October 31, 2009 @ Halloween Private Party!

Occtober 31st, 2009 at a Halloween Private Party in Monterey

A set of TD&TS songs and a bunch of fun covers!

We spent our Halloween 09 with our friends at an awesome Halloween party. We played an acoustic set of a bunch of D&S songs and some super fun covers thrown in. It was a really cool setting because we were able to play a bunch of our songs that we haven't played in front of an audience before! It was also an interesting show because Nick had been sick and lost his voice so for really the first time ever Easton sang lead vocals on a bunch of Nick's songs. Also, since it was such a rockin' party we tried to play some of the slower, softer songs with a much more upbeat feel to them. It was really cool to hear a sort of different take on some of the songs like Across the Water and Halloween. We took a bunch of requests for our original songs and didn't really have a set-list so we aren't sure exactly what we ended up playing, but below is a basic song-list. All in all it was an awesome night and a happy Halloween for all of us!

Song-list for October 31, 2009 Halloween Party!

1. The Psychologist

2. Mistakes!

3. Across the Water

4. Halloween

5. The Regular G (Days Away Cover)

6. You Know About Me

7. Dog Problems (The Format Cover)

8. Ashes Ashes

9. Rules in a Knife Fight

10. Collie Man (Slightly Stoopid Cover)

11. Regulators (Warren G Cover)

12. Boss DJ (Sublime Cover)

13. Benson Hedges (Fun. Cover)

14. Bret You Got it Going On (Flight of the Concords Cover)

15. These Inevitable Insanities

16. Semi-Charmed Life (Third Eye Blind)

17. Untitled Unreleased Song

Nick's Blog #012: Addressing D&S' Touring Situation

We get a ton of people asking us when we will be playing a live show near them or when we will be touring their part of the country next. This has always been a very tough question for us to answer simply because of the dynamic that we have have set up as a band and our methods of recording and releasing music. I don't feel that we have done a very good job of explaining ourselves when it comes to this particular topic. There are some issues that we as band deal with that have directly affected our ability to tour in the past and will continue to affect our band in the future. But I would first like to say, that these are not excuses for us not touring. We fully understand that EVERY band on earth has specific hurdles that they come across especially when it comes to touring and traveling across the country. Our touring situation (or lack there of) has been a conscious decision of ours and I want to make it very clear that this is in no way an excuse, but rather, an explanation of why we have made the decisions we have made. I personally feel that if we are asking you, as fans of our music, to wait two years between our first and second album without any shows of any sort outside of California, then we owe you somewhat of an explanation for these decisions.

As some of you who have talked to me online may know I have a genetic lung disease called Cystic Fibrosis (CF). I was diagnosed with this disease relatively late at the age of 16. If you don't know what CF is you can visit this website for more technical information: What is Cystic Fibrosis? Basically what happens when you have CF is there is an inbalance of certain chemicals in your body which causes serious problems to occur in your lungs and/or pancreas. Thankfully, I have a relatively lighter case and am what is called pancreas sufficient. So my pancreas functions fine but I tend to have lots of problems with my lungs. I tend to develop infections in my lungs with symptoms that can range from a really bad cough to more serious problems and pain in my lungs. Personally, I develop one of these infections 3 or 4 times a year with some years being better or worse than others. Some of these infections can cause me to have to visit the hospital for 7 to 10 days at a time to receive IV antibiotics, with another 2 to 3 weeks of IV's at home. Now, I could go on for days about the specifics of the disease, but these are the basic problems that I deal with on a regular basis.

Okay, so there are the obvious reasons why going out on a low budget music tour would be a bit daunting with this disease. Obviously if I were to get sick while out on tour there would be problems with me getting the proper medical treatment I needed since I see a highly specialized doctor specific to CF. I worry quite a bit about staying healthy for our local shows in California, let alone across the country! But there are some other problems that may not be so obvious to someone who does not live with CF. One is that most CF patients have around 2 - 3 hours of physical therapy per day that they must do in order to stay healthy. I personally use 2 different machines that help me to inhale medicine and help me to clear my lungs for 1 hour twice a day. If I miss one treatment I tend to feel shitty for up to a few days because of it. Now at home this becomes routine, and I barely think about it. On the road however, this could become very difficult as both of the machines require a power outlet and I need somewhat of a clean, private place to do this. In other words sleeping anywhere but a hotel room while out on the road would be very difficult, which in turn would bump the cost of a tour for our band WAY up.

