Hi you amazing patron supporters!  This song is a little more dark than most of the content I make, I would really recommend you listen to the end talking to see my reasoning...  I also just adore the song.   I find it so important to create music for all kinds of moods, and I just was too scared to try to do something more in this melancholy vibe.    Anyway, your honest feedback is always appreciated.

I want to thank you guys so much from the bottom of my heart for continually supporting me creating these music videos.  I just literally can't put into words how much of a burden worrying about if I can continue doing this, and because of YOU.  I can... I can keep making more music for the world.  So Thank you.

Love you guys!

- P

Together at long last :-) 

This is my mash-up I have been working on for you all.  I can't wait to hear what you think of it!   

I want to make sure you know that I appreciate you guys so much.  Can't wait to bring you more of these more frequently. 

- E

Hey everyone! Just posted my newest music video for Midna's Lament :) Hope you get a chance to check it out! 

Also wanted to let you know on Monday June 1st I'll be sharing a special code here in the activity feed for all my Patrons to get first access to tickets for my tour this fall! Tickets don't go on sale to the public until Friday June 5th so you guys will have the chance to get the best seats in the house first so be on the lookout for that ;) 

Woohoo so much good stuff happening lately and I couldn't do it without you guys! Have an awesome weekend :) 

Sara Bareilles - Gravity with my amazing hubby Peter Hollens.   -- I'll be bringing you more "live" covers in addition to produced videos each month. Hopefully I'll be able to perform these for you all in person one day!  Let me know if you enjoy this as much as the more produced "music videos".  

We recorded everything live; the piano, and both lead vocals in a sound stage in Eugene.   This is one our favorite songs & Peter wanted to hop in and join me, so he added some harmonies and sang a little bit of verse 2.

Thank You for all of your love and support!  It means the world to me to know I can post these for a community of supporters who enjoy my work! Please leave any requests down below!

Love,

Evynne

I shot this video up at Silverlake (http://www.oregonstateparks.org/index.cfm?do=parkPage.dsp_parkPage&parkId=151) 

I ended up reaching out to the original artist on this one and got her blessing, and she wants to work on something together!  How cool is that!?   So let me know which LOTR/Hobbit type song you might want us to do together.  Would be a lot of fun to work with her on it.  

As always and I have to keep telling you, this video wouldn't be able to be made without your support.  You are the funding these, you are the reason these are being made.  Love and appreciate you guys.   

Lots of awesome new songs coming, just finished a tune from how to train your dragon 2 which I'm excited about :)  Lots more on it's way!

- P

Hi guys!  Here's my newest video.  I literally just ran al over town shooting in the most random places we could think of and having as much fun as we could along the way.   I hope this brings a smile to your face!

Love you guys, and thank you so so so much for your support.    I even worked in a few shots playing in the kiddy pool with the lil man.

Loves,

Peter

Hi guys!!  I was about to release my Now we are Free from the Gladiator that has been requested over and over again, but I ran into a licensing issue, so I made this the last few days.  I hope you enjoy it and know that I HAVE SOOOOO many awesome ones coming SOOO soon!  Hope you enjoy!

Thank you so much Patrons for empowering me to produce a video like this! I really hope you like this one as it has very special meaning to me! Again, Thank You for making this possible! 

Love, Evynne

I've been so excited to release this to you!  You requested this months, if not years ago, and I'm finally happy with how the audio and video turned out.  I hope you agree! We shot this on a 4k camera too, let me know if you can tell the difference.  We also uploaded at normal 1080p, but it really helped us capture golden hour.

As always an ENORMOUS thanks to those of you who make this possible.  Love you guys.

- P  

PS. LEAVE COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS and I'll hit you back!  

I hope you all like this one! I'm excited to introduce you to REL & hope you'll consider becoming a Patron! She's extremely talented...especially for a 15 yr old...and I think she'll go far! 

Thank You all so so much for making it possible for me to create more videos! I hope you are enjoying these live sessions as much as I am.

With love, Evynne

HOLA COMRADES....

(this is a free public post. $3+ patrons will be getting a separate post with their download code for the video: watch for it!)

