One. Two.

We’ve had a flurry of dates over the last few weeks as we transition our sound into a two-piece. So far, the feedback has been good out of town. We’ll be introducing the new sound and lineup in town on Monday at the Handsome Furs show. Seems appropriate, seeing as they are an electronic duo as well. The new lineup has Brea swinging drum sticks, triggering samples, wheezing accordion, singing opera and too much more. On my side of the stage, I’m still wandering through a forest of effects with a few more toys to bang on.

We won’t leave you in the dark long, though. We just finished tracking a new song called “King of  Cracker Blues” today at Tep Studios, a new professional studio in town. We were their guinea pigs testing the equipment and they were our sounding board for a new step forward. We should have it mixed and ready for your pleasure within a week or so.

Sample lyrics:

King of Cracker Blues,

I’m from Tupelo too

and it gets difficult to live

with hymns humming through our heads like this.

See you soon.

News Has a Kind of Mystery

Title quote comes from a personal favorite, John Adams’ fantastic opera about Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao, “Nixon in China” whose three disc set kept me awake on the three hour drive back to St. Louis.
Jan 16th’s preferred method of precipitation: Snow flurries.

We begin the ascendency that is 2009′s tour schedule by playing our first show in Springfield at a place called The Front Porch. Dave joined us on drums for the first time in over six months and it felt good to hear the person who wrote the parts play them. We played “Hymn of an Amen” for the first time in just as long. It was nice to rant, a red-faced, profound, four on the floor Beckett inspired fever. Watch out, we sound angrier than ever. Brea seranaded everyone with an operatic souncheck and accordion. We practiced Bjork’s “Joga” on Stylophone (thanks Frodermans!).  And we played a dense set of new and old material that all went over well with the diverse, all ages crowd. The place was packed-halfway through the set, we had to ask people to move closer to let more people in.  The downtown venue had a good walk-in crowd and apparently there were some local write-ups on us in the paper (which we couldn’t track down before exiting town). I suppose news has a kind of mystery.

A Change is Gonna Come

Obama isn’t the only one with an ear for Sam Cooke.

Those close to the band know there have been many changes with the band over the past few months. Our sound has evolved, we’ve worked to set up a new concert series in at The Luminary focused on one-night-only artistic events, and, most dramatically, we have rearranged the lineup once again.

We’ve been laying low since around November, but we will be gracing the stage often in 09, both locally and across green grassed, gray pavemented, change-obsessed America’s urban centers. Hopefully, that means your hometown.

Expect to hear new music every time we play over the next few months. A little more soul, more samples, more experimentation, more vocal manipulation, more more more words, the mood more visceral, more emotional but not like that, no no.

Welcome, 2009.

James

//The Mirror Stage//

Our Changing Social Order

We are pivoting into working heavily on the new album through the next few months. Here is an excerpt of a song we are working on tentatively titled Our Changing Social Order after a Sociology textbook from the 1950′s that Brea or I had picked up at an estate sale. Enclosed in the book was an (apparent) homework assignment that was untraceable as to what it was intended for. It was a kind of vocabulary and critical reading exercise that had random sentences written out and numbered. Another page had two mismatched words on each line. Both pages were graded in red ink, although what the pattern being graded is up in the air. The words of the song aren’t necessarily from the book or the homework pages, but adopt the rhythm and some of the words morphed into order while I was playing and singing with the pump organ.

Our Changing Social Order

I had a dream, it flew,

discovered land.

It demanded time, a sacrifice.

I took a knife like Isaac.

American manic

revival revolution.

A round world panicked that it has become flat.

A Tour in a Minute

photo from live show at the Annex NY, NY

As all belated events begin with an excuse, we’ll opt out this time. We’ve been woefully unfaithful at giving out up to date, Twitter-like announcements, but all that is changed. Our East Coast dates were great, the travel challenging, our best laid plans to learn French in the van forgotten, our Casio keyboard/tape deck/Am radio broken, our fans satisfied, new fans found, CDs sold, stickers posted across the Eastern seaboard, the van still needing an oil change, the rains came day and night across the hills over the skyscrapers scraping the sky and we loaded in under it and words were not spared nor taken back.

In New York, we were the biggest draw of the night. Not bad for our first time in the city. The bartender was Black Dice’s tour manager and just got off the road with The Raconteurs. The Annex was a fantastic space. Moody and elegant, complete with a balcony like a VIP lounge minus the Hennessy. A band from Italy opened with bowed guitars, saxophone, and keys. The rest of the night spanned genres, with a couple of local acts, including Misha an electo-Joy Division sort of band. We stayed the night in my friend’s studio apartment in Williamsburg, covering every square inch of floor space including the kitchen. In Philly, we ate Phillys. In DC, we voted with our feet. Replayed debates, had our own. Saw many friends. We rolled on, into the night. Nothing, but one, was left unspoken. Our songs have a way of lodging in our heads, changing on stage an off into something different. They are the biggest challenge we have to live up to, how to say those words well and act like we believe them.

We have some time off, playing a few local shows as we write the new album, begin scratch tracks and our video series. We are helping to open up a new venue at our studio/gallery The Luminary, which will be the only venue in the city to feature high quality projection and will have one of the best sound systems in town. All at our fingertips. Look out for our inaugural concert there on New Year’s Eve called the Black & White Ball. Details to follow…

//The Mirror Stage//

I’m Tired of Using Technology

The ghost of old technology was seen again at The Smiling Moose in Pittsburgh Friday night as our two (out of two) keyboards went out, leaving us to rock steady with guitars and added percussion. We stepped on stage and our beloved Casio, complete with tape loops and radio, wouldn’t turn on. Once going, we discovered that our Nord Modular synth had somehow been jostled in such a way that all of its intervals were off, leaving us with an impossibly out of tune keyboard, which is supposedly impossible. As I’m writing this, we are scouring Craigslists between Pittsburgh and New York hoping to find a replacement before our next stop. This is why acoustic artists exist: desire for a simple life, unencumbered by wires.

