Songwriting: Week 4

I've ditched the 'solitude' part of these posts. Sometimes things don't work out that way. This week was more about gigging than writing. Actually not entirely true. For whatever reason I've been going from Wednesday to Wednesday not Monday to Monday or whatever. So... half of this week was about gigging and half was about writing. So let's start with the first half.

We had a couple of big gigs on the weekend, one at the coast and one in Brisbane. Both were with a very cool band from Melbourne (or as they put it "Melbourne via Perth" - I think that's what they said) called The Violet Flames. Check them out here. Go do it, seriously. Come on, it's free. We'll be playing shows with them down in Melbourne in May (whoops, that's not announced yet). Here's a photo from the coast show (if you click on it it gets bigger). The show went very well and actually sold out.

















Andrew and I ended up staying down the coast and went water skiing the next day with one of Andrew's good mates. I hadn't been skiing for a while but managed to get up on the ski first attempt (Andrew took two). We had a grand old time but skiing is really tough on the legs and we both bailed in spectacular fashion (meaning we were buggered, our legs buckled beneath us and we got smashed into the water). Anyway, that was fun but next came one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. Are any of you familiar with wakesurfing? Essentially, it's surfing behind the wake boat, and if you're good at it, like Andrew's mate, it's surfing behind the boat, which is moving at pace, without a rope. It sounds impossible but I kid you not it happened. There were jetski riders who nearly crashed into a jetty because they were looking across at us while this was going on. Now I don't have a video of us in particular but here's a video I found of wakesurfing. If you still don't believe me check this out. Just substitute the German dude for our friend and you should have a pretty good idea of how incredibly awesome this was to watch.



Crazy times but very cool. Next came the Brisbane show at the Globe. Thanks to everyone who made it along. You were awesome. Some of the best singing I've heard in a very long time. We played a couple of new tracks which were a little rusty (I forgot some lyrics) but hey they were only written the week before so go easy. That was our last show before Andrew heads to the US of A. Death Cab were playing that night as well at The Tivoli which would have been awesome to see. It sucks when gigs clash. Andrew got excited and bought himself a ticket to Death Cab before being reminded by yours truly that we were playing a show ourselves. He had to sell his ticket. Unlucky Andrew. End section on gigging.

So I headed back down the coast to continue writing. By this stage I had become very accustomed to the drive back and forth, and contrary to my previous post, I can understand how people can commute, though not at peak hour, that's just silly. In the couple of days I had down there before I was summoned back to Brisbane, I got another song together called

Should Have Gone To Bed Early

I also discovered an unprotected wireless internet network which was awesome. I don't understand why people don't put passwords on their networks.

Which leads me to now. I'm back in Brisbane, again, because we're about to record a new demo for Andrew to take overseas. It'll be done very soon and we might let you hear it on myspace. But if for whatever reason that doesn't happen please don't get angry.

And now for something random to finish. I was reminded recently of one of the best inspirational psyche up speeches I have ever seen. I won't embed it in this post but see the link below. As someone in the comments section points out:

According to my count, he says f@#k or its derivative 28 times in the space of 80 seconds.
He only says [word I won't even write with @# in the middle] 4 times.

So be warned it's a bit rough but soo soo funny. I have it as an mp3 on my ipod and use it for extra motivation before going on stage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVub6EDYovg