2003, I got fired. Following a celebratory screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, I headed home, dusted off my 4-track, and spent the weekend cranking out the uneven scrap heap of sonic whimsy that became IUTWJFAL. I later gave it away as a bonus disc to anyone who purchased my band's then-new album at shows up & down the East Coast.

So how exactly did it end up online in the former Eastern Bloc? Fuck knows.