Thursday At The Social In Los Angeles

It's Not Last Night Yet

Hello everybody,

News:

The residency at the Echo in February has been confirmed. Every monday night. 21+ and free. I think Zach de la Rocha (of Rage Against the Machine) will be playing with us each night. Also, there's some talk that the Morning Benders may at least play that first Monday with us. A dream come true.

By the way, I've noticed some of your expressed frustration with the abundant amount of 21+ shows, and I want to let you know that, as excited as I am for these Echo shows, I am freshly 21 myself and sympathize. The all ages shows tend to be a bit more vibrant anyway. (If that seems like an open challenge to the 21+ generation, it is)

Maybe some of the more devoted blog followers will remember that I had recently mentioned our wishes of playing a completely different set each night. And while we still were very excited about the challenge, we realized that some of you who come would perhaps want to hear the song that you had heard the previous week. Or maybe I'm thinking too hard.

For all of you San Fransiscans, in early March we're coming up to play the noisepop festival. I hear that it's really great but don't know much about it yet. When I have the particulars, so will you.

Here's the set list we had for the Hotel Cafe show. If anyone has any suggestions or comments, feel free to say so.

Maybe Not Today
Save Your Ticket
Wilderness
All Her Crooked Ways
Awful Things (which you can all hear in a previous blog of blake's)
End of Every Day
Salute the Institution
Like it's Something
Love is After Me
Blood and Guts

If you don't know certain songs on there, go ahead and judge by the title.

Talk to you soon. I miss all of you non-southern californians very much.

Taylor

Post #19

I'm in Yuma AZ this week for a huge family reunion. My entire family (of four) and my cousin, Jean-Pierre Louise, all hopped in the Simon Dawes Tour Van. There's like 70 people there I've never met before, and the ones I do know are either all grown up or too old.

Charlie Chickenpox sent me a great compiliation of Mike Tyson interviews. It's on YouTube, but don't watch it if you can't handle the word "fornicate".

How sweet is it that this place in Northridge might work out for us? You almost can't believe it: how happy you are for the band.
At the moment, we're trying to figure out what the living arrangements would be. Stu "Man" Machine will be staying at his Venice crib, which means we're gonna have Wylie, Taylor Turtledove, John Doe, and yours truely. We will have BBQ pool parties, and you're all invited. Bring your own beer.

Wedensday's Hotel Cafe Performance

Well, so far all the feedback from last week's show has been positive. I guess all the haters are also cowards. Hotel Cafe was kind enough to record the show for a... "generous" $45 charge. We debuted quite a few new ones that night. Some have some more work to be put into them, some sound sorta rad...
There's one new song that I actually sing lead vocals on. It's called "Like It's Something". It's such a different world... singing vocals. Sometimes Taylor forgets lyrics at a show, and sorta groans or scats or something... On Wedensday I flubbed a word and almost lost it, it was so hard not to laugh! And the song's sort of a moody thing, kind of pretty or whatever, and it was like... like farting during a funeral or something. It was 100% fun that night, so that's all that's important. Funerals should be that fun!

Here's a somewhat unique performance of The Awful Things for anyone who missed the show. xoxo

-Blakemus

Lions And What It Feels Like To Be In Flames

So as some of you may know I grew up in Malibu, CA. It's a small coastal city located west of Los Angeles. On Monday evening we caught fire. We have a long history of fires here, as well as mudslides, and viscious El Ninos.
The fire started around 5 pm when we were all rehearsing in Venice, which is maybe 10-15 miles away. We could see the flames from Venice! I heard these were walls of fire 200 feet tall. Epic flames. The area that was burning was about 300-500 yards away from my parent's home. A little scary, but not as much as some would think. I'm more frightened by elevators, airplanes, and ocean currents than fires or mudslides. But the fire made headlines; we read about it on CNN this morning.

I went to see my friend Atom's band called We Are Lions tonight at the Troubador which was F.U.N. They had a great show, and Matt the drummer was like Passion Of Christ on the drums. Look up pics online to see what I mean. Their myspace is www.myspace.com/wearelions

Looking forward to tomorrow night's show. We'll let you know how it goes.

See Beaut1ful G1rls Have Fun W1th T0ys

I guess I've been somewhat lucky when it comes to not having my email spammed. Got almost 3 years of clean use out of it before all these great offers on sex pills and porn memberships started rolling in. The people behind online porn propaganda are a pretty crafty folk. They cut up articles and pieces of literature into these lovely little vignettes, so that the spam blocker bots will think it's an avant-garde poetry email of some legitimacy. The "ho*t old;- chiks that love it har*d" in the subject line must have been approved by some technicality. I usually end up deleting about 5-10 of these a day, right off the plate, but now I'm going to start collecting them. I'm going to try to use some of this material as direct/indirect inspiration for songwriting.

Here are just some examples from today's crop...

"leaving me in this horrible country by myself, and I will do all else. pretty, tender figure of a maid that brought my heart to a stand. I know but the one thing - that you went to Prestongrange and begged, and she gave" Man, sounds like some old Dylan song.

"At least, I owe you nothing. Here, I said, is the stillest place we have hit on yet in this busy conversation, and neither one of us the less pleased." Bonnie Prince Billy-ish?

"I sold my wife body to my best friends.
I have never seen such gangbang party." Shellac all the way.

"Whiles out with a vast deal of agitation. She had asked of Captain Sang" Leonard Cohen and Christopher Walken.

I think this stuff is pretty amazing. It should be noted that some of these have been more or less modified to a certain standard of grammer. There's about 2 paragraphs of babel in every email, most of which cuts of mid sentence and picks up inside some other random sentence.

We've had a couple rehearsals in this last week, which is very exciting because this band does not rehearse. As Taylor said earlier, we're in the process of looking at properties for a living/rehearsal space. So, this week's rehearsals were spent mostly learning and playing more new songs! And making some interesting variations to old songs, such as "The Awful Things" and "All Her Crooked Ways". It's funny, Wylie pointed out how every time we get into playing "Crooked Ways" we have some new idea or change to make to it. It's one of those "works in progress" I suppose". The new songs learned are called "Like It's Something" and "They Call Me Wilderness" and we'll play them on Wedensday night at the Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles.

Hopefully some more news to come on all the residency-related issues surrounding Simon Dawes. Bye, homies.
-Blake

A Place to Call Home

So we're in the process of finding a spot for the 4 of us to live in together finally. After searching and searching it seems as though our prayers have been answered, but I can't be too sure. I don't want to count my eggs before they proverbially hatch.

Again, we're playing at the hotel cafe on the 10th at 8pm and it's 21+. We're also still pulling for those February residencies.

Lastly, I added a demo of 'All Her Crooked Ways' onto today's blog. I recorded this with garageband the day after it was written. I hope you enjoy it.

All Her Crooked Ways (demo version)


LOVE,
Taylor

Just Friends

Best wishes of love from Joe Kaplan and his French boy slave, C-3PO.

New Years Pics

Homie in the yellow flannel is our buddy Matt. Today is Matt's 22nd birthday. Happy Birthday Matt!