A founder of the country band Sugarland is suing the two current members of the popular group for $1.5 million.

According to a lawsuit filed late last month in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, Kristen Hall was to get a cut of the group’s profits even after she left in 2005 for a solo career. The lawsuit says Hall, who founded the band in 2002, has an agreement with Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush to equally share profits and losses.

Hall says in the lawsuit that she has been excluded from the group’s profits since she left.

this somehow seems un-kristen-like to me, but i suppose she’s entitled to the money if they promised it to her. does this mean that she should continue to share in profits only from work when she was with the band, or that she should get a share of the profit for work that sugarland did after she left? i can’t say that it makes sense to get money for work you haven’t performed, so to speak, but if that’s what they agreed on then give her the money.

i hope she has that in writing.

i blab on so much about kristen hall, and kiki and herb, that you might think that’s all i like. but you’d be wrong.

although i don’t listen to music nearly as much as i did when i was younger, and although most of the music i do listen to when i listen to it was made before 1990, and although i very infrequently attend live music concerts, and although when i do attend them the artists giving the concert most likely got their start long before said year 1990, i do have some current musical opinions.

even though the subjects of my current musical opinions aren’t themselves very current.

back in the day, when being emo meant you were merely just another black-clad youth, i listened to my cure, and my smiths, and my siouxsie, and my pil, and my depeche mode, and my sisters of mercy.

and i listened to my skinny puppy, and my ministry, and my severed heads, and my moev, and my nine inch nails, and my legendary pink dots.

and i listened to my r.e.m., and my fetchin bones, and my love tractor, and my dbs, and my connells, and my royal crescent mob, and my mojo nixon.

and i listened to my alphaville, and my the the, and my new order, and my cabaret voltaire.

and i listened to my nirvana, and my mudhoney, and my sonic youth, and my dinosaur jr., and my jane’s addiction.

and i listened to my kristen hall, and my michelle malone, and my ani difranco, and my utah phillips, and my michelle shocked.

and of all those, the one i still listen to, and listen to the most, and go see whenever she plays in new york city, is michelle shocked.

she, and her music, is a little bit of everything and constantly surprising and enjoyable. she’s a bit of a troubadour and a story-telling raconteur (like utah phillips), and a bit of a brilliant acoustic musician (like ani difranco), and a bit of an incredible lyricist (like kristen hall), and a bit of a political animal (like michael stipe).

except that it’s all in one package. and she’s creative (each of her albums is completely different), uncompromising (she gave her label the stiff middle finger better than nearly anyone else ever has), and entertaining (self-effacing, spontaneous, and explosive).

not familiar with michelle shocked? if you like acoustic, start with texas campfire tapes; if you like folk, start with arkansas traveler; if you like protest rock, start with short sharp shocked.

but you’ll end up listening to all of them anyway, so start wherever you damn well please, or with whatever is accessible or handy.

I’m having one of those now.

i’ve been blogging (blathering, really) for years about how much i love kristin hall. about how kristin hall is my favorite artist. about how i want “peaches” by kristin hall to be played at my funeral. about how my favorite two cds by any artist of all time are “fact and fiction” and “be careful what you wish for”. and about how high my gooogle ranking was for kristin hall related searches.

blah, blah, blah.

and now i realize that i have been spelling her name wrong. for at least two years on my site.

it’s kristen hall, idiot.

i really don’t undertand how i did this. i’m a fanatically accurate speller, especially of names. i used to be rain man with names when i was a yearbook adviser. I could blow students away with my memory of who was carrie versus cari versus kerry versus cary. i could spell 12-letter polish names with ease.

it’s no wonder “kristin hall” got me so many google hits. everyone else was spelling her name correctly, and i was getting the spelling-challenged crowd to visit. and the worst part is how many times i linked to the kristen hall website and never noticed the “e” versus the “i”.

not to mention how many times i’ve looked at cd covers.

i’m sorry to have propagated this misspelling.

i’m an idiot.

hopefully this posting will somewhat mitigate my past misdeeds. and i’ve edited all the pages (and the site category) to correct the spelling.

it may seem i’m making a mountain out of a molehill. but writing this is a process–it’s a reminder to myself to be more humble about my abilities.

and to not take anything for granted.

it’s about damn time. enough of this number two and number three nonsense.

in an effort to figure out google and how it works, i signed up for google sitemaps. you can then get a plethora of info about how google sees your site, and all that.

for instance, i learned that the number one topic i have blogged about is kristin hall. if i just turned this site into a series of blogs about kristen hall, i might get some action around here. and certainly she is an interesting topic.

but i wouldn’t subject her to the vagaries of my attention. she deserves better.

the second hottest topic? peeps pie. come on people. that wasn’t even a blog. it was just a picture, with no words involved.

