americans in france lost jobs and beige days

Poor, Sick, Sweaty, happy.

2010-05-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

Making a record in a proper studio for the first time has been a magical experience. The kind and extremely capable folks at Sound Of Music (and the environment of the 4 story building itself) made it easy to relax and focus on the task at hand. I can't say enough about our engineer John Morand, he is a casual professional who has great ideas and is not afraid to try (and sometimes suggest) strange new things. Having sometimes band member Paul Finn (who we affectionately call "the suit" in the studio) has been great too. He is a nerd and a genius.
Our record is the first full-length to be made on their 2 inch tape machine which had been trapped in the basement due to a fire next door to SOM. Recently a new stair case was built that allowed them to move the multiple thousand pound machine out of the basement and thankfully into our lives. We tracked 7 songs the first day and the rest the next and got three songs completed with over-dubs and vocals the following day.
We were hoping to finish the thing in three days due to the fact that I just got fired and am not sure how I'm going to afford to pay for the three to five days it will take to get this thing "in the can" but we quickly came to the conclusion that this was something we are going to be proud of when it's finished as long as we don't rush it too much.
Coming home was a harsh hangover. I arrived jobless with some kind of lung infection and a trashed home with no air conditioning (or fan) on a 95 degree day. I tried to get some much needed rest which was thwarted by the heat and the coughing. When I woke up sweaty and decided to go out for a taco, I noticed that I had a flat tire. It all happens at once like that sometimes doesn't it? Having the rough mixes and the May 12th date to get back to SOM has been a much needed silver lining... that and the fact that I'll be in Florida until then.
We got two donations to our poor attempt at fund raising to make our record and I would like to personally thank Richard and Joy Allen for their contributions. I will be sending the roughs of the songs as they are completed. Donate and you can have them too!
The next date we have booked is May 12th.

Beige Days Begin

2010-04-07T00:50:00.000-07:00

The songs are ready and the date is set: we're making a new record Beige Days (and we need your help).

We visited Sound of Music Studios in lovely and sketchy Richmond, Va and decided to record there. It is a beautiful place that has hosted some of our favorite bands and offers three floors of excellent lodging and analog recording.

The thing should take just three days if all go's according to plan. Those day's are within this very month and we are creating new songs and getting the other ones we've been playing practiced and amateurishly recorded in our home. We're hearing some of these songs now for the first time now and are getting anxious to get up there and get it "in the can" as we say in the biz.

The biz sucks if you are trying to make money in it, which we are not (success can suck it). That being said, we are broke. We would like to humbly ask for your donation of a dollar or more to put towards the costs of making it in this fine studio. Here is what we offer in return for your generous contribution:

1.00$ Files for the entire record as soon as it is digitally mastered
10.00$ Files for all the demos we do (includes extra songs that don't end up on the record).
20.00$ All that other stuff and a t shirt
50.00$ Hand made artwork and demo CD's
100.00$ Beige Day's on vinyl (and a 45 to be named later)
100.00$ + the top contributors will be listed in the liner notes as "executive producers"

Help us support this public funding approach to making our record. We don't make music to get money, the contrary actually. We also don't make a lot at our jobs (and have no desire to) . It may seem strange to try and sell your record to people before it's recorded but come on...a dollar? If you can't afford the dollar but can refer a few people to donate we'll totally hook you up! You vote with your money everyday without realizing it. Even if you don't support this venture, be conscious about spending and thanks for reading!

