My buddy is helping me get over one of my biggest fears, which is to do stand up comedy. He and I are on the same night and plan on being really real. Its a competition. So here goes. April 7 at khoury’s in long beach. 830pm 21 and up. 7 bucks.

http://www.laffdown.com/datesXXII.htm

the beyond baroque show with marc smith is at 2pm. today sunday. not 8pm

I wrote some sweet kids books with brilliant illustrators

Theyre all done and ready to ship! Hardcover for most.

Valentine the porcupine dances funny

I Looove you Whale

Hot Hands in The Weirdo Winter

im off to do a reading in Vegas next weekend. Thank you to the last few schools who let us do a kids book reading there. Illustrator Jenny Lewis and I had a blast. I also posted some book trailer videos in the write bloody store.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE STUFF!

Have you ever spent all day in a tiny closet, trying to sing your ass off and not mess up because it will be the last time you make an album? NIGHT REPORTS IS FINALLY DONE. The multi-year, recorded in closets and baseball stadiums is complete. The haunted sports musical by Beau Jennings (beaujennings.com) and Derrick Brown takes Brown’s creepy verse about a failed baseball player and sets it to Jennings’ Oklahoma dreamy piano stylings. Mixed by the brilliant Richard Swift. Come and get a taste right HERE. If you’d like to listen, and press LIKE, its free. If you’d like to download, WB subscribers get a fat discount at check out by typing the secret word “haunted.” I would be so pumped if you would just tell a friend on facebook or blog what you thought.

sample on my facebook page. link is to the left. Night Reports is coming. If you have 65 dollars and some bratwurst, would you like to sign us to your label?

A few great things to report
1. I am working on a new commissioned poetry work to be combined with music and movement for a famed dutch dance repertory. I can’t say much more, but it is a new work and I am so excited to get going on it. I hope to perform it in NY and Amsterdam in the fall of 2011.

2. The best album I’ve ever completed was recorded in Beau Jennings’ Brooklyn apartment in a closet. I am so thankful to all the musicians he gathered to play violin, slide guitar and other ghosty noises. This is the haunted sports musical I’ve been talking about for almost three years. It is finally in the hands of the amazing Richard Swift for a sweet mix and master. I must say it was perty tricky writing lyrics set to a plot, locked in a theme of a baseball player who feels haunted. That player also plays worse the more he falls in love.
We are planning a short late feb tour that might be the only tour we ever do, 4 east coast shows and that’s it. Beau has a baby on the way so that will be it for a long time. Needless to say, i am the most excited about playing these songs live.
It was pretty hard for me to do this recording. I broke down in the sound ‘closet’ a few times because as some of you know, I lost part of my hearing in the army and its gotten pretty bad. I was missing a lot of tones and it was making me feel crazy. This will be the last recording of music I do without a hearing device or a colostomy bag. It will probably be the last band I ever do and Im not sad about that.
We will make it available on a bandcamp site for digital download and when we get money, we will release it on vinyl. DEC 28. Thank you to the folks that came to our preview shows in NYC and dressed in baseball attire. I cant wait to put on the uniform again.

2.5 the bowery celebrity fund raiser was a hoot. sarah vowell gave me her glasses. david cross had the line of the night: he started out his entire set by saying, very calmly, “let’s give another round of applause for halle barry in monsters ball.” fred armisen read a japanese haiku in japanese. kristen schall was weird and wonderful and has many strange voices lurking inside her. amber tamblyn read a poem about the katrina of her vagina. emily wells and beau jennings played behind me and it was raw honey. matt cook is your new therapist, so damn funny. they made a bunch of bread and bob holman was super jolly. special thanks to amber for making it happen and bringing people who wouldnt normally love poetry, to see that it can be a real nutjug!

3. i am pumped and excited for the new year. I have new poems to shape, a new write bloody authors workshop to run ( a 5 week workshop-late jan 2011)
three stage or film scripts I’m finishing and the commission, which is a collaboration I’ve dreamed of for a long time. Don’t sleep in. Work your buns off. Merry Christmas.

December 5, 2010 in New York City, Derrick will host an outrageous arts benefit co-chaired by Amber Tamblyn and David Cross. The event supports the programming of the Bowery Arts Science and features writers and comedians such as Matt Cook, Sarah Vowell, Fred Armison, and Kristen Schaal. You know these folks, they’re famous and stuff.