Oi! okay, i'm back in action….more or less. still a little under the weather, on antibiotics and probiotics and all the biotics but feeling way better. 

thank you all for so much care and kindness and lymey-spiney advice over the past few weeks. i feel really loved. lyme disease is clearly a nasty nasty thing.

so many people with undetected chronic lyme have contacted me, offering to share their wisdom. i’ve been calling it the “silent rock star killer”. i knew about kathleen hanna,

and avril lavigne, but there are OTHERS. i want to start a super-group with all them called SubLyme. our hit will be “what i got”. ask me no further questions about this….

and now we can get back to business 

presenting .....*drum roll*.......

my first ANIMATED THING!!

it's a *weird* one. 

but I'm really really proud of it, and i’ve been working on it in secret for months.

the story goes like this. 

i tend to use the voice memo function of my iphone for all sorts of things - but mostly song ideas that i almost never come back to. i sing melodies or to chatter a lyric to myself, or to dictate a thread of an idea for a talk if i'm driving and can’t jot shit down. and mostly i never go back and listen to any of this shit. mostly it just stayed like so much urban-myth undigested bubble gum in the pit of some digital art-stomach for years and years. 

this is not a habit i picked up once i had a smart phone. i used to just carry on these terrible habits with recording cassette walkmen, then for a terrible span of lost time in the late 1990s and early 2000s with minidisc, DAT, microcassette, and some weird nameless handheld digital voice recorder (I never really did figure out how to use any of them. I always missed my Walkman). the funny thing is, I have all my recorded Walkman tapes really organized. everything after about 1998 is a lost and disorganized mess. there's no central filing system. there's no single hard-drive. there's just shit everywhere - old phones that died or were lost with recordings on them, song ideas I emailed to myself but never really put anywhere, leaving scores of ideas to be post to various laptops and abandoned email systems. it's kind of a tragedy. but like my lost wedding dress and wedding vows (I know, I'm fucking terrible) I figure the passage of time flattens everything out. and maybe all those  songs were no good anyway. we will never know. 

in desperate times back in the late 1990s, if I was somewhere and without a recording device, I discovered the handy-dandy trick of caking my own voicemail and leaving myself song ideas. those were all certainly lost to time, but I was actually more disciplined about retrieving them, because I knew they had a short life. 

but all along I was, unwittingly, exercising whatever odd head-muscle must learn to *not* to feel foolish whilst humming nonsense words and half-baked rhymes in off-key whispers into phones at the the bottom of coat closets at friends parties. 

and nowadays I just use my iphone. 

now….fact: neil gaiman is a total weirdo when he's half asleep. in a GOOD way, usually. you know all that cray shit he's been writing for the past 30 years? it has to come from *somewhere*. the guy is a fleshy repository of surreal strangeness, and he's at his best when he's in the twilight zone of half-wakefulness. he's the strangest sleeper I've ever slept with (let's not get into who I've slept with...different animation) not just because of the bizarro things that come out of his mouth when he's in the gray area, but because he actually seems to take on a totally different persona when he's asleep. and when that dude shows up, the waking neil gaiman is impossible to get back, unless you really shout him awake. jekyll and hyde shit. if i ever get around to it, i want to write a neil gaiman instruction manual for whatever wife comes after me in case I die or we get divorced or whatever. i feel like it would make a good read in general. 

to be fair, and in his defense: neil has pointed out that i sometimes talk in my sleep and i say some pretty insane stuff. but I'm never around to hear it, so, you know, i just have to take his word for it. 

(i just texted and asked him to remind me of an example…he wrote back that i said “i want to go dancing and i don’t want them to take the sheep, don’t let them take the sheep”)

anyway, most of the time when he spouts some really surreal gems i just enjoy the carnival sideshow of Sleeping Neil and go off to sleep myself. but sometimes the shit is so good i write it down, mostly so i can tell him about it in the morning. 

when I found this voice memo, I couldn't even remember where we were when I recorded it...in a hotel somewhere, i think, and I am pretty sure i recorded it in the bathroom so i wouldn't bug neil. maybe i recorded it the following morning. i don't remember. 

all I know is that I was looking for some other recording ages later and I saw this untitled snippet and played it back and thought it was hilarious. 

and then I played it for neil and HE thought it was hilarious. 

i'd been recently watching the "blank on blank” animations (if you don’t know them…they’re amazing. here’s one of my favorites, a janis joplin interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdF4b1_LQnQ) and was really inspired by what these surreal animators were doing with found sound recordings and interviews that were never intended to be animated, and i thought...this would such make a perfect animation.

i was at TED at the time I uncovered it - march of this last spring - and neil and i happened to be having dinner with maria popova (http://www.brainpickings.org/) and a random friend of hers. neil was so chuffed with the recording I'd found on my phone that he pulled out a set of headphones at the restaurant and said "play them the thing! play them the thing!"...and so i did, and i watched maria getting that delighted-yet-profound bulgarian look on her face. i mentioned it would make an amazing animation and it turns out that maria's random friend was logan smalley, who runs TED Ed (http://ed.ted.com/), which is basically an amazing little factory of awesome educational animated clips. he said he'd help me find an animator...and along with fishing around and asking on social media, i landed avi ofer (this was the clip of avi's  that really sold me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTQSbjecLg. you can see all his work here: http://www.aviofer.com/).

