Oh yes, you read that right, TWO delicious free albums - volumes one and two in the 'Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline' series.

Part 1 can be had from Last.fm by clicking here

And for Part 2, you have to go to my Reverb Nation Page - and sign up for the mailing list there, then you can download all of that one too!

Anyway, that's about two hours of lovely tunes for you!

Why am I giving them away? Have I suddenly decided that paying for music is a bad idea? Is it that I think they're too…

I've just set up a Twitter account purely to post links to new music, much of it here on last.fm.

It's called 'To The Left Of The Mainstream' and can be found at www.twitter.com/ttlotm

If you're on Twitter, please click the 'follow' button to keep track of the posts. If you're not, there's an RSS feed on the page that you can add to google reader, safari, netnewswire or whatever…

The stylistic remit is pretty broad, in that it's anything I really like (do check out my listening here to see if you're likely to find anything of interest in…

I've had a Youtube uploading frenzy in the last couple of days - here they are -

This one is a Pat Benatar song, with a twist. :o)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v8zq6HRRhQ

This one is a track that's featured on the Steve Lawson and Lobelia Live in Nebraska EP, though this was recorded at a house concert in California - it's called I'm Lost -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvZo3TU7WZI

And this one is a The Police Song…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L1HdyKqvtM

Enjoy, and check out the Steve Lawson and Lobelia pages for more on what we do solo…

And if you like the vids, please rate or favourite them…

So, beginning of a new year, time for everyone to do their end of 2007 best music lists… I'm just going to offer the stuff I got off eMusic, and a few of them were released in 2006 even though I didn't get them til 2007 - with the way digital releases go, things released on CD one year might not end up being available for download until early in the next year anyway, so there's a little ambiguity about what a 'release date' is these days… (the album titles below link to the emusic pages, and the artist names…

Well, a year and a half on from my 'two hundreds club' post, we're onto the three hundreds club…

As a comparison, here's the previous list…

Jonatha Brooke - 312
Michael Manring - 261
Kris Delmhorst - 243
Julie Lee - 206
Bill Frisell - 205
Eric Roche - 205
Rise Kagona - 202

That was from Oct 2005.

Here's the current list of artists with over 300 plays -

Jonatha Brooke - 497
Bruce Cockburn - 469
Lobelia - 439
Steve Lawson - 430
Bill Frisell - 384
Michael Manring - 380
Kris Delmhorst - 368
Prefab Sprout -346…

Last wednesday was the preview of my show for Edinburgh, a duet with Julie McKee called 'The New Standard' - a bass and voice duo playing really unlikely cover versions for a mellow jazzy duo; songs by Slipknot, Soundgarden, The Cure, Green Day, Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush, Gorillaz, John Martyn, The Buggles…

We're on at The Lot, on the GrassMarket, from the 6th-12th August (but not the 7th), at 11pm, and we've got a warmup gig in Glasgow on 3rd, at Brel Bar on Ashton Lane.

Have a look at our…

Got a really fun tour coming up at the end of this month, under the banner of the 'Fret Phobia tour', it's me ( Steve Lawson ) with fretless guitarist, Ned Evett, and on the London date we're joined by BJ Cole. Here are the dates, if you fancy coming along!

20th - CB2, Cambridge 020 8361 1190
21st - Darbucka, London (with special guest BJ Cole) Tix £7/£5 concs.
22nd - Escobar, Wakefield.
23rd - Oceans Eleven, Leeds. 07906 140 294
24th - 2pm Riffs Guitar School, Stockport 0161 484 5208
24th - 8pm Iguana Bar, Manchester…

My new album, (me = Steve Lawson ) Behind Every Word will be released on June 20th, order now and get a free download album!

Yup, finally, the release date is set at June 20th, but my new album, Behind Every Word is available to order now! Yay!

And what's more, if you do order it now, you'll get a second album to download for free. Lessons Learned From The Fairly Aged Felines (Lessons Learned Pt III) is the third part of the 'lessons learned' series, each of which appear as accompanying albums to my solo releases. Whenever I'm recording…

Just a quick note to explain why I'm spending so much time listening to myself of late (for those that have come to this late, Steve Lawson is SoloBassSteve is me.)

I'm just finishing up a new album, called 'Behind Every Word', should be out mid-June (in time for a tour with Ned Evett at the end of the month). Part of the process of deciding what works and what doesn't is listening to things on different machines, in different rooms and different situations, so the laptop becomes portable music source, and I rack up rather a lot of plays…

just found out about coverflow - an OSX-only application that allows you to rifle through all the albums you've got in itunes by their cover art, like you're flicking through a pile of records. It's a fantastically tactile experience, and brings back that old sensation of being inspired as to the contents of a particular album by the cover art.

It automatically detects a lot of the album artwork via a range of searches, and for those that it doesn't automatically connect to there's a really easy link to a google image search on the album title and artist name…