Ants in my Pants… January 28, 2010
So yesterday I had to change a lightbulb. The ceiling is really high up so I had to step up on a high chair to reach the light. As I descended from the chair I heard a rip in my pants. Turns out that I ripped a hole in my favorite jeans in the lining in the ass region. Dammit! Why do things like this always happen to your favorite pair of jeans. It should have been the crappy ones…dammit.
We’re playing the double door tonight. We’re on first at 8:30pm so don’t be late! (It’s a free show by the way)
Captain Planet January 25, 2010
Greetings People of Earth,
I thought I’d see if I could waste five minutes of your time by sharing some random thoughts with you.
I’ve biked a lot lately. I gave my car away a few months ago so now I bike everywhere. It’s about a 14-mile round trip to our practice space from where I live, so I’m getting some serious legs. It feels good to exercise though. It’s hard to stay active during the winter months. And I haven’t drank any soda since the new year so I’m on a health roll! Wo-hoo!
One thing I’ve noticed while biking is the serious pollution problem in Chicago. The city is often “cloudy” and foggy. I’ve come to realize this isn’t fog, but smog. It makes it hard to breath when biking really fast. The air just smells gross and taste bad. We need to do something about this. It’s frustrating because most cars that pass me are SUVs or trucks that have one person in them. It’s such a waste. Part of me wants gas to go up to $5/gallon again because that’s the only way to get Americans to change their ways. We are a stupid race. I feel like we’re going to keep going down this path until it’s to late. Here’s another example. The other day when I was in the grocery store I bought 2 items and the bag boy put them in individual plastic bags! Things like this drive me crazy! I corrected him and didn’t use any bags. I don’t understand why people aren’t taught to conserve? One more example. I often see people rolling down their car windows and throw trash out on the street! What the hell? Really? I feel like taking a crap on their sleeping pillow…maybe then we can call it even. I’m not the greenest person in the world…and I’m not asking people to become tree-hugging hippies, but we can all do simple things like car-pool and use small cars, use re-usable bags at grocery stores, avoid littering, and use energy efficient bulbs and turn the lights off when we are not in a room.
What is going on in LiO-land? Well we have about 14 songs written for the new album. We’re going to write about 6 more so we have 20 to choose from and we’ll probably go with the 10 that fit best together. We want to start the “real” tracking in April. Hopefully we’ll get desperate mixed soon so you can check it out.
We have a big show at Double Door this week on Thursday…and it’s free!!! So come out and check us out. It’s a 4-band bill and we’re first so come and check it out! See you there.
Out of the Studio – Early Report January 14, 2010
Yo Yo Hey Hey,
“Oh it’s good to be one of us…”, we’ve emerged from the studio bowels with another song below our belts. Actually, it’s not 100% finished, I still need to go back and overdub vocals. But other than that it’s a done deal. We’re going to post a few videos of the ordeal, but I wanted to give you an early report.
We tracked Desperate at I.V. Lab studio in Chicago on Tuesday. We did things really differently than our normal approach, we tracked the whole song live as a band old school style to analog tape! It was super fun. The downside with this method is that it takes a long time to setup. We spent about 4 hours moving mics around and connecting cables before we even played a note! I produced the recording but shared engineering responsibilities with studio owner/engineer Manny. I tried lots of new mics including my new favourite tom mic, the Josephson e-22…it’s so nice…and Steve Albini uses it, so it must be legit. The studio also houses my favorite mixing console, the API 1608. Sorry if things are getting a little to geeky for you here.
All the hardcore practicing really paid off. We ended up keeping about 99% of the final take we did. After we got “the take” we did some synth and minor guitar overdubs. I think my favorite part about the recording is that it sounds a lot like my favorite band Bob Hund in that the song is very “live” and has a metric-ton of feel and subtle tempo shifts (the good kind). I think this will be the best LiO recording to date.
Manny also enlightened us with some good studio stories about artists he’s worked with, like Smashing Pumkins, Plain White Tee’s (Yes, he recorded ‘Hey there Delighla’), The Hush Sound, and Fall Out Boy. I’m not sure if I can spill the beans here so I better keep them to myself. 
Sorry for the tease…
I’ll try to get some video up here later today. We have tons of footage so it might take a while to sift through. Stay tuned…
ugh…it’s THE HIVES!!! January 9, 2010
Well…not really. We’ve been rehearsing and recording our practices all week to work out the minor kinks in Desperate. But you can only play the same song 999 times without loosing your mind. So somebody started playing a Hives riff and before you knew it we were playing “Hate to Say I told you so” learning it on the fly (it took us a few bars to figure it out as you’ll see). We only made it to the first chorus, but it’s pretty funny so we thought we’d share it with you. You can download the masterpiece bellow by clicking on the link. Enjoy.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD HATE TO SAY I TOLD YOU SO
The Macbook Saga II: A New Hope January 6, 2010
As you may recall in “The Macbook Saga, Episode I: Revenge of the Julmust” the evil Julmust from planet Krypton came to earth to destroy my macbook by spewing its un-Godly contents all over my keyboard. My macbook used all of its Jedi-powers to defend itself, but they were no match for the Julmust and my mac was brought over to the dark side. I retrieved my surgical tools and rabbits foot and disassembled the machine only to find that the keyboard was a single unit that can’t be accessed from the bottom. Idiot. Having spent 3 hours and feeling like an horses ass I decided to read online about solutions rather than to continue my path of reckless run and gun tricks. Using the wisdom from youtube user “existenceisfutile84″ I decided to continue the open-heart surgery by taking off the keys to clean under them. You can see the disaster below.
Disaster
After feeling like I destroyed my computer and shedding a few tears I still hadn’t ridded it of the curse that had fallen upon it. When it started to look like all hope was lost I called upon every neuron in my head and discovered a detail about my computer that might save it. Notice the little crack in the plastic in the lower right corner. This is due to a design error in the white macbooks and the mac store will replace your keyboard for free if this happens to you! I put on my sneakers and rushed to the store, and an hour later…my mac was back! Wo-hoo!!!!! So the moral of the story is, if your computer breaks due to your own negligence, don’t try to be a hero and fix it yourself. Come up with an excuse or lie to get professionals to do it for you at no cost.
After all this drama I need to finish the post with some stupid humor. Here’s a youtube video I like.
