I'm donating some money today to the Red Cross on behalf of the Chilean relief effort. Chile's always been this sort of magical place to me. I'm a big fan of Chilean author Isabel Allende who's work a lot of takes place in her homeland. It's a bit helpless seeing the earth devastate itself and the people living on it like it has recently. Earthquakes, tsunamis. Whole towns ripped up. Cracked. Not much you can do to stop one of these things. When mother nature wants to yawn and stretch, she's gonna do it. It can all make you just sit there dumbstruck, you know? If you'd like to send something their way you can do so via the Red Cross.

Big news to report on the upcoming album. Aside from a trumpet overdub, we have wrapped it all up as of last weekend. That's huge! Matt Girard who you may have seen playing bass for us last summer will be coming in to lay down that final bit of brass that will complete the record. But for all intents and purposes we're in mixing stage.

Rehearsing tonight for our Great Scott show on the 25th in Allston, MA. Info here if you're looking for it. Oh and as I was walking to the train today I noticed Patti Smith on the cover of the Phoenix (our alt weekley for those outside of Boston). They're running an excerpt from her book (the one I mentioned in my previous blog). Pick up a copy of check it out here. I finished the book last week and was sad when it was over. An excellent memoir.

Oh and I might I add that Conan is now on Twitter? Brilliant.

Cheers,

Jen

Still generally avoiding news and—according to my Magic 8 Ball—my outlook is good.

That said, things do filter through and I've been very loosely keeping up. The latest to make the bile rise to my throat is seeing "Jay Leno" and "The Tonight Show" without seeing ", the former host of" sandwiched in between. I was finally able to read the long out of print The Late Shift in three large gulps last week, and even then someone as high up as the president of NBC thought he sucked. It's not even that I think he's evil or anything, just middling. He does nothing interesting with the show. Taking the history of the Tonight Show into account, the man is an anomaly. Completely unimaginative and uninventive. Coco should raise an army led by the undead Johnny Carson, Jack Paar, and Steve Allen. Then they can tie up some tea bags to Leno and repeatedly dunk him in hot water until he comes to his senses.

All major combat missions vis-a-vis this album are complete. We finished up tracking on the record this past weekend. Friday, we had Charles come in to track some bass on this last song. Ate burritos afterward and talked about Cool Runnings quite a bit. (He was in Arkansas last week and this movie kept coming up.) All that's left is some future session to track some brass on a song, but for now, this shit is pretty much done, son. (When will this awesome sauce be released? No clue yet.) But I'm terribly excited to get this mixed, mastered, and out for you to—literally—eat with your ears.

Also been working very, very hard on a new version of the website. Google is ending FTP support for Blogger which, as it happens, is exactly what we use to run part of this site. So, because Google sucks, we will be soon using the vastly superior Wordpress and the site will look as pretty as ever. It'll be awesome.

I can't believe I almost forgot about the Beachcomber show last week. We hadn't played there since 2005, but seeing as how it's about 10 minutes away from our current abode Jen and I played an acoustic set. Reworked a couple of older numbers and messed around with arrangements to accommodate the kind of set we'd be playing. To further compliment the blast from the past: Joni and Mark (aka Ross' parents) were there, and Joni even took a couple of pics like old times (which will be posted soon to our Flickr page). It was really great catching up with them, actually.

With recording all but wrapped up, the weekends are opening up some and I'm looking forward to spending this coming Friday heading into town for coffee and pretending I can afford stuff.

And beginning rehearsals again...

Henry

Currently reading:
Man in the Dark
by Paul Auster