I've been doing bits and pieces of this one in live sets for a few months, but after writing a few new verses I went ahead and recorded the whole thing: The Climate Change Song, dedicated to the man who is (sob) president. Definitely use headphones if you're listening to this at the office.

I'll be doing the full version in this Friday's show at the Store on Halsted. There have been a couple of gigs where this has turned into a call-and-response song, with audience members echoing the appropriate obscenity at the end of each line. I hope that becomes tradition.

We've got a new T-shirt in our Cafepress store. Ten percent of the purchase price will go to Girls Rock! Chicago, a nonprofit that teaches self-expression through music to girls, trans youth, and gender-nonconforming youth.

One of the unignorable facts of playing out is the gender imbalance of live rock music. In multiple-act lineups, I've started keeping track of the ratio; often it's 1:10 or worse. There are a lot of reasons for that, ranging from critical perceptions of the relative gravitas of rock and pop, to the prevalence of male radio DJs and other cultural gatekeepers, to the way rock instruments and gear are marketed to dudes, to tone policing of women's voices, to good old-fashioned prejudice. Anyway, once you start seeing it, you can't un-see it. Here's hoping that, in our small way, we can help balance things out.

We rounded out the year with a lot of one-off songs and free downloads.

Here's a cover of the Pretenders' "2000 Miles."

Here's "Carol for a Cold Season," complete with authentic Chicago holiday traffic.

Here's "Alabama Baby," a response to the Breitbart editor who cited "You're Sixteen, You're Beautiful, and You're Mine" (really!) as a defense for Roy Moore's predatory behavior. 

And as long as we're sharing jokes, here's "Without You (I Struggle with Portion Control)," for which I would so love to shoot a video someday.

Here's the Homebrew edition of "After All," one of the songs still in the "Maybe" column for Highway Gothic. (If you've ever wondered if a retractable ball-point pen could be used as percussion, btw, the answer is yes.) 

​As always, thanks for listening, downloading, and sharing.