There are also a lot of smaller issues that wouldn't bother me as much but altogether could prove to be very difficult on the road. Issues such as having to distance myself from a band member if he were to get sick while on tour. One thing that I think any CF patient will tell you is this: while a cold or the flu for a normal person might be very uncomfortable, it usually lasts about 2 to 5 days. If I get a cold or the flu the health problems can last weeks, lead to infections, and quite often lead to precautionary, but week long, hospital visits.

With all of this said I would once again like to say that NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE. I would hate for anyone to think that I am saying that because I have Cystic Fibrosis it is impossible for me to go on tour because it's not. All of the problems that I mentioned above can be solved. And this is what we have been doing for the past 2 or 3 years: Trying to figure out how we can get out and play for you all while at the same time staying healthy and happy enough for it to be worth our while. Obviously there are a ton of variables to cover here but with every local show we play we are learning how to better deal with these obstacles.

As I had said before, I don't feel that we (especially me) have done a good enough job in the past expressing this stuff to all of you. Again, I feel that if we are asking you all to buy our albums, buy our merch, and help us to spread our music, then we owe it to you to let you know why you have not yet seen us play in your town. Please, please, please feel free to ask us any questions that you have regarding shows or even CF. I absolutely have no problem talking to people about my disease and think that the more people that hear about CF personally from somone the better!

Thanks for reading guys!

Mistakes! Live Video

Here is a live video of our song 'Mistakes!' from our show at East Village Coffee Lounge in Monterey, Ca.

Leaving the Hospital; I'm Going Home (Guitar Tab)

Here is a guitar tablature for the acoustic guitar parts in Leaving the Hospital; I'm Going Home. The chords used can be used to play the song completely on an acoustic guitar. Enjoy!

Download the .rtf file here: Leaving the Hospital; I'm Going Home Guitar Tab

Questions From our Friends

Hey everyone! A few months back we asked our friends and fans online to submit questions for us to use in our promotional materials for Autumn in the Evening. We had some really interesting questions asked of us! I am going to start posting these questions along with, what are hopefully, interesting answers! The questions are tagged and titled "Q & A".

Also if you have a specific question that you'd like to have answered leave it in the comments of either this post or another of the Q & A posts!

Check out the Q & A posts: The Dreamer and the Sleeper Q & A

Nick's Blog #011: Rehearsal and Show Weekend

Blog: Friday, September 25, 2009

I am super stoked about getting together with Easton and Ray and to start working on music again. After we released Autumn in the Evening me and Easton were pretty burnt out, not on the band itself, more just the process of putting out an album completely on your own. As you probably know we try and do everything ourself from recording to package design to mix and master to shipping of the actual cd's. We love doing it but it is a lot of work so we decided to take a month or two off to clear our heads. It's also nice for me and Easton, who have been friends since we were pretty young, to just kick it without the stress of recording an album.

So at this time The Dreamer and the Sleeper as a band are in a relatively stress free situation. We haven't really begun talking about a new album yet (much...) and we are really excited about the direction our live show is going with the addition of Ray. To add to my personal excitement I have just been released from a semi-routine, week long hospital stay to receive IV antibiotics for a lung infection. So, I am super excited to get out in the real world again and see all of my friends and play a great show!

I spend Friday afternoon hanging out with my girlfriend Annie. So excited to be home but still pretty tied down with an IV due every four hours. As the evening rolls around Ray comes over to get ready for a rehearsal and sort of a brainstorm session for our live shows we have coming up. He brings his friend Stacy who turns out to be a super nice girl who is a great sport for listening to us play These Inevitable Insanities over... and over... and over... and over again over the course of the next 24 hours. Meanwhile Easton is driving up from his hometown of Santa Barbara. Ray, Stacy, Annie and I hang out and talk and watch a few episodes of Conan O'brien I have DVR'd.

Around 9:00 Easton shows up after his 4 hour drive. Easton and Ray unload our brand spankin' new PA system while I... err... watch. It takes a little while to get the PA up and sounding how we like it. A lot of knob twisting and tweaking by Easton (he is emerging as the technical one of the group) only for it to be turned down to an appropriate level for my neighborhood at 10:30 PM at night.

We spend a good 2 or 3 hours going over songs from Autumn in the Evening that we already know pretty well. The girls are freaking troopers! They had to be bored as hell because like I mentioned above we literally play some songs 7 or 8 times through... but neither complains at all. Annie even opens her eyes from her nap to sing a quick "We live our lives on the line!" Easton gets a huge kick out of this! Later in the night our friend Helen comes over to chill with us. In case you are curious the songs we consider to be in our live catalogue at this point in the night are Across the Water, The Psychologist, These Inevitable Insanities, Mistakes!, Halloween, Rules in a Knife Fight, Seventy-Six, Ashes Ashes, a hand full of cover songs that we enjoy playing and a particular new, still untitled song. We feel pretty comfortable playing theses song so we move on to songs that we don't have as much experience playing live.

