Hello friends, I have been remiss. But I’m back and bursting at the seams with great music for you. So, without further ado:

Floating Action: Floating Action
We played with Seth Kauffman and his band, Floating Action, recently, and it was a delight. They combine aspects of 50’s reggae, hawaiian music and loose Stonesy grooves, frosted with [...]

Whoever decided to call it (and the title track) “Surf’s Up” either is pretty far out of his mind or has a pretty dark sense of humor. Turns out, it’s both.

The problem with recording is always that the live energy and the ‘vibe’ that a live performance creates, gets squashed and sucked dry until you’re left with some barely recognizable artifact. It’s like translating something into Japanese and back into English: something gets lost.

Ann Arbor was a great place to lick our immigration wounds and get the rock back rolling. Johnny’s speakeasy (built in the 1870’s as a fruit cellar) was one of the most unique places we’ve ever played and the good vibes there washed away the recent memories of kevlar and ponytails and triplicate forms. Thanks [...]

When we arrived at the Canadian border for our Montreal and Toronto gigs, we had no idea that we were about to enter a different dimension. The ponytailed, Kevlar-clad Canadian immigration officer seemed nice enough as she took our documents and paperwork and started her online research, but two hours later, as she conferred with one colleague after another without ever looking our way, things weren’t looking so smooth.

On Friday, we played the gorgeous new Brooklyn venue, Bell House. Skippy, who runs it (and also runs union hall), always makes us feel at home, and Friday was no exception. We did an early show, together with my old friend chris moore (moore n sons - check em out!), and then there was a [...]

2:43PM Thursday, February 26, 2009
Not exactly the road blog I envisioned. I’m sitting in the emergency room waiting room at the Vance County Hospital somewhere near the Virginia border waiting to get an EKG for some persistent chest pains. My images of being shuttled breathlessly into the emergency room and hooked up to beeping, humming, [...]

We just saw the final cut of our brand new video for “Walk on Thin Air” for the first time today…It’s like David Lynch and Buster Keaton made a short film together.

For the first five or six songs of our set, these two girls were reenacting the kama sutra on the edge of the stage right in front of me. It was, er, a bit distracting, but not the kind of thing I wanted to discourage per se.