Seating is limited so don’t miss out and make your face hurt. Buy tickets now!

Come visit our booth in the convention hall, right when you walk in!

See Derrick @ Live Wire presents: the 6^th Wordstock Extravaganza @ the Aladdin Theater  on October 9^th

See Spring Hill Spider Party @ Back Fence PDX on October 10^th

~

Check out more tour dates here. Check in to Wordstock and Back Fence for more info on ticket sales.

It’s gonna be nuts. See you all soon!
It’s all going down with the Night Kite Revival.

WORD x Word Poet rocks fest opener
By Jeremy D. Goodwin, Special to the Eagle
Updated: 08/25/2010 10:45:46 AM EDT

Wednesday August 25, 2010

PITTSFIELD — Two bands and a poet walked into a theater — and the poet rocked the hardest.

The second annual Word x Word Festival kicked off over the weekend with a triple bill at the Colonial Theatre featuring earthy rockers Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, acoustic popsters Mike and Ruthy, and performance poet Derrick Brown. (Events continue all week and culminate with another Colonial show on Saturday.)

The bands offered tightly executed performances in various shades of earnest rock and pop, but Brown (accompanying himself with audio tracks he controlled onstage — a swooshing helicopter here, an R&B drumbeat there) slipped in a welcome sting with his crowd-pleasing verbal ballet.

Performing in the middle slot, Brown got the audience clapping along to his first poem, and weaved a zig-zag path from non sequitur humor (he cautioned a possible “side effect” of his performance would be “hallucinations of decorative stools”), to battle-worn meditations, to unexpected bursts of lyrical beauty. (To the latter point: “Your breath is something for sparrows to wander in.”)

Brown was introduced as a former paratrooper, and the imagery of violence and warfare permeated his work. This feature was so conspicuous, and at times so unexpected, that it called for (but did not receive) some sort of explicit acknowledgement. Otherwise, it’s easy for the armchair psychologist to suppose Brown is working out his military memories in his work even
when he doesn’t notice it.

For a love interest, he would “murder an army of sleeping Cubans.” Elsewhere, a desirable woman is described as “an electric chair disguised as a Laz-E-Boy.” Tears are called “lady war paint.” And in reference to the inescapable music of police helicopters criss-crossing the skies above his Long Beach home, he says to a lover: “They’re playing our war.”

At times, the humor seemed an alternative to forcing the audience to live with an uncomfortable moment. But the way Brown nimbly brought the audience along for an essentially dark but eventually life-affirming ride was, in its way, joyous. His one-man-show easily filled the space of the theater, and succeeded consistently. It lived up to festival founder Jim Benson’s introduction: “poetry as rock and roll.”

Northampton-based Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers delivered an earthy, warm set of tunes that veered through a tight spectrum of poppy rock, at times touching upon — but not lingering in — adult-contemporary flavors.

The smiling band offered songs rooted in the pleasures of family, friendship, and love, but never came off as cloying. This earnest stuff would never cut the mustard in Brooklyn, but that’s to the hipsters’ discredit. When Kellogg declared, in “Satisfied Man” (performed unaccompanied on acoustic guitar) that he’d be happy to die if he did so surrounded by friends and family whose lives were warmed by his presence, it came off as truly affecting rather than hopelessly sentimental.

Onstage instrument switches underlined the band’s able if unflashy musicianship, and the well-paced set achieved emotional depth with radio-ready smoothness, while still managing to rock in all the right places,

Mike and Ruthy’s acoustic-flavored pop was well-crafted but felt one-dimensional, its sweetness never tempered by anything savory. All round edges and saccharine smiles, it definitely has its role in the marketplace, but doesn’t feel particularly vital. Perhaps in a perfect world, this mildly Appalachian-tinged pop would be the mainstream pop of radio, but that doesn’t make it essential.

The fledgling festival is still working to articulate its unifying concept. Is it a poetry festival, as Kellogg described it from the stage during his set? No, but it’s got poetry. Is it a music festival? No, but it’s got music. The idea at Word x Word is to celebrate the word — as written, spoken and sung. We got the second and third legs of this stool on this evening, but when the written word is truly integrated into this performance festival, that’ll be the conceptual leap that truly ties it all together.