of course, as i’ve mentioned elsewhere, the number of people subscribing to my rss feed rises with each day that passes that i haven’t blogged. howard’s law, i suppose.

which tells me that you all just want me to shut up, or just talk about peeps pie or kristen hall incessantly.

i get the message.

and on a completely unrelated topic, i found my post containing my american idol prediction. back in early march, i predicted elliot would go all the way.

i think i’m sticking to that. before last night, i thought he was gone. but after last night, he’s around for one more week anyhow. he may be a dark horse, behind chris and taylor, but i think he’s the only performer left who has actually improving somewhat, if only marginally. and i think people are going to notice that, and reward it.

update: all those google hits for kristin hall? i was spelling her name wrong. it’s kristen hall. here’s my mea culpa on the matter.

kristen hall, for new or casual readers of my blog, is my favorite musical artist ever, bar none, number one. you may never have heard of her before, but i’ve mentioned her here and here and here and here on my site. and you can go to her site to learn more about her.

it would be worth your time.

i know her from her many many solo albums, the best of which in my opinion is “be careful what you wish for”, although many hardcore fans think that “fact & fiction” is her best record, and i can’t say that they are wrong because it’s wonderful too.

and as i mentioned here, i want “peaches” played at my funeral, and it’s on “fact & fiction” so there you go.

i saw her once, at eddie’s attic in decatur, georgia, and that’s enough for me. i could have gotten sugarland tickets when they played new york last year, but i didn’t bother. they were third billing and you just knew that they would play fifteen minutes or three songs, whichever came first, or whatever, and then because i am cheap i would have felt obligated to stay to see toby keith or whoever the hell they were appearing with, and who wants to go through that?

i was very happy for kristen when she had such success in her group sugarland, because she really deserved it. she’s an amazingly talented songwriter, and should have gotten greater fame and financial rewards for it long before sugarland was formed. (i bought the sugarland cd on itunes. my first, last, and only itunes purchase, by the way. kristen, put your back catalog on itunes!)

i have a feeling that she’s not too interested in fame and fortune. and i also have a feeling that she did this sugarland thing just to cash in a bit, which she richly deserved to do, and now she has a little stash of cash to coast on and she can do whatever the hell she wants to do.

who wouldn’t like to be in that situation? i sure the hell would. but i’m too lazy to devote time and energy on the level that she has, and i don’t deserve it nearly as much as she does.

and she doesn’t owe anyone anything. if she wants to make more music, i’ll be first in line to buy it. i sure hope that she’ll make more music. there’s been a dearth of kristen hall product for long enough.

if she wants to sit on her ass and do absolutely nothing for the rest of her life, she can do that too, and i’ll be more than happy to listen to what she’s recorded up until now, ad infinitum.

and if she wants to be like j.d. salinger, and go off into the woods and write just for herself and for no one else, and we can all get her 1,776 songs tied up in ribbons after her death (that’s an emily dickinson reference, for those of you that are scratching your heads), that’s fine too.

did you know, by the way, that all of emily dickinson’s poems can be sung to the tune of “the yellow rose of texas”? or, for that matter, the theme from “gilligan’s island”?

but i digress.

go kristen. do whatever the hell you want to do. i’m behind you 100%, girl.

you’ll always have at least one fan who will never, never forget you.

and i am a bit of a homebody, and i like to go out and do things, but not every single night. i need time to decompress. i like sitting around the house and wasting time however i choose to waste it.

that said, the next few weeks are bringing some fun things. spaced out a bit, so i can’t complain.

we got tickets for various events over the past little bit, and those are coming up soon. the next, and coolest, thing is our daily show tickets on monday. that’s right–halloween. we emailed a few months ago and they give you free tickets on a random date. and the random date they gave us was halloween. i can hardly wait–i’ve never been to a taping of a tv show, so i’m sure it will be a blast. i hope the guest is good. on halloween (did i mention that our tickets are for halloween?) you’d think it would be someone good.

of course, i’ll report back.

we also got mid-december tickets for chita rivera’s new one-woman show. two nights after opening night. i mentioned this before, in the context of being a big queen and discussing the handbill snap guy, but i’ll mention it again. she a goddess. i hope the show does well–i can’t imagine that it won’t.

also, got early december tickets for the radio city christmas show. i got a half price ticket offer, or rather, a two-for-one offer, which if you have two people going is the same thing anyway, and so we got two tickets. off-peak show, in the orchestra center not too far back, ended up being $35 a ticket. not bad. it’s a cheese-fest, but you gotta love the rockettes and the dancing santas and the live nativity and all. and this year it’ll just be kirk and me, so we’ll get there way early to listen to the pipe organ guys, who i didn’t get to listen to last time because we got there late. before the show started, but too late for much pipe organ.

well spent $35, believe me.

