NEW SONG:
The Other ShoeHey right, so we have a new record coming out June 7th and are really excited about it. It's really long and themed, so if you are really cool you might immediately hate the thought of it, but if you are kind of chill and patient you can probably hang and finish reading the rest of this post, and then wait 2 and a half months doing whatever else you do with your life, and then buy the record. Or you could just download the whole thing right now
HERE.
Anyways, the new record. If you've been paying attention to our band for the last few years, you probably are aware that we've been joking/threatening the fact that we were working on a musical/rock opera/themed album/play/whatever. We came up with the idea right after Hidden World came out, which featured a song called, wait for it - "David Comes to Life" (C/O
JADE TREE RECORDS). That song was written in about 10 minutes I think at a practice in between 2 recording session for Hidden World, and almost didn't make it onto the record because some of us thought it was too simple sounding. Little did they know that 5 years later, they'd have to be still playing it every show after it became such a "hit". These are the things that punk rock "legends" are made "of". Another true fact about that song was that originally it was going to be called "Ian Comes To Life" and was going to be about our old friend Ian Dickson, who was doing about 5 shows for us a month in New York at the time (the other song that almost didn't make it onto Hidden World was "Manqueller Man", which we haven't played in about two years).
So we decided while we were writing the song (right at the practice space we were renting for $10 an hour) that making it about Ian was kind of weird and awkward, so we invented this character named "David" because that's a pretty generic name but also has a lot of cool connotations (only from the Bible) but mostly because it was not the name "Ian". Also co-incidentally, we'd just met our friend David Eliade (who made us call the song David as a tribute to him). Anyhow, after Hidden World we realized we were out of ideas for full length albums, because we had gotten used to the easy-going pace of putting out 23435494 7" singles a year that we'd been doing for the previous 5 years. We decide the only thing more ridiculous than putting out a 73 minute punk record, was to just say fuck it and do a musical. We honestly came up with this idea in like 2006 and have been meaning to do it since then. Some of the riffs on this new record are from BEFORE that (I can remember practicing with Jonah in the basement of the house I lived in 3 houses ago, and right before we went to Japan for the first time with his other band Career Suicide and writing the riff from the new song "The Truest Road" [sorry, this part won't make a whole lot of sense because you won't be able to hear this song for a while yet] at the same time as we were writing the riff for the song that we eventually gave to the Revelation Records comp we were on back then). Also all the christmas time charity 7" single songs were intended for this record ("Davids Christmas" and "Davids Plan") but we decided to nix them because they aren't really that good (they are both amazing) and because we got on a real roll writing songs for this thing.
So I shit you not, this is the record we started thinking about for our 2nd album. We basically just wrote ChemCom by accident because we weren't ready to deal with David Comes to Life yet. I know that people are into ChemCom and stuff and it one like an award or whatever, but honestly it was like an accident that we even did that record, we just sort of started practicing for David and Chemcom happened instead, without us really meaning to make it. It was like if for your whole life (since 2006) you've been in love with this one girl and try to impress her at school or whatever, your job (what do you people do who read this, anyway?) and like put all your creative energies into this one girl, and then by accident somehow at a party you are making out with her lamer older sister who plays the flute and is REALLY into science (and then later you win an award for it, or whatever, no big deal) and your friends are all kind of like "wtf" and you secretly are too, but you just go with it and pretend like that's what you meant to do all along.
We started writing for it in the early summer of 2010, right after we got home from a short tour through the badlands and then the prairies of Canada ("The Other Badlands"). We would all wake up at 9.30am to watch the early World Cup game, have breakfast, watch the 11.00am World Cup game, go on the internet for 2 hours, watch the 2.30pm World Cup game (sometimes together) and then finally at 5.30pm, start practicing. We did that like 5 days a week for the entire summer when we weren't touring again and wrote about 40 songs. After we got back from Miami in September 2010, me and Jonah got dropped off in New York and recorded bed tracks for 27 of those songs in like 5 days (that's 2 seperate drum takes for most of the songs, done in 3 days) and then spent the next four months bouncing between studios in New York and Toronto, and going on tour until 3 days ago we finally had an approved master (the 4th attempt) and are here right now announcing the record.
There are a lot of different things that are going to be happening over the next few months - lot's of little 7"'s and special shows and things to pay attention to. I will talk about them all, but another place you can check out is this website
davidcomestolife.com that will have some cool stuff on it.
Anyways, LATER.
