What's Bacharaching?

I'm a HUGE Burt Bacharach fan. He's a guilty pleasure that I feel absolutely no guilt about. I mean, just look at him:

Amazing.

Anyway, today I typed "Burt" into my iTunes search bar and "Slow Jamz" by Kanye West and Twista showed up! This is interesting, because Burt Bacharach is one of the best songwriters of all time and "Slow Jamz" is one of the greatest hip hop songs of all time. I did some research, and that song is built from a sample of Luther Vandross (the pitch-shifted "are you gonna be, are you gonna be, are you gonna beeeeee, well well well well" is Mr. Vandross chipmunked-up by Mr. West in the studio). The Luther Vandross track that the sample came from is his version of Burt Bacharach's "A House Is Not A Home." YES!!!

ANYWAY, we just got added to a Russian Circles show in Chicago this upcoming Saturday, July 5. RS is doing 2 shows in a day, an all ages one and a 21+ one. We've been invited to play with them on the all ages bill, an early show that starts at 7 PM. We're very excited because we're overdue to play Chicago and also we get to hear Russian Circles play "Death Rides a Horse" really loudly for free. What more could you possibly want out of life?*

*(the answer to this rhetorical question is, of course, Russian Circles covering anything by Burt Bacharach. They could do a sweet stoner metal version of "What the World Needs Now Is Love". I'm sure of it)

wow......

I'm not sure who's seen this yet, but our friend Sam Pura sent me this link today and this is pretty unbelieveable. I would recommend skipping forward to about 1 minute in, since it starts kind of slow:


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

No news is good news.

Actually, that's not true. No news is completely boring.

We've been getting ready for our Weezer Tribute band/Thor Axe show this Thursday, so we haven't been doing much with our real band. We just started rehearsing for our first video. We're playing a song in a different way and trying to do it as a one-take thing, so we have to..uh...be able to play it well.

If anybody is interested, the Weezer Tribute/Thor Axe show is taking place on Thursday at the Stagger Inn in Edwardsville. It's 21+ and starts at 9 PM. There's a very small cover charge. Thor Axe is probably the loudest thing that has ever been at the Stagger Inn, and we're probably going to piss off some hippies.

In the meantime, read this thing that I wrote today when I was insanely bored.

Getting there

Last night I mailed off the disc containing the files for our last (and longest) song to the mastering people. They'll get started on that later this week. When they are done the actual music that will eventually get burned onto cds and/or pressed onto vinyl will be complete, just shy of a year in the making.



This is really funny:

Clownvis Presley

I guess we were a bit far away at the RFT awards ceremony last night to notice that the announcer, Clownvis Presley, is the scariest thing that has ever lived:


Wow.

Also, new Crawdaddy article is up.

Recap

We didn't win anything at the Riverfront Times awards last night. It was kind of a relief at the time, the awards ceremony was pretty uncomfortable and it would have been weird to have to go up there and make a speech. We witnessed a few clumsy acceptance speeches and a few that turned into pleas to the RFT of "how about an interview?" and "we want a cover story!" from the podium. The ceremony was hosted by "Clownvis", which is a clown/Elvis impersonator. Weird...

I'm waiting, with nothing to do. I'm wai-ay-ay-aiting, just a-waiting on you.

It appears that we're going through a period of time where a lot of little things are happening, but it feels like absolutely nothing is happening.

-We're playing a show later this month (June 26 to be exact) in Edwardsville, IL where we're performing a Weezer tribute set. It's been pretty fun to obsessively figure out how to play these songs, work on the vocal harmonies, and tweak our amps to make them sound as "Weezer-ish" as we can. We're only hitting the period between 1994-1998, so just Blue album, Pinkerton and a few key B-Sides. It will be a fun night, Thor Axe is opening the show.

-We're working out the ideas for our first Youtube video. The only thing I can say for sure is that it involves our dining room table.

-Tonight is the Riverfront Times Music Awards night at the Pageant in St. Louis. We're up for Best Indie Rock band and Best Live Act. I've never been able to attend the awards ceremony (Griffin and Aaron went last year I believe), so it should be fun. If we win, we'll be able to put it next to our "Best Indie Rock" award from 2006 on top of our toilet.