: Go Here To Donate (seriously, we haven't got any yet)

Here is a demo version of one of the songs, I'll be posting these here for streaming now and then.

spring 2009 tour with paulie

2010-03-11T18:26:00.000-08:00

pretzelvania

pf plays with gun and vacuum cleaner after show at random party in virginia

hello

baby

florida

magic eyeball lighter

tcb

kh discovers (his love of) black velvet onesie in florida

ron liberti t-shirts and electric tulips, baltimore

the hustler, melbourne, fla

love

fall 2009 lost job tour

2010-03-11T11:50:00.000-08:00

i think he wore that Harlem t-shirt the rest of the tour

jacksonville doppel

kansas city

florida

kh so mild

alabama

new orleans

somehow we ended up on a ferry at 5 am

swamp baby! new orleans

brooke melts faces with hairy lamb, new orleans

best drums (borrowed) ever, new orleans

drawn on chalkboard outside Circle Bar, new orleans

balls

brad and his magic box in lawrence, kansas

austin, texas

botanical gardens

now

sleep

we love morgantown, wv 123 Pleasant

b. jangles and yellow leaves after chicago show at The Bloodline

Rave sleep-over in a Cleveland crack den

2009-11-13T22:43:00.001-08:00

Hola from the road. It's Friday the 13Th and we feel the sub woofers vibrating up through our air mattresses. Friday night in Cleveland isn't as rock and roll as the town's reputation would have you believe.

The last two day's have been a bit of a roller-coaster. Morgantown was easily the best show of our trip thus far. We were the only band and as a result decided to play as many songs as we could. The crowd was nuts! We played our first (2) encores! And they actually had a real jukebox and not one of those damn "Touch Tunes" things.

Here is my problem with those terrible machines:

1) A jukebox should contain actual physical copies of music

2) The song selection should reflect the tastes of the proprieter, the clientel and the region.

3) If I pay a dollar for one song, I should own that song

4) It just takes one turbo who likes the Stone Temple temple pilots to kill your buzz

Jukebox expenditures are the biggest drain on the few funds I have.

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh preceded Morgantown and here is what I have to say about that: The trekkie who runs that place is on our shit list. We showed up at a normal load in time and saw him in the door so we knocked. He stood there not acknowledging us. So we knocked again. Nothing. We gave up and shot the breeze, figuring he would eventually let us in to unload our gear. The door swung open and the first thing this guy says to us is "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?" he claimed to be on the phone but clearly it was a speaker phone or we would have noticed that (we could see him in there seemingly just standing still). We found out the next day that this is par for the course for this notorious grump. He is mentioned as such in some "top ten worst.." lists in a couple of nationally circulated publications. In a twisted way it was a privilege to meet such a notoriously insufferable dum dum. (he is not pictured here. these people were cool)

Cleveland

I am starting to understand why they call this place "Cranky's". The relentless bleeps, booms and blip blops prevented us from sleeping (despite the sleeping pills) so we decided to pull a publicity stunt. Life handed us a rave and we'll be damned if we didn't turn it into raveonaide. It was time for Kent to create his raver-alter-ego MC Fuckit. He did so and gooved with the turbo's at the rave (our band opened for) tonight. The Malibu shots he took knocked him out already. So before the pills take hold and I can fall asleep here in the crack den upstairs: here are some stills, a video will follow

see video below: mc fuckit 2009

passing out is awesome

2009-11-11T00:09:00.001-08:00

everyone keeps passing out, its great!

