Recording Ends - Tour Begins

Dear all:

Recording is unofficially over, and thus begins the tour blog. I had a grueling week of vocals with mixer Christopher James, getting through all the leads and the vast majority of backing vocals. Everything sounds great, and without the rest of the band I was able to eat at Taco Bell every single night. Delicious. However, we completely ran out of time without finishing six backing vocal tracks. Not wanting to cancel or delay the tour, I will do backing vocals for the remaining tracks on my own in Philly.

In my downtime I had some nice lunches with Peter Torres and manager John Davis. Our friend Jeremy Levy was in town on business and pleasure, and I got to hang out with him on occasion as well. It was during this time that I was pulled over for the worst traffic stop clusterfuck of all time:

1: I pulled into the wrong driveway of a hotel by accident. In attempting to back out of the driveway and onto the street, I was stopped for making an illegal U-Turn (which I wasn’t actually doing)

2: Our rental car had two of three brake lights out, which I am theoretically liable for.

3: I was not carrying my insurance card as again, I was in a rental car. Apparently this does not matter to the state of California.

All told this may add up to $500 + dollars in fines and points on my license. Hopefully the judge will be understanding at my court date.

I also missed Dan Brown’s bachelor party in Vegas, which was disappointing. Rumor has it there was wall to wall gambling and drinking with very little sleep.

But all inconvenience aside, we started our tour on Saturday, which is fucking awesome. I left the studio at 1:30 am Saturday morning, packed my bags, and was picked up to go to LAX at 4am. McKenzie and I met up at the Detroit airport and cabbed it to the venue there. Larkin and Briks, having spent the week at home preparing and gathering supplies for the tour, had driven from Philly the night before.

Its great to be playing live again. We’re on tour with Under the Influence of Giants (UTIOG) and Young Love, two IDJ bands who are right up are alley stylistically. Later we’ll be joined by PlayRadioPlay! from Philly back to LA.

I’ll give you a more complete update on the first leg of the tour after the Philly show…

See you soon.

Matt