All of this didn’t keep us from having a great show. Once we got going, we found our stride and put on a good show. The lineup was strong. Pittsburgh band Life in Bed was a band favorite. They had math-rock riffs with show-stopping songs and were one of the best overall bands we’ve played with, no matter the popularity or success. Check them out at myspace.com/lifeinbed. Cleveland band Black Girls carried a Strokes-meets-Walkmen vibe and pulled it off really well. Be sure to look them up as well.

Pittsburgh was also our first encounter with couchsurfing, this time with James and Dan, a couple of musicians kind enough to offer up futons for tired eyes. Thanks for the buckwheat pancakes. And, here we go, back to searching for keyboards and driving onward to NYC.

The Middle East, America

The tour van has now been coined “One Armed Scissor” from “Moby Dick or, the whale” due to its newly malfunctioning windshield wipers. One is tied down with the string from Gregg’s hoodie, leaving one wiper to clear our way across the stormy Eastern seaboard. (Editor’s note: weather.com predicts rain for every tour date, in keeping with our trend dating back to every out of town show being riddled by rain.)

We made an all night drive to get to Pittsburgh and have a day to lounge around the South side shops. West Virginia met all expectations and shocked me out of even my Mississippi standards of hoosier excellence. Ohio provided one of the most beautiful sunrises I’ve ever experienced. It looked like smoke-filled wreckage painted by a Van Gogh acolyte, with a plane’s path marked by a trailing cloud (see photos).

We are more ready for this tour than ever. We’ve been playing really well, finally hitting our stride with Nate behind the kit and getting some out-of-town experience together so that we are finally comfortable improvising on stage again and know that we will give a strong performance every time out. This will be our first major-market jaunt, hitting up NYC, Philadelphia, DC, Pittsburgh, etc where it is harder to break through, but, honestly, more of a receptive market for our sound. We’ve been warned how hard the East coast can be on new bands, but have no doubt that we can expect good crowds and better shows. Keep up. We’ll add to it as we go…

Art created for Body Politic

Art by Adam Watkins

The Atomic Age

A: Afternoon benefit seven band festival for the Timmy Foundation on the campus of Indiana University.

B: Late show at The Cinemat, an alternate film theater/venue.

A: Seven great bands in one lineup. Highlights include Husband&Wife (reminded us of Fleet Foxes meets Anathallo); Alexander the Great (Pedro the Lion meets Cursive maybe); and Rodeo Ruby Love, who helped us get on the bill and may be coming to a town near you! They have dates posted at myspace.com/rodeorubylove.

B: The Cinemat had a full-sized theater screen and high resolution projection set up, so could play a DVD that we’ve been experimenting with to play behind us live.

A: Played our first outdoor show. For a band that is self-admittedly a “night” band, we enjoyed the afternoon breeze for once instead of the stale beer venue smell. You know the one.

B: The venue also had a fully stocked film library and rental service complete with a documentary on Moog, the creator of all things electronic and an extensive collection of Atomic Age films. Before our show, a film festival was using the space to watch a Russian subtitled horror film. Very hard to follow.

A + B= sold out of CDs.

C: Gaby, the organizer of Timmypalooza, had an afterparty at her house, which we more or less missed because of show #2. But, she graciously offered her IKEA futons for our exhausted minds to sleep on, not to mention leftover burritos.

In a Rearview Mirror, Dimly

We logged our last hours on tour in Athens, splitting time between The Grit, a vegetarian restaurant, Flicker Theatre, the venue/short film theatre we played at, and The Manhattan, a dive bar with elaborate black velvet paintings. We were accompanied by Jeff and Julia Guy, two of the band’s official favorite people. Jeff, a great painter from Atlanta, did a stint at The Luminary | Center for the Arts (our beloved home) last December in which he painted dozens of small panels to give away to people he came in contact with during his time here, including one he gave Brea and I entitled “Be Not Caught Without a Hymn in your Heart,” the title of one of our new tracks we’ve been working on for a future full length.

The show was a nice send-off, not least of all because they had a mermaid-painted piano that we opened the set with, playing another new instrumental cut called “Trumpeter.” In keeping with our theory that the shows all reflected the cities that we played in, we shared a bill with some more experimental, captivating performers-Animal Electric and The Matt Kurz One. Animal Electric is a Beach House-meets-My Brightest Diamond group, complete with autoharp and arresting mood-pieces. The Matt Kurz One in one man literally playing every part of the song simultaneously-one foot for bass, hand for guitar and hi-hat, other foot kick and sometimes fitting in keys for a Ramones-esque romp.

We shared our goodbyes and hallelu’s we’re goin home’s, hopped in Moby Dick, or The Whale and drove all straight through to St. Lou already planning Pt. II. We found out we’re still good enough to tour, with our without a drummer, that somehow it is possible to make small amounts of money while Shell Oil makes record profits, that bands don’t have to hate each other at the end of trips but can instead be more inspired, and that we are still learning our voice, it is changing and deepening all the time, and that’s more important than all the rest.

**We’ll be updating the page regularly even when not on tour, so keep up with new developments here. There are always new developments around here…**

//The Mirror Stage//