Day Two: the Blue Nile

2009-11-06T10:49:00.001-08:00

The sunset drive through Virginia was elegant. My rose colored biker shades psychedelified the autumn colors and we listened to Creedence at a high volume as we cruised down a back roads route towards Harrisonburg. One thing about Virginia is you see a lot of curiously named geographical features. We passed through a town called Tightsqueeze, crossed under consecutive overpasses named Music and Buisness, stopped for gas in Lynchstation (wtf?) and decided to wait to pee rather than pulling off at an exit that simply read "Hurt". When we did pull off the highway and turned on our navigation system it gave us a direction to take "Trickle to Mule Station".
We met up with our tight bro's Invisible hand at the Blue Nile which is a great club with an Ethiopian Restaurant upstairs and a bar with a stage on the ground floor. Every band member gets two PBR's and a generous vegetarian platter (Casey was pumped about this).
There were four bands: Invisible Hand, Eternal Summers, us and Preacher. Preacher is an interesting outfit. They were the local band and so they played last, starting the show outside the club where people were smoking. They stomped their feet and sang acapella then proceeded to march around the entire venue passing out playbill style pamphlets containing some lyrics and their set list. In between songs the frontman Johan litterally started preaching and carrying on about things that sounded vaugely christian but it was tough to tell if he was putting us on or not. We made a bet regarding whether or not they actually jammed for the lamb. They don't by the way. Their drummer is my friend Kenny's doppelganger. We'll se Kenny in Florida and I'll post their pictures side by side and let you be the judge.
Now we're in DC staying at Kent's folks house. His mom just made us sandwhiches and I am about to "jam" with Kent's 7 year old nephew who is bringing his guitar over here shorty. Tonight we play at Comet Ping Pong, a pizza and table tennis emporium. We have deffinatly not started roughing it yet but we know it's coming so we're going to enjoy the hospitality while we can.
Also, we just added a show in NYC at Bowery Electric tomorrow (saturday 11/07)

So you wanna shows blog?

2009-11-04T23:08:00.000-08:00

Here it is! Americans in France has entered the blogoverse! We do so in honor of the tour we are now on, of which it is the end of day one.

I guess you should have a bit of a sense of the strange circumstances in our lives going into the tour:

Casey works for an architecture firm in New York city from our home in Chapel Hill. With the tour approaching, she was gearing up to crunch in some extreme late night hours in an attempt to cram a months worth of work into the 4 days before we hit the road. Her hard drive crashed on day two and took another couple of days to fix. This would have pissed her boss off a lot more if he wasn't an extremely cool dude (and a traveling musician himself). Big props to J.C. (not that one dummy).

Kent recieved word the day before our first show that he would not have a job to come home to when we returned. He is taking it very well considering it was a big-boy job. There is something excellent about what Aerosmith would call "livin' on the edge". His van has a brand new transmission and we are just going to live in the motherfucker if we have to.

I had just spent a month working the potato harvest in northern Maine and returned to Chapel Hill to play some shows and finish work on the Shithorse cassette tape (now available). On the way south I decided to stop in New York to break up the trip and stay with Kent's sister and our dear friend Anne-Marie Howard. With a pocket full of farm money I racked up a big-city bar tab.

Later at the apartment in Brooklyn, I tried to stay awake with Anne-Marie until she left for JFK to fly to San Francisco that morning. I was exhausted by this point however and failed.

I woke up a few hours later to find the place empty and got my stuff together to finish the drive. All of my stuff that is, except for one crucial element: my keys which turned out to be en route to San Francisco. In her defense we have the same key chain.

Unaware of this, I propped the door of her building open with a pack of cigarettes and used a coat hanger to break into my truck. Finding no key's within the vehicle I walked a few blocks in the cold rain back to her building and found my cigarettes lying out of reach behind the locked door to her nice, warm and dry building.

This was an expensive situation to remedy and when I got back to town I struggled to pick up shifts at my old job and left town with 50 dollars.

It's a long way to the top indeed. However, if our first show in Greensboro was any indication, this is going to be a great trip. Greensboro is one of those towns with a revolving door of venues. Places open and close shortly there after (or stop hosting shows) and a new one will pop up somewhere. I hope Artistika (ARTISTIC-KA) sticks around.

The show was put on by Wuag 103.1 fm. The station has been playing our record a lot since it was released and we were happy to meet all the dj's that have been playing it and thank them. We played first to a crowd that seemed to top 100 people and the sound in that place was incredible!

Lake played after us, who more or less started out as a Fleetwood Mac cover band (I am told). They had about 8 people in there band and were very talented musicians and nice people. They also served as the backing band for Karl Blau, who headlined the show. He is a prolific character by the looks of his merch table. He had 15 LP's on that thing! This made our one album, one t-shirt, one sticker operation look like the equivalent of the kid's table.

We decided to drive back to Kents place and stay in a comfy sleeping situation. The morning finds us pumped to drive to Virginia.