and then on november 11 we see bauhaus, or the remnants of bauhaus, or whatever they will be twenty-five years after being the goth gods they were. peter murphy could be sixty-five and on a ventilator, and i’d still think he was the sexiest guy ever born. even more so than robert smith, and that’s saying something.

bauhaus is at the new nokia theater, where sugarland will be playing at the bottom of a three-band bill in december. this is important because kristen hall is in the band, and she is my favorite musician of all time. but i don’t want to pay big bucks to see three bands, two of which are some country music crap bands that i could care less about seeing. sugarland is country too, but this is kristen hall so i can make an exception. but i’m afraid that, since they are the opening band, i’ll pay all that money to see them sing three songs and then i’ll have to leave. which would irritate me.

we’ll see about sugarland.

and, in the goofy but i’m psyched about it department, stanley bing is doing an reading at work and i have a much-in-demand ticket to that. who is stanley bing? he writes the back-page column for fortune and is one of my favorite columnists. he is a medium-sized big cheese for some fortune 500 company as his day job, and stanley bing is his pseudonym. or his nom de plume, or whatever. his new book is titled “sun tzu was a sissy”, which is a great title for a book.

really looking forward to seeing stanley bing.

now, can you see why i love living in new york?

sure wouldn’t have these opportunities in south florida.

well, who knew.

not only was rasputina not bad, they were very very good. in fact, i’d go so far as to say they were pretty close to brilliant.

i used to care a lot, as faith no more once cynically said, about music. i was a nightclub dj and went out every single night for years on end. but music lately?

feh.

it’s a combination of things. i moved to new york, which at first for me was not conducive to listening to music. you are on the streets a lot, and this was the days before ipods and such. and i couldn’t listen to the radio at work, and by the time i got home i just wanted to zone out in front of the tv.

and i had stopped going out to clubs and concerts as much as i used to, because, frankly, when you are in your late thirties and going to the kind of places that i used to go to, i think you look kind of suspect. i know that when i was young, i used to look at older people and wonder why in the hell they were there. i was just about the oldest guy at rasputina last night, except for this really old guy next to me, and i was glad he was next to me, because hopefully if anyone was wondering like i used to wonder, they were wondering it about him and not me, and knew that we weren’t together, because i was seated with my legs wrapped around kirk and not him.

i. am. so. superficial. sometimes.

so are you.

so music became less and less a part of my life. and it’s a vicious cycle. you get out of touch and suddenly you don’t really have a reference point for where to jump back in. so you don’t.

and now years have gone by, and there’s little to no new music in my life. i do have an ipod shuffle, but it’s filled with songs i know already, and i am the poster child for the jack format. in extremis.

i’ll age myself saying this, but i still get excited when i hear, say, depeche mode on the random ipod selection. or the cure. or skinny puppy. how many times have i heard these songs? thousands, probably. literally.

i really need to move on musically. but i have no idea who to start loading onto my ipod. and it’s 99 cents a pop and all, and i am cheap. the last thing i bought from itunes was sugarland, and that was because kristen hall is in the band, and i am a huge fan of hers.

and of her music from 1990 or so.

i’d go back to see rasputina live again tonight, if i could. it’s two women with cellos and a guy on drums. the cellos are amped and run through various effects boxes, and they get the biggest sound you can imagine. full and deep and sounding for all the world like dinosaur jr. at times, but with the pixies-ish loud/soft thing using straight cello sounds as contrast. and the lead singer is bjork-ish, but better and more understandable, with a cute quirkiness as she throws out clever bon mots and non sequiturs between songs. and the drummer is amazing in that charlie watts way–he barely moves and you wonder where all the wonderful syncopation is coming from. there’s a great charisma between the three, and they are musically tight as all hell. you can tell they’ve been together for a long long time, or at least play like they have.

but they have the hope nicholls problem, which is that they are so good live but their brilliance doesn’t translate quite well enough in a recording studio. i saw so many of these bands at einstein-a-go-go. chickasaw mud puppies. fetchin bones. royal crescent mob. love tractor. the connells.

none of which are on my ipod. except for fetchin bones, because hope nicholls really was so amazing that i listen anyway, and substitute the song in my head, and close my eyes and see her pulling all that crap out of her amazing trunk o’stuff. most charismatic live performer i ever saw, she really was. and i’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of bands.

and so, while i had a great time last night, i still don’t know what to put into itunes.

recorded, say, in this century.

maybe i’ll start with rasputina anyway. and i’ll close my eyes, and substitute the song in my head.

my new ipod is playing favorites.

first off, well, second off, i now have an ipod. i realize that i am the last new yorker to have an ipod, but i’m now the proud owner of an ipod shuffle.

