IN RUSSIA PICTURE POSES FOR YOU

If you are drunk.

LEEDS

Hi we love Leeds. When I was younger I didn't have a lot of context for music so I thought that since there was a "Live At Leeds" album by The Who, it must have been some mecca of rock music. That album was all I really knew about Leeds, but I think I started making associations through it to every other thing I would learn about England..The Beatles, soccer, the queen, The Rolling Stones, Donk...to my mind all that British stuff came from Leeds. Leeds was one of the first places we ever played in England, after Liverpool, and one of the first places I'd ever seen in the country. I'd already forgotten all the connections I had made when I was a kid so I wasn't expecting much, but we always had fun there and still stay at our good friend Jase's house whenever we're in the North. We even visited to place where Live at Leeds was recorded...a kind of underwhelming modern looking student place. But some of our best UK shows have been in Leeds at the Fenton when Jase was still booking shows there. We've had a lot of downtime there and have eaten many meals in that Indian restaurant that used to be a public toilet, and watched many football games there, like when Spurs beat Chelsea to win the League cup. We are going there again for a Dr Martens party in a few weeks that looks like it will be fun as well and is free if you rsvp or something.

THIS TOUR

Hey wow, we are going on tour AGAIN. It's like all we every do. That's not true of course, because you know that we are almost done recording our new album, which we wrote during the world cup and recorded during the start of the prem this year. But like the last two times we tried to record albums in one go, it keeps getting interupted by playing concerts. I can tell you now that we all feel like we "dodged a bullet" by not having to go on the tour with Against Me in October. It was too much, no one really likes them anyhow, and we'd been to England to many times on this record. We're excited to be here now tho, on our own (literally - I"m the only person in the Air Canada arrivals lounge in Heathrow right now as I dictate this to my assistant). Recording albums is really fun, so it's almost like you don't want to have too much fun all at once. You want to spread it out. Doing chemcom was like a lavish 18 course meal spread over 9 months. If there was another metaphor involving "9 months" I would have, I just couldn't think of anything. With that one we recorded a bit, went on tour, came back to record a bit more, went on a huge tour, recorded some more. At this point it was mostly just 2 or 3 people in the studio tops so it was like working because you had to be there and actually do stuff everyday and produce something at the end, but not like band work because it wasnt 6 people crammed in a tiny room for 2 weeks straight. We switched studios a bunch of times and kept things fresh and just added and added over half a year. And then went on tour when we needed more money.

This time is mostly going to be the same. Me and Jonah got dropped off in NY (well dropped off in DC, where we got a bus to NY) after a tour to Florida, and we tracked 27 songs on our own with this guy Shane Stonebeck who is the chillest engineer there is. Jonah left after doing drum takes for all 27 songs in like 3 days because he had to go get married or something, and I stayed and did all my guitar beds and some leads over the next 4 days. It was a very intense schedule of starting to track at around 2pm, after I'd got a big bag of groceries, and then we'd just track straight until like midnight if I had to go out the party that night, or some nights we'd just push until 4am and track until I feel asleep. My bed was a pullout couch in the front lobby of the studio, so my head was about 2 feet from 25th street, which woke me up every morning as it got busy. Shane usually ordered his dinner after retired, and the day would start all over again at 2 when I finally got the courage to "wake me up at 11" as he would tell me the night before.

So we did that for a while and then went on some other tour. The stuff we'd done in New York was mailed to my parents house in the suburbs while we were away for the weekend in Vegas. If agoraphobia was setting in inside our Vegas adventure, it was in full fledge now - they pulled us screaming out of our Vegas rooms, dragged us down the leather elevators to the lounge and stuffed us into waiting taxis to bring us to the airport, the glitter and fresh air of Las Vegas never actually touching us. We got into our planes, and Josh picked us up from the airport and drove us straight to another studio when we started working on the next part of the album. We did that for the next 2 weeks until we're basically read to go to the next stage, which is vocals. Josh, Damian and I met several times at Dufferin Mall to hash out the structure and narrative of the David Comes To Life story. So the last few weeks have just been writing lyrics and working on the story. That's coming along very nicely, so we thought it was the right time to go on tour again:

