Hey there. It’s been a while since I’ve blogified my existence, so I thought I’d take a few moments and try to encapsulate what I’ve been up to.
We’re a few weeks into my cleverly-named “2010 Tour” – we’ve pretty much shaken the cobwebs out at this point and are now confidently pretending like we know what we’re doing. The shows have been going great and the audiences have been fantastic. We’ll be playing all the way through Labor Day weekend – the remaining tour dates are posted at weirdal.com. We still have a few more shows which are unconfirmed at this point – when those get finalized I’ll of course add those to the list on the tour page and give everybody a heads-up on Twitter.
The new album has been put in suspended animation for the duration of the North American tour, but after I get off the road my main focus will be writing and recording the three songs that I need to complete it. That’s really all I can tell you – any release date information would be pure conjecture at this point.
The band and I are very excited that we’ll be doing our first-ever European tour in December. Well, at this point, it’s just 2 dates (the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Minehead and a show at the Forum in London) but it’s still a tour. We’re doing it. We promise. And we’ve got our fingers crossed that the promoter will see fit to book some more European dates while we’re there as well.
I’ve mentioned the situation with Cartoon Network in a few interviews and podcasts, but I never formally addressed it, so… here’s what happened. As I had previously reported, after years of negotiation, I was able to sign a major production deal with Cartoon Network to provide content for them. They were primarily interested in live action features, so I pitched them on a movie idea. They loved it, and gave me the go-ahead to start working on the screenplay. I worked closely with them for several months, and after submitting my 4th draft, just when I was just about to get the official green light… Cartoon Network let me know that they were no longer in the feature film business. It was a major policy change that affected not only me, but also the dozen or so other movies of theirs that were in various stages of development. Everything just stopped. So, bad news for me, but good news for all the Cartoon Network fanboys that already hated my movie without seeing it (because apparently any live-action programming on that network would be sacrilegious). Anyway, it’s not entirely bad news – the script went into turnaround, which means I’m free to sell it somewhere else. (Come to think of it, that was pretty much the exact thing that happened when I was trying to get UHF made.) So maybe it’ll get produced at some point, maybe it won’t… all I know is, I’ll have a lot more free time this fall.
Let’s see, what else… “When I Grow Up,” my first children’s book for HarperCollins, is still scheduled to come out in March. Other than that, well… I’ve got several other very exciting projects that I’m working on, but considering what happened with Cartoon Network, maybe I should just shut up about them.
That’s it for now. Hope to see you on the road!
Al
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