(a note here: i made pals with a handful of great animators who we didn’t wind up using…but many of them are excited to do stuff in the future. sooooo…i’m just saying. we could do more animated Things and i’d be happy as a clambake, and we’d get to give work to some super-talented artists).

so there we were. i hired avi, i dumped my basic ideas and vibe out in an email, sent him a bunch of reference clips and animations i liked, and we talked ideas and concepts on the phone and over email for a month or two. then he and his team got to work. they sent along their progress and every clip was like getting a little christmas present in my email, watching it take shape and grow….

I love what we ended up with. I hope you love it too. 

in closing, this is the thing i actually love most about this story:

unlike the songs I've released here so far: this project wouldn't have HAPPENED without the patreon. 

animating is time-consuming, and the artists need to get paid to slave over their hot animating stoves. 

and i know you guys love me and everything, but I also know what the market will bear as far as weird thing-content like this goes: if I simply fronted the money for this and then put it on YouTube with a nice little tip bucket at the bottom, it'd probably never recuperate a tenth of what it cost to make. likewise, if i fronted the money and then put it onsale, as a paywalled film on iTunes or whatever, it would be appreciated by a few hardcore folks….but locked and out of circulation. it couldn't go onto love a happy healthy youtube and vimeo life, where animations belong so that they can be shared. 

i know I'm also taking a risk, doing this one. there may well be people supporting the patreon here who are like THIS IS NOT THE THINGS I WANTED. if that's you, i encourage you to speak up. i am listening. this whole patreon Thing-thing is, as I made clear at the outset, an experiment. 

and for a moment, all you fine Patreon people, give yourselves a pat on the back. your support means that something now exists that never ever would have existed. 

in a way, that's priceless. 

i love you guys. 

xxxx

afp 

p.s. if you're reading this and you're not a patron, I enthusiastically encourage you to join, especially if you’ve managed to read this far in the blog. when you join, these blogs and content will be emailed straight to your inbox, you can join the comments, and you'll be joining a fantastic & supportive community of weirdos. and I'll love you forever for helping me to Make the Things. patreon 

p.p.s. you $3+ folks have a download link coming in a separate blog/email. watch for it. you $10+ patrons have a long overdue webcast coming your way. watch for that, too. patreon 4eva. 

p.p.p.s. i just showed this clip to whitney’s roommate alexei and he alerted me to http://sleeptalkinman.blogspot.com/. oh my god. it’s an epidemic of mild-mannered british men who say weird shit in their sleep! 

ALSO: all the links:

YOUTUBE

http://youtu.be/9QlDX8mPAcc

VIMEO

https://vimeo.com/134945314

Hi guys!  I know most of you didn't request this or probably haven't heard of it before, but I heard this song on a show that Evynne and I call one of our guilty pleasures and it had such a nice message I just had to cover it.

I really hope while watching this brings you some joy, because it was such a feel good song and experience to work with these amazing girls and their family. 

Can't wait to hear what you think!

GOING LOVE NOW answering your comments below!!

I got over 300 requests for this one, and finally made it happen.  Hopefully this is something you can really enjoy!  Let me know what you think!

Going live on the Patreon Mobile App now answering questions!  If you don't have the beta app yet, download it so you never miss when I'm on live answering YOUR questions!  

LINK TO APP: patreon.com/ios-beta  (ITS AWESOME!!)

LOVE YOU GUYS!  Thank you SOOO much for supporting our work!

My wife also has a patreon page if you ever want to check out her stuff too here:

https://www.patreon.com/evynnehollens

LET'S GET THE COMMENTS GOING!! What did you think?!

The only reason I was able to make this video is because of you.  We spent weeks on this one... I hope you can tell.  Running to a meeting will edit this in a few hours and update.  Just know that I love and appreciate you all so much.

Hello everyone!  this video couldn't have been made without your tremendous support and the IDEA to do this.  I saw many requests from patrons for this one, including others, but y'all gave me the idea first!

Please let me know what you think!  And check out the original if you haven't heard it to see how much different we made it!! :) 

Love you guys, thank you thank you thank you!  

Please even if you have seen the video click thru and give it a look, with a like/comment if you have the time helps a lot on the youtube side with Search engine optimization and a lot of other geeky stuff !! :)

- P