this in itself is not much of an accomplishment. ipod shuffles are the premium du jour for nearly every marketer in america. you get a shuffle for opening an checking account, or free with your fill-up at mobil, or i think with each happy meal at mcdonalds. if you’ve paid for one, you are a fool.

kirk got this shuffle as a prize for answering survey questions. hours worth of surveys (at least it takes him hours, because unlike everyone else who fills out online surveys, he actually reads the questions and thinks about his answers) over the course of years (maybe two years?) but it all paid off. i used to kid him about these surveys, but now i have an ipod so i can’t complain.

he also got a free 25-pound bag of a new cat food to evaluate, and i’m pretty convinced that it killed my precious 18-year old cat jeff. but that’s a blog for another day. perhaps tomorrow.

anyway, i now listen to my ipod every day on the way to work, on the cross-trainer machine at the gym, and on the way home. i stay alert, though, for the evildoers on the subway and all. i’m not totally oblivious. i’m just aware of my surroundings whilst also listening to “money back guarantee” by the five man electrical band.

which brings me to my point. i have tons of crap that was downloaded back when you didn’t get thrown in jail for downloading. all of which, of course, i bought on vinyl or cd or cassette at one point but am too lazy to rip into mp3s, so i just downloaded it instead because, of course, i haven’t heard a new song since the pixies broke up the first time.

and i’ve loaded all of these mp3s into itunes, and my shuffle can pick from them at random, and play them back at random. i have lots of great stuff, all my old favorites from my einstein-a-go-go nightclub dj-ing days. i have ministry. i have faith no more. i have book of love. i have skinny puppy. i have my beloved pixies. i have hundreds and hundreds of great songs.

including my one purchase from itunes, which was the entire sugarland album. i am a kristen hall fanatic, and am so happy that she is finally making buckets of money because she is the most talented performer on the face of the planet, bar none, and no one deserves this success more than she. and i’m pretty sure she’s the brains behind all their music, because you can hear her stamp on every song. just because she’s in the background, don’t kid yourself.

and that’s in the mix for my ipod too.

but what does my ipod play? every freaking time i turn it on? “money back freaking guarantee” by the five freaking man electrical freaking band.

i have read stories by people who swore that their ipods had favorite songs.

and i thought these people were idiots.

i now apologize to them.

they are right. it’s not a settings thing, and it’s not an “i don’t know how to use my ipod” thing. it’s a matter of this ipod fixating on a song, and this is the song.

i have not heard any other song more than once. i hear this song each and every redundant and superfluous time i use the damn thing.

maybe steve jobs can recommend an exorcist for my ipod. he owes me that much. i practically singlehandedly kept apple afloat when i was teaching school, buying and recommending computer equipment.

you can say what you want. but i know apple well enought to know that this “feature” is probably programmed in as a joke, and they aren’t telling anyone. that’s exactly the kind of thing they’d do.

in the meantime, if anyone knows the place to get the anti-earworm hack for an ipod shuffle, i’d be much obliged. i’d thank you kindly.

i’ve been thinking about this, actually, for a few weeks now, since i read the book stiff, by mary roach. what a trip. read the synopsis.

there’s a chapter about cadavers that are used for research into decay rates, to help forensic science. they put you in a field, and you rot, and they record how fast you rot and what happens to you as you rot and what bugs live in you at different stages of rot. and all that rot. kirk thinks this is perfect, and i agree. i don’t want to be embalmed and buried. that’s just window dressing for the people who are left, and to my mind, highly unnatural.

neither do i want to be cremated, although that’s certainly preferable to being pumped full of chemicals and staying antiseptic and intact for innumerable centuries. why do i care? i’m dead, right? i can’t feel anything.

probably.

exactly.

how the hell do you know how you feel or what happens or why it happens? have you been dead, embalmed, or cremated recently? i thought not. so it seems to me that the safest route is to go completely as nature intended, which is to rot where you drop. except that i can’t rot where i drop, so probably i’ll have to rot in that forensic field with all the other sensible, rotting people.

my only regret is that if that happens i’ll miss out on having my epitaph. which is, by the way, “sit on my grave and picnic.” i thought of that when i was 18 and sitting on jim morrison’s grave at pere la chaise in paris, and having a picnic. bread and wine and cigarettes and romanticism and all. if i rot in a field, i could still have a headstone somewhere, with my epitaph on it, but i wouldn’t be underneath it, and that would be deceptive, as people would think that they were sitting on me and picnicking when in actuality they were not.

on second thought, that’s absolutely perfect.

i also want to have “peaches” by kristen hall playing at my service, assuming someone has one. it’s a great song, and if you don’t know kristen hall’s music, you should.

that’s it. thanks to my stupid government that won’t legally recognize kirk and i, we’ve spent thousands of dollars getting all our paperwork in order, all that stuff that just automatically happens when you get married. so that’s taken care of.

but i need to investigate the rotting thing more.