NOV 18 LISBON Portugal @ ZDB
We've never played in Portugal and have always wanted to. A few of us have been on vacation. Sandy is Portoguese, so she knows lots of German guys who live here. I came here on a road trip last summer to Lisbon and Porto. I told some guys I met at a soccer bar on my street this weekend that I was going to Portugal to play music and they were impressed, especially with the band name. Maybe the dude from Animal Collective will come hang out with Sandy?

NOV 19 PORTO Portugal @ Plan B
Porto is a nice funny little town. Everything kind of on a slant, not sure how we are gonna be able to get our gear into the club without using a funicular. Which Jonah would be really into.
anyhow.

NOV 20 MADRID Spain @ Palacio De Deportes
You might remember us playing here a few times but at way smaller venues. We thought the way things where going we'd be playing bathrooms and laundry mats in Madrid before long. This is the first Arcade Fire tour show we're playing, so no one really knows what to expect. We've played in front of really big crowds before, but mostly at the tail end of massive festivals where there's already been lots of cider imbibbed. These shows we figure will just be 11,000 very polite upstanding indie rock adults waiting for us to be finished playing, rather than rip stuff off the walls or throw their shows at us, like we're used to. The fact that shows this big can even have walls is a foriegn concept. Seeing this band play in SNL this weekend made it just that much more surreal.

NOV 21 BARCELONA Spain @ Palau Sant Jordi
Pretty big place in the haunted olympic cat village. I hung out at the Espanyol stadium that's right next door a few years ago to catch my breath, and it was full of cats. The cemetary on the south side of this hill...it's full of haunted cats. Will probably end up pulling a "vegas" here. We have the next day to hang out so if you know if Feran Aldria is in town or can take us to a bullfight or whatever, get in touch.

NOV 23 BORDEAUX France @ Heretic
Somewhere I don't really know anything about. I think garage music is popular here? And wine or something? The team used to be good, and then they traded that guy Chamahk who looks like a dinosaur, to the wrong team. We usually have a great time in the tiny French cities we play.

NOV 24 MARSEILLE France @ Le Dome
This place looks really cool, I just googled it (the Dome, not the town). All I know about this place is it's meant to be seedy in the way stop-over towns on the water are. I stopped over here on a train ride from Paris to Barcelona, got off the train to go outside, took one long look at the place and got back on the train, to have dreams of the first round of the Champions League where we would beat Marseille for ever and ever after.

NOV 26 LYON France @ Halle Tony Garnier
The vibe I get from Lyon, having never been there, is from Haneke movies - fast past, ultra modern, small town vibes and secrets and then something creepy happens and you never figure out why. Second city vibes for sure, OL are perrennial also-rans.

NOV 27 Schio (Vicenza)
Very excited for this. Have no idea where it is, what the town is called, anything. Probably a dark exciting northern Italian shithole.

NOV 28 MUNICH Germany @ Zenith
Really disappointed we aren't playing where Bayern plays, a giant stadium that lights up on the outside depending on what team is inside. Really cool. We played Munich before. We took a tour of the hip part of town and found a skate shoe store called "Ughhhhhh".

NOV 29 DUSSELDORF Germany @ Philipshalle
I think we may have flown out of here a few times. Can't remember ever stopping to hang tho. Anyone who could name their city that sounds chill enough to have a good time with though?

NOV 30 BRISTOL England @ Fleece
We played here a loooong time ago, like the first time we ever toured England in like 2004. You can bet that someone told us that a guy from the Varukers or the Exploited or some shit was at the show. Mostly we just played Euchre for ours with Bickle until the show started. We have never been back for a show, but stay in Bristol several times a trip because Ben has a very sweet Aunt who puts us up in her home whenever we show up at all hours of the morning. Plus there is a massive Tesco.

