William Notes: I was in a folk rock band called "Shiny Boots of Leather" and we never played "Venus in Furs" by The Velvet Underground. I always felt like this was a missed opportunity. Playing in the band was quite a lot of fun; I just played as many notes as I possible could with the outfit. Dino and Tyler were really into Connor O'berst, other monsters of folk greats, and a bunch of indie music that I didn't really get into.

Dino could play a mean finger style guitar, Tyler was an exceptional lead guitarist (he played for Same Sex Mary) and they were often booked with Wyatt Mckenzie (I'm doing it for the Google Spiders) -- so people paid attention to them. We played an amazing show at the Artifice for a Neon Reverb Music showcase. I met some trash reality star from VH1's "Tool Academy" and her trashy reality TV boyfriend too. She said I reminded her of Jim Morrison.

SIDEBAR: Can I talk about VH1's"Tool Academy" importance as a cultural significant event in a TED Talk format at your college? (SLIDE IN THE DMs NOW).

Anyways, while I was being complimented for my bombastic playing and my penchant for using effect pedals -- Dino and Tyler were getting an earful by someone else on how I was too busy of a bass player. Womp Womp Womp, that's when "Shiny Boots of Leather" stopped being fun.

SIDEBAR: Guys, I'm not going to write an autobiography, but I decided to randomly type things into my previously typed entries because I was reuploading wavs for this album that probably a dozen of people will listen to. Run-on-sentences-galore.

But during my time with the band, I really did enjoy a song that Dino wrote called "Blue Skies". Musically, the song was essentially the same four chords, over and over again, but what music doesn't eventually fall into the four chord formula?

I digress, because the song itself was lyrically driven; Dark, Pessimistic, and Lovelorn. So, feeling just a little salty, I convinced Michael to record some "metal" guitar and insisted that he solo as much as possible over the entire song.

As I recall, Dino's reaction was "There's a lot of stuff going on with it."

I loved the original (which I also recorded for them, shout out to the defunct Neon Reverb Radio for playing it a handful of times) and I love this version as well. It's a great song and Dino is one hell of a musician. Please go check out Art the Rat.