DAN JACOB WALLACE

The official release date for my new album, DEN OF MANIACS, has been confirmed as March 23, 2010. In the meanwhile, here are two free mp3s and the album cover (left-click to listen, right-click to save): Look at Me (link no longer available) (in which I improvise a lot of electric guitar solos as a means of [...]

The other day I was listening to an online lecture in which the following scenerio occurred (I’m paraphrasing in spots, but the salients remain intact): British Lecturer: Suppose a student comes in late to class the fifth day in a row and I say to her, “Early again are we?” What have I really said? Class of [...]

The documentary American Artifact: Rise of American Rock Poster Art, which features two of my songs on its soundtrack, will be making its Chicago premiere this month at the Gene Siskel Film Center, running January 29th through February 4th. The Saturday, January 30th, 8:00 p.m. showing will be followed by a Q&A Panel with director Merle Becker and poster artists Jay Ryan, Mat Daly, [...]

I have not read Nathan Rabin’s new memoir The Big Rewind, but I did read and enjoy his recent A.V. Club blog post about his experience as a first-time author. It deals not with getting published or creating the book itself, but with the process of putting out his book. The article’s intended audience are those first-time [...]

One of my favorite discoveries in recent years is composer Gloria Coates. I first heard of her via an interview she gave on the Naxos American Classics podcast in promotion of a recently released recording of her 15th Symphony (along with two other works) by Naxos. I was taken not only with what she said [...]

From time to time I find myself in a conversation with a musician who says something to the effect of, “I’m not interested in learning music theory because it would ruin my music; I believe that music should just come from the soul.” This idea is not an invalid one per se (provided we take [...]

I’m not really interested in the question, “What is jazz?”, but I do find it funny that there are things called  ”jazz purists,” such as the one featured in this guardian.co.uk blog post. I don’t understand the idea of being a purist about anything (which is part of why I don’t care for the need to commit [...]

We have a tendency to categorize and, in doing so, create hierarchies. This tendency leads to systems that confer a status of seemingly tangible reality to our ideas about the world, thereby confirming the hierarchy. For example, if we are given a collection of 20 randomly chosen rocks and asked to put them in some [...]