DEC 1 LIVERPOOL England @ Kazimir
Not sure what I can say about this place. Our first ever UK show was in Liverpool.

DEC 2 NOTTINGHAM England @ Rescue Rooms
There is an ice skating rink here. I don't think we've been back since we were DIY. We almost booked a day off on the 1st. THE SHOW BETTER RULE.

DEC 3 LEEDS @ Vice Warehouse Party
It's for Doc Martins.

Hey, so that Lisbon show that got cancelled we've rescheduled. Here is the infos:

Novemeber 18th
Lisbon Portugals
8 Euros @ ZDB
FUCKED UP
some portuguese bands

UH

Hey remember last year when I was obsessed with dip, and also donk? Well now I'm obsessed with camels:

SUNY

Hi everyone. We are playing SUNY Purchase on Friday. Last time we played this college the state police shut the show down and kicked us off the campus because a few wooden barricades fell over while Damian was standing next to them or something. It was really lame and we were not scared. We only played like 2 minutes of music. A few weeks later we flew to England for a festival and that show got shut down after 2 songs because of noise or violence or something. We flew all the way there just for the one show. The festival had no money so we had to fly from Hamilton Ontario on something called "Flyglobespan" which made me really nervous because I hate planes, especially small cheap ones that have to fly out of small markets. We got there safe but as soon as we got to the festival grounds Sandy sat on Burdock root and had to be rushed to the emergency NHS tent located a few feet away from where we were sitting. The Fall took like 2 hours setting up their gear in the precise way needed for Mark E Smith to wander on stage and start randomly messing with every knob (like on the amps, not the people) onstage and like turning amps off and stuff. The Fall asked us to open for them on a tour once a few years ago but we declined because we'd heard a rumour that their deal on tour is they need to borrow the opening bands gear every night and they just wreck it up. Anyways by the time we got onstage 2 hours late (I think some band called The Editors had a hand in fucking us over as well, but I can't remember) at like 2am the soundman started flipping out because he said it was "too loud" and past a noise curfew FOR A TOWN LIKE 5 MILES AWAY. Apparently some priest or bishop or something got woken up by our set a few warrens over and called the bobbies or whatever. Even thought that part actually kind of makes sense, we're pretty sure we got shut down because Damian set up a folding table onstage before we played and then smashed thought it like a wrestler. I was just pissed because I was missing Uffie, who was playing across the field at the same time (I used to like Uffie in 2006 and still it's the #1 joke used against me in the van, almost 5 years later. Either there is nothing else to make fun of me about in 5 years of being perfect or everyone else in the band sucks at making jokes. Also I was watching new Uffie videoes from her new album and they are OK).

The worst part was that band Gang Gang Dance was still scheduled to play AFTER us and obviously couldn't play because our stage got totally shut down after us. We were kind of happy because it's a crazy and hilarious story to fly all the way to another continent and back only to play for 6 minutes, but they were for some reason really pissed so Andy Capper had to buy them a really expensive bottle of wine to calm them down because they couldn't play their set. The WORST WORST part that I forgot to mention before is that they ALSO played AFTER US at the original SUNY debacle, so we almost had got them shut down at that show as well. We played with them again at Coachella a few years later and there were no incidents and I legit think that band is pretty cool anyway. And then a few years later they got their gear stolen, and had to cancel a tour at least once, maybe twice. Bummer pants.

ANYWAYS we are gonna try to play SUNY again, on Friday. If we play a full set great. If we don't, also great. We are pretty chill about stuff like that. I'm missing Ricardo Villalobos in Toronto to play this tho, so it would be great if at least something funny could happen.

Anyways if you could see the pile of empty Halloween candy wrappers next to my computer right now you'd understand why this post is so insane sounding.

Speaking of cancellations, our Lisbon show got cancelled! BY NATO. Thanks a lot Anders Fogh Rasmussen! We are trying to organize a replacement Lisbon show for the same night, so if you have any ideas please don't hesitate to call Sandy Miranda at home or to facebook Jonah Falco.