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!
