Archive for The Bad Penny

Yay, Us

Posted in Essays, News with tags on 11/06/2026 by Kurt Orzeck

It came to our attention today that The Bad Penny is the third-most popular music website in Idaho. Yeah, yeah, we hear you cracking jokes about the state in which we’re based, but that doesn’t diminish our gratitude for your visits to the website.

And by the way, watch your back, Treefort and Record Exchange.

You’ve probably noticed that we’ve upped our number of concert previews over the past year and added a calendar of notable area concerts on the horizon. We’re all ears for incorporating more features and entertaining new ideas, so please reach out if you have any concepts that you think would benefit the website and/or the Boise music community at large.

A couple of clicks should avail you of the reality that The Bad Penny is not only a labor of love but a website intended to support the music scene in Boise and its surrounding areas. It’s a fragmented, cliquey scene, but we nonetheless want to do our part to encourage people to attend shows by visiting acts and local bands alike.

Thanks again and rock on.

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Thank You, Bad Penny Readers!

Posted in Essays, News with tags on 08/18/2026 by Kurt Orzeck

Thank you to the devoted readers of this unconventional, iconoclastic and oftentimes just plain nutty music website – and also to those who just happened to stumble across it – for making Aug. 18, 2026, the most highly traffic day since The Bad Penny launched November 25, 2009. Traffic is not the be-all, end-all of this website, but it’s also worth noting that we surpassed our total numbers for the entire year of 2025 early last month.

Every single prop (that’s what the cool kids say nowadays instead of “all the props,” so get onboard, yo) goes to the readers who have consumed (we prefer “ingested”) one or more of our tens of thousands of posts, whether they be the multitudinous stories on The Jesus Lizard – who we are proud to say is the most popular band on The Bad Penny – to our invaluable (which is to say, value-less) post on the Best Albums of 1909.

Every day till all this goes away, we’ll continue to try to both educate and entertain you, turn Bad Penny readers on to good music, steer them away from crapola, buck trends, go against the grain, reject social media (except YouTube, which is our guilty-pleasure equivalent of Obama sneaking out for a cig), protecting all of us in this space from AI infiltration and, most importantly, adhere to what we consider to be our values as best we can.

If you ever have any valuable feedback, ideas worth sharing, rad bands you’d like to see get more coverage and that are a good fit for this website, don’t not never hesitate to contact me directly at korzeck at gee male dot calm. (Apologies for the tortured language; such are the rules on the battlefield in the war against the bots.)

Long live great music, great people with great character (we gotta get around to working on that someday) and great animals. And, lest it need be said, down with tyranny.

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Thank You, Bad Penny Readers!

Posted in News with tags , on 07/19/2026 by Kurt Orzeck

A sloppy and bloody smooch to each and every person who has stumbled across The Bad Penny and – even more so – to those who frequently or infrequently check to see the latest rubbish to surface on this blog website.

A few minutes ago, The Bad Penny surpassed the total amount of traffic that the site drew during the entirety of 2025. A sincere thanks to all the musicians, music lovers and readers who made this possible. And a derisive smirk (because the middle finger is so yesterday) to the publicists, managers and other industry folks who dissuaded their clients from engaging with the site because they believed it wouldn’t sufficiently pad their precious purses.

Capitalism and art don’t make for good bedfellows. And fascism will destroy both … and us all … and our pets! … if we give up the fight.

Resist. And rock on.

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