It’s official: Ruined Music HQ is relocating from Brooklyn to Portland, Maine in three short days. It’s also official: moving is tiring. I am looking forward to having everything settled.

We’ll be taking a little break next week for unpacking/internet-getting/recovering purposes. Enjoy the 4th of July holiday, and we’ll be back the following week, assuming we’re not crushed under boxes of our own CDs. Most of our music collection is feeling sort of ruined to me right now, if only because it is so heavy.

So check it out, we have our first-ever Ruined Music band interview up right now. What do you think? Are there any bands or musicians you’d like us to interrogate? Our feeling is, if someone loves music enough to play in a band, he or she has to have some ruined songs lurking in the past. Let’s air ‘em out in public, on the internet!

Suggestions? Email info@ruinedmusic.com with BAND SUGGESTION in the subject line. No promises, but we’ll see what we can do.

So it’s been a while since we updated. I know. I’m sorry. Life off the internet has gotten busy and stolen lots of time from life on the internet. I’m not kidding:

So, your patience and understanding is humbly requested, dear Ruined Music readers. Thank you!

*Make a New Year’s resolution to write your ruined music story. Look at the guidelines. Send to submit -at- ruinedmusic.com with SUBMISSION in the subject line.

*Travel safely if you’re traveling over the holidays.

*Befriend us on MySpace.

*Give someone you love the gift of an item with a broken record on it: head over to the Ruined Music store. Thus far the mug, tote bag, and 3/4 sleeve shirts have been our most popular items. I kind of want one of the notebooks, myself (hint hint, Bryan).

*Send us a smallish, good quality .jpg picture of your cat for the Random Cat Photo. Why not? Mail to info -at- ruinedmusic.com with RANDOM CAT in the subject line.

*Make a gift mix for that special someone. Scenario A: you live happily ever after. Scenario B: you have a good story for this site. Either way, you win.

Happy holidays! See you in the new year!

I saw this on a wall in our neighborhood early this morning.

Alex and/or Veronica, if you’re out there… get in touch.

DEADLINE: Midnight, Sunday Oct. 14, 2007

A few months ago, a reader sent us something we’d never seen before: extremely silly haiku about ruined music scenarios. This gave us an idea.

Fond of counting syllables as you write them? Enjoy winning prizes? Enter the first-ever Ruined Music contest: haiku style.

All entries must follow classic haiku form (5/7/5). (Don’t know what that means?)

One grand-prize winner, as chosen by us, will receive a Ruined Music giftbox extravaganza, including:

-two sweet mix CDs (one by Bryan, one by Mary) (guaranteed free of any songs that have been ruined for you)
-one Ruined Music t-shirt (any style in our store)
-a Ruined Music pin
-praise and adoration from fans around the world after we post the winning entry on the site

Send entries to info@ruinedmusic.com with the subject line HAIKU. You can enter up to three different haiku. Please include your name, email address, and phone number with each entry.

And finally: your haiku can be based on a true story. Or not. For the purposes of this contest only, made-up tales are welcome. Non-fiction, fiction, science fiction, anything goes… as long as it’s about music getting ruined and fits the site’s theme.

The winner will be announced on Thursday, October 18th, to wild applause and virtual high-fives. (Followed by virtual high-sevens.)

I was just clearing some files off my camera, and I found a few pictures I took in the spring while we were redesigning Ruined Music.

Yes, the cats are involved.

Apologies to everyone on our mailing list who didn’t receive our email about this week’s site update. I emailed NotifyList’s help desk to find out what was going on, but they haven’t gotten back to me and the emails still aren’t showing up. Argh, and also grrr. I hope you stopped by anyway, or saw our message on Myspace, or had a psychic intuition that there might be new stories, or something.

We’ve had a bunch of problems with NotifyList. I’m officially fed up, so Bryan is going to look into switching us over to phplist. Our friend Travis uses that for the Serious Business mailing list, and if it’s good enough for Trav, it’s good enough for us. If any of you know another free, reliable mailing list service that we should consider, drop a line to info@ruinedmusic.com. Hey, remember when people used smoke signals to tell each other about their website updates? Crazy.

ps. Don’t get me wrong, you can still sign up for the list by using the NotifyList form, and you should (if you want to, that is). It’s the easiest way for me to collect addresses for the phplist import. If the change affects anything, we’ll let you know.

Ed. note: My friend, ahh, “Rasputin Jones,” is a very talented comedy writer with a bad pseudonym. “Rasputin” sent me the following messages over the course of one night; I thought I’d post them here for public consumption. Because that’s what happens when talented comedy writers send Ruined Music haiku to my personal email address at 4 a.m. Yes, there will be a site update with real stories in a few days - just think of this as an hors d’oeuvre, if you will. -Mary

Ruined Music BlackBerry haiku
by “Rasputin Jones”

Elton sings “Levon”
Jello shots, awkward grimace-
she just pooped herself.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Seduced lesbian
with an Ani singalong
wait… this ain’t a chick.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

“My Sharona” blares
from the bright red Camaro
that just hit my dog.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

I wrote these all on the fly in bed w insomnia on my crackberry. How good is that
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

u can publish haiku under moniker rize pealov unless u hate the name I also like rasputin jones I will do lots of them essay will be under real name
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

…he’s also in a band called Man in Gray. (He’s too modest to talk about it himself, so I’m doing it for him.) Here’s the exciting news: Man in Gray’s debut full-length is out now. It’s called I Can’t Sleep Unless I Hear You Breathing, and because I know the band I can assure you that there are some songs about wrecked relationships on there - though I’m not at liberty to disclose which ones. Anyway, I thought I’d mention it because a) I’ve been listening to it nonstop, and b) the reason our site redesign took longer than planned is that Bryan was simultaneously putting final touches on the recordings and the album artwork. Talented chap! There’s more info at Serious Business, and you can check it out on iTunes too. My mom downloaded it yesterday and she loves it, although she admits she “can’t make out all the words.”