New single and music video from Safe Houses: “I’ll Be Bad to You”

Posted on May 16, 2025 by Brian LaRue

My band, Safe Houses, just dropped a new single and music video, “I’ll Be Bad to You,” and it’s currently available on all the usual-suspect platforms: video on YouTube and Vimeo; audio on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube Music, and the other major streamers. I often describe Safe Houses’ sound as “jangle-garage,” but what that really means is a blend of powerpop, garage rock, “classic indie,” post-punk, and whatever else happens to be in the air. Punk backing and ‘60s pop sensibility that reserves the right to go off the rails when appropriate. “I’ll Be Bad to You” is, to my ear, squarely in the powerpop zone, but we welcome alternate opinions. It’s the latest digital-only release from my label, University of Space Recording Co., and the lead single from our upcoming EP, The Winter I Turned Psychic. It’s also available via a QR code on a business card, and if you’re in a bar or a coffee shop in Bushwick, Brooklyn or Ridgewood, Queens, you might find a few. The QR code links to Bandcamp – you can actually download the song there, for just $1.

We shot the video for “I’ll Be Bad to You” in and outside of East Williamsburg EconoLodge, the long-running DIY spot somewhere in the tangle of the industrial park. We worked with co-directors Tasha Lutek and Jamie Frey, friends of ours – Tasha and Jamie also co-directed our video for “Someday Is Starting Now,” and Jamie fronts the excellent NYC rock’n’roll band Nite Music. (I played guitar for a spell in NO ICE, Jamie’s previous excellent NYC rock’n’roll band.) The concept is that Safe Houses and our fictional “evil” counterparts, Dangerous Motels, are both playing shows, and Dangerous Motels keep trying to undermine Safe Houses’ gig while harassing folks around the venue. Then, of course, Safe Houses and Dangerous Motels face off, or in other words we basically have to fight ourselves in the street. We shot it in one very productive afternoon.

When we play “I’ll Be Bad to You” live, I often intro it by saying, “This song is about what it’s like when you’re single and you’re thinking, ‘If I could convince someone to be in a relationship with me, I’d be a really good partner,’ and then you find yourself in a relationship and you realize you were totally wrong about yourself.”

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Introducing University of Space Recording Company

Posted on September 16, 2024 by Brian LaRue
Logo by Olivia Russin

After years of threatening to do so, I quietly launched a record label in early 2023. I say “record label” colloquially. More accurately, it’s a cassette and digital label. It’s called the University of Space Recording Company, and it’s the first element to emerge publicly of the broader interdisciplinary University of Space organization. I know this sounds cryptic and odd, but I can explain.

First, though: The University of Space Recording Company is something I’d been working on gradually behind the scenes since the pandemic shutdowns in 2020. Through that time, I’d been editing and prepping a handful of solo recordings I’d made in the past, but hadn’t released. So when my own jangle-garage band, Safe Houses, needed to release a digital double-A-side single – “Someday Is Starting Now (Julia)”/”I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” – it felt intuitive to roll it out under the University of Space banner and give it a promotional push. That’s the label’s first proper release. There’ll be more to come in 2024, as we bring more acts onto the label, and explore new channels and partnerships to bring the music to a wider audience.

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Heavy Breathing with the Scam Call Center

Posted on July 5, 2023 by Brian LaRue
This wasn’t the guy btw

Everyone knows the best thing to do with an incoming phone call from a number you don’t recognize, at a time when you’re not expecting a call, is to ignore it. Everyone knows it’s probably going to be a scam call. Everyone knows that if it’s not a scam call, it’ll go to voicemail, and you’re experiencing any suspense about what’s up, you’ll be able to find out in 30-ish seconds. 

And everyone knows that if you pick up a scam call, you’re just going to have your number flagged by scammers as a number that picks up, and that as such, they should call this number again sometime in the future. 

I don’t remember why I picked up the phone when an unfamiliar number, from an area code of a city where I didn’t think I knew anyone, called me that afternoon. Maybe I picked up on the off chance that it was someone who worked with one of the businesses I was working for as a freelancer. Maybe I was just in a mood, and I really wanted to hand it to someone for having the nerve to try to grift me in the middle of a work day, for god’s sake. Maybe it was a slip of the thumb. But I picked up, and I thought, Welp. Guess I’m on a list now. Too late to turn back.