First we work on a live version of our song Astronauts. It has potential but in the end I think the collective feeling is that it sounded pretty sparse with just the three of us (Easton on acoustic guitar, Ray on bass, and me playing an electric guitar with a hefty delay pedal). So we move on and fool around for a bit, jamming some really old songs such as Waltz #1 and Charmer. These both sound pretty darn cool! There isn't enough interest from any of us to actually perform these songs as part of our set but it is still really cool to have them in the back of our minds in the future.

As I had mentioned earlier our friend Helen came over to hang out with us while we jammed. We start reminiscing a bit and it comes up that years ago the three of us had played in a show that Helen had put together while we were playing in band called Bull Mountain. This of course leads to us playing every Bull Mountain song we can stumble through on our acoustic guitars. We laugh our asses off as we try to remember the chords as well as the angst filled emo lyrics. I find one song particularly funny as my job in the song was to play a D chord throughout the entire song. I claim to be an innovator... I don't think the other five in the room agree... At this time I think we all realize we aren't getting much more done and we turn in for the night.

Blog-ith: Saturday, September 26th, 2009

I wake up late after our late night jam session. I sit around and watch some college football until Ray shows up. We throw together some MEAN bacon wrapped hotdogs with onions and peppers as a sort of tailgate party for the Cal / Oregon game that is on TV. They are freaking delicious. Easton shows up at about half time. Sadly Cal is getting clobbered so we decide to start going over specific songs for our show in the evening. We rehearse the songs listed above and decide which cover songs we want to play. We decide on playing Dog Problems by The Format which is one of our favorite covers to play. It just has a good bouncy rhythm to it that translates well to our acoustic set. We also decide to play a song called Collie Man by Slightly Stoopid as well as The Regular G by Days Away. We also go over a few other cover songs that we often play at shows, from Hangin' Around by Counting Crows to Coney Island by Good Old War. We have always really enjoyed playing a hand-full of covers in our live sets. I think it's fun for the people watching as well as it being fun for us to play some of our favorite songs.

We tighten up a few song here and there before we begin packing up for the show. After we are packed up we head down to East Village Coffee Shop in Monterey. It is quickly becoming on of our favorite places to play! It is a really cool coffee shop in downtown Monterey that has lots of nooks and crannies for people hang out in. Shows take place in a long narrow room in the back and are broadcast to the front room's on nice big flat screen TV's. Super cool!

As we are setting up our PA and getting ready for our show a lot of our really good friends from around the area start showing up. It is always really cool to play on a Saturday night in Monterey (the town we grew up in) because we get to see and play for a lot of our best friends and family. At this show in particular a bunch of really good friends of ours show up that either we haven't seen in a while or who haven't seen us play in a while. Overall it is a great atmosphere and is so cool to see everyone. Our friend Dakota sadly couldn't make it tonight so Ray plays a few songs of his own before we go on as a band. I was bummed Dakota couldn't make it because she was so awesome at our show in June. She is so original and you really don't know what you are going to get next from her! Hopefully we'll get to play again with her soon. (FYI: She sings on our song Mistakes!) None-the-less Ray played amazing as usual. He played a few songs from the EP I am recording with him so that was cool to hear.

After Ray the three of us play our TD&TS set which we later agree, sounds the best we have yet! After the show everyone heads back to my house to hang out. I am really happy and actually pretty grateful that everyone chooses to forfeit a night downtown to come hang out with me at home (I'm still on IV's). So that was really cool of my friends. Loads of cool people swing by to hang out! My awesome cousins Steve and Renee bring pizza and wings! They are the best. A bunch of us hang out have a few beers (me excluded of course!) and watch the USC Football game and the season premier of SNL. The game was awesome, SNL was not!

Easton, Helen, Annie, Steve and Renee hang out with me until late in the night / early in the morning. It was a really great time. Easton is heading back to Santa Barbara in the morning so we both exchange how awesome it is to be working on TD&TS again! A few ideas are shot back and forth about where we are going from here but nothing I want to post juuuuust yet! Over-all it was a great weekend and so cool for me to be able to hang out with everyone again... A week in the hospital can seem like a month away from home! So once again, I am very thankful for everyone who came out to the show and who hung out after! It made my weekend!

That's it for now! Until the next D&S development arrises!