HE jester walked in the garden:
The garden had fallen still;
He bade his soul rise upward
And stand on her window-sill.
March winds bring April showers
and sometimes society women dress up as goddesses.
It’s the first day of March and there are like ten inches of snow outside. February is the worst month of the year and everyone knows it. So our hopes are high for a happy and productive March. We have a lot going on between recording, booking and touring. Here’s what the touring looks like:
3.3 AS220 :: Providence, RI :: w/ Caroline Smith and the Good Night Sleeps
3.8 The Liberal Cup :: Hallowell, ME w/ Jeff Beam
3.9 Paddy Murphy’s :: Bangor, ME :: w/ Jeff Beam
3.10 Lompoc Cafe :: Bar Harbor, ME :: w/ Coke Weed
3.11 Olin College :: Needham, MA
3.15 ZEN :: Bangor, ME :: KahBang Arts Show
3.22 Empire Dine and Dance :: Portland, ME :: w/ Cuddle Magic
3.27 Live on WMBR Pipeline show (Boston)
3.28 Great Scott :: Allston, MA :: w/ You Won’t
3.29 Sierra Grille :: Northampton, MA
3.30 The Arts Block :: Greenfield, MA :: w/ Cuddle Magic
3.31 Fury’s Publick House :: Dover, NH :: w/ Tan Vampires
We’re recording in the breaks and hoping to finish by the beginning of April. S’gonna be good. Then it’s mixing/mastering/cover art/duplication/waiting/preparing.
Also, my birthday is March 30th. I will be 24. Have a good day.
H.
February begins with a momentary return to the road. We’ve been recording drums this month, but will give Peter a break after this mini-tour with Boy Without God:
2/2 :: Portland Museum of Art :: Portland, ME :: w/ DJ Ponyfarm :: 8pm
2/3 :: Firehouse :: Worcester, MA :: w/ Guerilla Toss, Friendship & Happy Jawbone Family Band :: 9pm
2/4 :: The Montague Bookmill :: Montague, MA :: w/ Sorry, Nay
2/6 :: The Red Door :: Portsmouth, NH :: 8:30pm
Then we’ll move onto guitars/bass/keyboards on this first batch of songs and get them into a pre-mix/master state, before we tackle the heavier, singly-er next group of songs (including “The Golden Room”). And thennnn another mini-tour which brings us back to our alma mater, Bowdoin College, on 2/9. WHO KNOWS WHAT WE’LL DO? NO ONE. Then Cafe 939 in Boston on the 10th with our boys Chamberlin and thennn St. Michael’s College on the 11th, where my mom teaches and thennnnn we go to NYC to work at The Tibet House Annual Benefit Concert, which is SO baller. Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, ANTONY and then that bro James Blake, who really isn’t that cool and some other people I don’t know. Well, I know Das Racist and they’re aiight, but Laurie Anderson and Antony will be there, so…eh. But we get to go to the after-party and breathe the same air as these people which, as Jeff Beam would say, is UNREAL. And we have Beam to thank for this opportunity, so…thanks Beam FOR HAVING AN AMAZING GIRLFRIEND WHO IS ACTUALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS MIRACULOUS EVENT.
H.
It’s a new year and we’re taking this perhaps arbitrary designation very seriously. The past few months have been a ridiculous flurry of activity: touring most of November, recording with Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, touring with Lady Lamb the Beekeeper and now, finally settling down in Portland again, before we embark on the next great venture, which is…recording. By late Spring, we will have a record of some sort, glossy, shrink-wrapped and in your hands. Bryan Bruchman of HillyTown.com taped this video of me, Henry, performing a new song during a break in sessions with Lady Lamb. We also have a tour documentary in the works, featuring our tour mates Cuddle Magic and many other bands we met and enjoyed along the way. We play at Frontier in Brunswick on January 7th, but we won’t have a Portland show till February 24th, when we open The Toughcats CD Release show at SPACE Gallery. Though we’ll be holed-up in the studio, expect our online presence to be just this side of cloying…
H.
We’re back in Portland for a bit, which is sweet. You’ll notice the details of our next tour displayed above, over a calm cosmic scene of lesbian romance. One might call the whole tour a sort of elopement, except that there will be no sex and no sense of being chased by a mustachioed father with a shotgun. But we will stop at a Sonic if we see one, which could also conceivably happen in an elopement scenario.
Christmas is coming and I sure hope my grandmother loves me. Gonna set up my toy train and build a tiny village out of blocks and put little flashlights in the houses so it looks like a twinkly aerial view of a beautiful little town, where nothing bad happens ever. And the next day I hope to receive two nips of Jameson in my stocking, just like I did last year. And I hope I get a nice brown sweater.
H.
The Best Tour Ever ends tonight at Zuzu in Cambridge, with Boy Without God. Then a short break for Thanksgiving etc. and back in the saddle. Peter and I will be playing tonight as a duo and then bussing around between MA and NYC for the following week or so, for undisclosed reasons. We miss Portland a lot, but we’ll spend a good chunk of December here (kinda), so that’s good. Expect a number of unveilings in the coming months, as we keep rolling from here to wherever we’re going.
November will be an onslaught of everything. Band-related tasks have crowded every moment of our time, so it’s nice to leave the nebulous world of online-promoting and get on the road. Check this for the details. And the vague synopsis is: shows of every kind with friends of all walks of music-making, from Higher Ground with Chamberlin, to a house show with Cuddle Magic, to art galleries in New York, to a frat house at Wesleyan. We’re couch-surfing, driving my parents’ Prius and taking names (on our email list). Does this post belie the somber nature of the picture above? Yes. But death will come to each of us. We are all dust in the wind. GONGGGGGG.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and
cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was
air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the
nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking
warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would
take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
-Dylan Thomas