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The Best Lesson I Ever Learned About Soloing, I Learned When I Was 16

Posted on June 27, 2023 by Brian LaRue
Not so much a rule, as a reminder not to get too far ahead of yourself

So, one thing about me as a musician is that I’m a guitarist who is deeply ambivalent about guitar solos in a rock or pop context. I’ll take a solo, sure, if it makes sense in the context of the song. But a lot of songs don’t need one. 

Look, my problem with solos isn’t that they are solos. Some of the most transcendent pieces of music I have heard, and will ever hear, are extended improvisations. My problem, if you could call it that, is with players who are more focused on demonstrating their chops than they are on connecting with the audience. This tendency goes all the way back to that teenage or preteen point at which so many musicians start feeling the itch to learn an instrument. A lot of kids start playing an instrument for the same reason kids do a lot of things: to become very skilled at something, and subsequently show off how skilled you are. Which is cool, in that the beginner’s drive, and the rush of learning a skill, can really help push you down the road toward mastery. Some musicians eventually stop caring so much whether everyone notices them shredding, and some don’t. 

I started to realize this dynamic at a pretty early age, fortunately sparing me the messy trial and error I probably would have undergone otherwise. The best lesson in soloing I’ve ever learned is one I learned when I was 16.

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Quick and Painless Peanut Sauce

Posted on January 6, 2023 by Brian LaRue
This could be your future

All right, here’s another one for all the broke artists out there! It’s the beginning of a new year, and following the holidays, there’s a strong chance the wad of cash under your bed is looking thinner than it normally does this time of month. Time for some budget eating.

Stir-fries have always been one of my go-to cheap meals. I usually make a super-large batch in one go so I can have it at the ready for a number of meals and save food prep time. Vegetables and tofu are very budget-friendly — especially if you have a good produce shop nearby that undercuts the local supermarket. The priciest element you’ll have is most likely to be a store-bought sauce. So it’s even better if you can circumvent the bottled sauces entirely and come up with something just as tasty on your own.

I like a good peanut sauce as much as anyone. But for ages, I rarely reached for it to add to a stir-fry or noodle dish, for a pretty boring reason: I found peanut sauce to be annoying. It was annoying that the good stuff often cost more money at the grocery store than other sauce varieties, even from the same brand. It was annoying that the good, but cheaper, stuff seemed to be continually in and out of stock. It was annoying that the recipes I found frequently involved 30,000 steps and maybe a food processor and too many utensils to justify making it as often as I wanted to eat it. It was annoying that the quick and easy recipes often tasted like barely-dressed-up peanut butter.

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Bad Advice Musicians Hear, Part 7: You Can Do It All on the Internet

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Brian LaRue

It’s a Friday night down at your local rock club, or maybe a Wednesday. Who even knows anymore? You’ve played at this place six times in the last nine months, and the crowd is still made up of seven of your friends, five of the other band’s friends, and three or four randos sitting at the bar at the back of the room. This is getting a bit tiresome, and you’re wondering how many times you’re going to need to drag your gear down here before anyone you don’t know decides to care about your music. You pack up your guitar, step offstage, and walk toward the bar. 

The bartender is pouring you a draught when one of the randos turns to you and sizes you up.  “You all put on a great show,” they say. “But these days, if you want to build up an audience fast, you gotta be on the internet. You can do it all on the internet. Are you on TikTok?”

You’ve heard this before, and you know there’s a strong enough chance this person has never actually been on TikTok themselves. But that’s beside the point.

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On Staying Out of the Comments in 2023

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Brian LaRue

I’m taking a few seconds right now to consider how my social media habits have changed over this past year. Of course they’ve changed, because the discourse on pretty much all of the major social platforms has been changing. You can adapt, or not.

Basically, the way I’ve adapted is by steering clear of other people’s threads unless I can bring something unique to the table. And the way I need to continue adapting is by not simply taking my two cents to forums where I appear slightly more anonymous. An interesting thought deserves to find its proper place, and finding that place often takes time. If it’s actually an idea that deserves its proper place, the wait is worth it.

