Head too hurty to blog proper today. Instead, I give thee, ‘Shamomma’ read­ing the kids’ clas­sic, The Mon­ster at the End of This Book. Ten cheers for grand­mas read­ing us sto­ries on YouTube.

I have come across another inter­view with some­one called Andrew McDon­ald who is not me. This time the name­sake in ques­tion is Aus­tralian acoustic muso Andrew McDon­ald. That’s him below.

The inter­view appeared in the Novem­ber issue of a Sin­ga­porean gam­ing mag­a­zine called Play­works last year.

Much like the last time this hap­pened I have been left feel­ing despon­dent and deter­mined to reclaim my fair share of atten­tion. So again I have removed the other Andrew’s responses to the ques­tions from Play­works and answered them myself. Here is a short­ened ver­sion of the inter­view as rewrit­ten by me:

Play­works: First time here in Singapore?

Andrew: That’s a con­fus­ing first-up ques­tion. I’m in Mel­bourne at the moment.

How do you find it so far?

I was born and bred and then sent to kinder right here in Mel­bourne so I guess I’m pretty con­di­tioned to the place.

What were you shop­ping for?

That’s another stumper Play­works interviewer-person. When did we men­tion shop­ping? I think you’re think­ing of Andrew McDon­ald the Shoe­maker?

You’re a gamer. Cool, we’ll talk about games in a lit­tle bit. But first, let’s talk about your music, the begin­nings, how it all started, etc. You were in a band before right?

Well, I’m not a gamer but you’re right, let’s argue about that later. Yes, I was once in a band. Me and my friend Tim cre­ated the band. We were called Pigs in Shit. We used the old ‘Power chords writ­ten on post-it-notes and picked ran­domly from an upside down pork pie hat’ method of song­writ­ing. We were pretty good.

Is your old band still together?

No. Tim moved to Tas­ma­nia to chase girls and it was no longer kosher for me to jam in his parent’s house.

What are your musi­cal influ­ences?
I have a few but I don’t really lis­ten to much new music. In fact I’m still lis­ten­ing to the first albums I ever got. The Lion King sound­track and the first Ala­nis Moris­sette album take turns on my iPod.
What about when you sing? What kind of influ­ences do you have for performing?

It depends. Some morn­ings I wake up with lots of mucus in my lungs and so I’ll sing low, bassy, Tom Waits stuff in the shower. Whereas some morn­ings my house­mates will yell at me for singing in the shower so I’ll change to some quiet Bing Crosby crooning.

Is there a pro­ducer involved with the song­writ­ing? Is there any­one who comes in and tries to change things?

I think you mean is there a pro­ducer involved with my writ­ing? I don’t have a pro­ducer but I do have an edi­tor. She’s pretty cool and tells me when I’m not allowed to do stuff like put my feet on the desk while I write. Or type with my eyes shut and call the story the Book of Fate. She’s a cool edi­tor like that.

Are you into sports?

I like bowls but I’m not really into crochet.

At least you’re a gamer, since you’ve been shop­ping for a Playsta­tion controller.

What? I’m not a gamer and any­way I don’t shop for Playsta­tion stuff. I have a cousin who has an elec­tron­ics busi­ness in Thai­land and he does my shop­ping for me. I don’t even have to pay him for the games and con­trollers he gets me when he vis­its. Instead I just let him use my garage for stor­age every now and then.

Do you record your songs on a lap­top or just hook­ing up to the com­puter on your own? Or do you pre­fer going into a stu­dio to record?

You mean do I dic­tate my writ­ing to myself? Well yes. I often wake up in the mid­dle of the night with an idea. I imme­di­ately turn on my walkie talkie and say my idea to my edi­tor who has the other walkie talkie. My edi­tor lives far far away from me, but they’re good walkie talkies, and I expect she’ll hand me a tran­script of the book I’ve writ­ten on walkie talkie someday.

Would you com­ing back to here?

You peo­ple are obvi­ously not check­ing the email ques­tions prop­erly before you send them through. Again this ques­tion makes no sense. I’ll assume the miss­ing word is ‘lit­ter’. No. I would never lit­ter if I came back to here. I mean, I live here. It would be ridicu­lous to lit­ter in my own house.

I have been at home mak­ing notes on my foolscap writ­ing pad this evening. And I have spent much of the night lament­ing the fact that foolscap is no longer the paper size of choice. Poor foolscap. And so I have writ­ten a short pop num­ber about foolscap. Though I think it’s just the cho­ruses. Maybe I’ll get Lil Wayne or The Game to come up with some rhymes for in between.

It’s foolscap!
Skinny by the sides
Longer down the spine
Few many more lines

It’s foolscap!
Alter­nate dimen­sions
With­out any ques­tion
Sta­tionery legend

It’s foolscap!
From the mid­dle ages
To its cur­rent sta­tus
God­fa­ther of pages

Who sched­uled the long week­end dur­ing Blog Every Day April? Blerg. Any­way, today I’m offer­ing up a piece of my per­sonal diary from Good Fri­day 16 years ago. I was ten years old. Colsore!

When I tell peo­ple that I have a pile of books at home that I’m reading/about to read, I really mean a pile. Not a stack, or a tower. A pile. Spread out. Chaotic. Piled.

See.