back to the ways of old...

yup! i got my new laptop and yes i am at the coffee shop. welcome back to the old routine- two rambling, bottomless entries every week.
once again i am having great difficulty getting some shalloboi shows booked. grrrrr. isn't it supposed to get easier as you go along and are actually able to draw people? steve albertson, who comes into where i work a lot because he used to work there too, says no. he's been playing in a band for over ten years and they are able to draw a really good sized crowd and he still has problems getting shows booked. so there tyler- don't take it so hard.
i am trying to get an east coast tour going already- but i haven't gotten a response from any of the places that i've emailed. i'm beginning to want to just make it a short trip down to kansas city- the record bar seems to always be game to have us play and it's a super nice place so why not? i just found a diy venue in iowa city- that'd be on the way. we could play in st. louis probably and then possibly bloomington or ft. wayne. not sure though- i should wait a while to see if anything bubbles to the surface. even though stefanie doesn't like to play in new york that much i still really like to do it. i emailed a really cool-looking place in detroit that i'm really hoping we get to play at- it's a strange loft-space kind of place.
'all hope is blind' is almost done. it's very strange- we've been working on it every week at least for the past few months and it seems to be getting finished completely on its own. something's been done literally every week and basically most of it's been done with others besides me doing work so it's very strange in that it feels almost like it's finishing itself completely independent of me. awesome! we have 8 tracks finished out of 18. of those 18 i think there is one that we haven't done the main tracks for yet and that's going to be rectified either today or friday and then i'm going to do more work on it as the week drags on. i am going to need to get together with katelyn and chris most likely after i get back from kansas city where billy and i are going to do some recording. i think we have about seven songs to do. that trip alone will finish at least three tracks. after i get back and get more strings recorded that will probably settle the bulk of the remaining three tracks. i'm going to also get the entire trio together to do some live recording on two tracks that i'm not quite sure what to do with- both have been around for ages and ages. the way that we record has really began to reveal itself to me through this process. basically we did the first 'all hope is blind' track back in november of 2006 or so (it was '4am train'- which we did because i was thinking of playing it at the acoustic show in kansas city that we did at davies uptown and i needed a track to put on a cd for billy) and that track was the first to be finished in about december of 2008. the next was 'down to the willows' which i think was done late one night after the new year in january or february of 2007. everything else seems to have been shelved while we worked on other projects and then picked upagain later on- i got back to work on my own in july of last year and that's where the bulk of the album's tracks were started. we got to the drums and guitars recording in march and there's been a steady stream of those that remained during that period of time. a few of those are already done. 'under the flood' took 10 months to finish, but it's done now. it's very strange to me to see it all start to line up like that because i'm used to not being able to trace any of the process. i took to dating the tapes and tracks- when they are started and when they are finished. i never did that with anything else and the other records have always been very haphazard and a majority of the work was always done by me so it was always a very chaotic and capricious process. a lot of times i'd schedule recording trips just to give myself motivation to get tracks started and going... good stuff...
really, thinks are going pretty well i should say. yeah, it's a bit of a bitch to get shows going right now, but i have a few things on the backburner. something should turn up- the year won't be a complete waste of time. it feels like it might be more of a recording year- kind of like 2007. we hardly played any shows that year and spent almost all of our time working on 'down to sleep.' ideally since we won't release anything in 2010 (how did we get all the way to 2010 i say? HOW!?) we can concentrate more on playing shows. yes indeedy.
i am continuing to chip away at the weeks at work. i'm at week 31 right now. i'm really looking forward to getting out of town for a few days. i had a great time going to kc last time. it was kind of odd because i hardly did anything in that entire three days- i didn't even manage to make it over onto the kansas side. i always manage to do one of my long drives when i'm there- i absolutely love those. my long drives at night in kansas city- a simple pleasure that must've started when i was in high school. it's nice to still be able to carry on the tradition as i get older. strangely i really don't feel any differently to how i did when i was a teenager. i just feel like i'm much smarter than i was back then (which if this was not the case then we'd really have something to worry about here) and i can see things a bit clearer- although the big picture of my own life continues to elude me. realistically i don't think anyone my age can see the big picture of their own life. i need to quit worrying about 'what i'm doing' because what i'm doing is what i'm doing right now and it shouldn't be so much of an issue. of course, worrying about this is going to be an inevitability. there's a girl named zea who comes into work pretty much every day and she's two years older than me and a bit of a kindred spirit- she started telling me about how she sits around a lot just asking herself 'what the fuck am i DOING?' it was nice to know that other people ask that question- most people act like this question is nothing to worry about or even think of in passing. i guess that that might be it in a nutshell- most people do their best not to even let it enter their minds. so there you go. stop worrying about it. sometimes i feel myself getting closer to the point where i'm worrying about stability and all of that other stuff. i just need to remind myself that all i need to do is get my debt down and then stability will come. the instable elements in my life all revolve around my debt- which i have been able to cope with a bit better these days. it's going to happen goddammit! argh!
i'm going to go email a bunch of new places. bye bye, then.