One practice I’m really glad I leaned into this year is: Whenever I feel compelled to post anything on any social platform, I ask myself whether it stands to reason that someone else who has better knowledge of the subject has already said the same thing, more articulately and authoritatively. Usually I’ll presume someone else has. Sometimes I’ll Google an entire phrase that pops into my head and find someone else said the same thing years ago. I’m just not here to post timeline white noise bs that makes me look dumb.

I’m especially wary about adding to the white noise because so many people I used to interact with heavily on Facebook and Twitter have been scarce on the socials in 2022.

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A Quick Layman’s Explainer of Specifically How Elon Musk Is Actively Tanking Twitter’s Business Model Right Now

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Brian LaRue
I’m seeing too many photos of this dude these days, so I just drew something myself instead.

Author’s note, added Apr. 2025: I’ve noticed this post has been getting a fair amount of traffic recently, and I want to point out that this post is from Nov. 2022, which means that at the moment I’m writing this note, this post is almost two and a half years old. It’s basically a historical document, not a reflection of life in 2025.

It’s been a pretty wild couple weeks in the ad-supported digital media business, and unlike most of what happens in this business, they’re things I can actually talk about outside of work without risking putting anyone to sleep. There are always 30,000 things going on on the business side of the internet – and while a lot of them feel urgent, they usually move pretty slowly, and most people outside of the industry don’t even need to notice them happening. 

But with Elon Musk buying Twitter and a ton of big-money advertisers pausing their spending on the platform – this is different. The platform, its owner, the advertiser brands are all recognizable entities, and they seem to be doing things incredibly quickly. It’s very rare for a story about the business side of the digital media business to make front-page headlines. My day job is *~*developing content*~* for advertising technology companies, and people who do this kinda stuff for a living generally understand we can’t talk about it at parties. It’s more than most people really want or need to know about the back end of the internet. But while the general-interest coverage of the internet often focuses on relatively abstract things like civility, the tone of content on social platforms and in other media, this Twitter stuff shines a light on the path that leads from tone directly to dollars. And if you think there are a lot of words devoted to this stuff in general-interest media, you should see the ad industry trade publications. They’re popping off, because Musk just can’t stop doing things that are bad for Twitter’s ad business.

There are a lot of updates that seem to flit by like side notes in the general-interest narrative, but are truly BFDs in the ad-supported media biz – and a lot of those storylines deserve to be explained in slightly more detail than general-interest news outlets generally explain them. So I wanted to take a minute to dig into some of those elements that are already impacting Twitter’s ad business. [In reality, this’ll take more than a minute, because there’s just too much. – ed.] The impact is not hypothetical, it’s not a future thing, it’s here now, and it likely will be for some time. 

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Now This Band Is Called Safe Houses

Posted on September 21, 2022 by Brian LaRue
Photo by Jeanette D. Moses

If you’ve been following along on this blog even a little bit, or if you know me offline, you probably know I’ve been the lead singer and primary songwriter of a band called Shelter Dogs since 2013. I kept that name going through three entirely different lineups – name recognition is good for a band, and I like having a back catalog consolidated in one place. But this year, we’ve been forced to change our name for legal reasons. Now this band is called Safe Houses.

I can’t say a band name change was on my agenda when I started planning for our 2022 spring and summer. We were eager to jump back into gigging and releasing new material, after the unpredictability of the previous couple years. The previous lineup of the band had recorded an EP in 2021, the release of which we paused until we had a new gigging lineup together. In March, I was squaring away the details of its release. We had a few options to explore, but one way or another, it was going to be a higher-profile release than our 2019 EP. We also had a music video shoot on the horizon for later in the spring, to accompany a stand-alone single separate from the EP itself. The new lineup hit the stage with a handful of new songs intended for our next EP. We were booking shows at venues we’d never played before. In a few words, we were doing everything a band was supposed to be doing after dropping a couple EPs and gigging regularly. 

Then we got a cease and desist letter from attorneys representing a guy who holds a registered trademark on the name “Shelter Dogs” for the purposes of performing and releasing music.

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