Thursday, August 27, 2009

playing The Local 269 on Thursday, September 3

come check me out at The Local 269 at 10:15 on Thursday, September 3.

it's actually my first Manhattan gig after playing out in Brooklyn for a lot of this year, so i'm pretty psyched about it. it's a new-ish venue and i have the last slot of the evening, which is a good sign i think.

The Local 269 is in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, at 269 East Houston St. on Houston and Suffolk.

"the walls are tumbling down"

from the forthcoming LP "The Zero Years".

[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "THE WALLS ARE TUMBLING DOWN" ]]]

my first LP -- "The Zero Years"

as i put the finishing touches on my upcoming EP "Broken Homes in Bexar County" i've started to work quite a bit on my next album, which will be a full-length. the songs i've posted more recently -- "the first time" and "the restoration of the western shoreline" -- will be on it.

a little while back i said i was going to call it "heard scenes", which is ok i guess, but i've been thinking about a slightly different direction for it. most of the songs are shaping up to be about the events of the last decade or so, and even the ones like "the first time" that are more upbeat are tinged with a little bit of longing for lost innocence or whatever, so i'm going to call it "The Zero Years", which i think is a pretty cool name and struck me as being a good label for the 2000s, especially for those of us frustrated with the bush administration and the harsh and often hollow culture that existed in the country at that time (and still lingers even while there's been a little bit of daylight recently).

i've talked a little about this before, but i'm approaching the recording much differently than i approached "Broken Homes". for one thing, i used a lot of virtual instruments and digital processing on the "Broken Homes" stuff, and while the slightly synthetic nature of that sound gave the EP a weird vibe that felt right for those songs, lately i've been trying to work with only sounds that i record myself. i've been mixing field-recorded samples with an acoustic folk and early rock-n-roll sound, and i'm getting excited about what i've been able to come up with, so i think i'm getting close to nailing an aesthetic for the album that i'm making.

it looks like, realistically, "Broken Homes" won't be on sale until at least mid-September, and i can't decide if it would be cooler to release "The Zero Years" at the very end of 2009 or at the very beginning of 2010, but i'll probably do it in early 2010 anyway just to give the two releases a tiny bit of breathing room.

where's "broken homes"

where's my upcoming EP, "Broken Homes in Bexar County", you've been asking yourself. well, i'm finishing some mastering but it's almost here; just waiting on the mastering studio to put a few finishing touches and then i'm gonna put it right on tunecore, which will export it out to amazon and itunes and all those places.

dude

dude. haven't blogged in a while, but that doesn't mean there's not much going on -- i have a bunch of stuff i've been working on and my first manhattan gig coming up.

more details in a bit...