dannielle:

jennyowenyoungs:

REBLOG FOR A CHANCE TO WIN A FREAKING HAT!**

That’s right.  I MADE A HAT!!!  A hat which will clear up any and all questions which might arise about up to where, exactly, you might have some secrets.  Answer: your skull somewhere.

Hats are for sale here - http://jennyowenyoungs.storenvy.com/

Special thanks to super hot hat model Saul Simon MacWilliams.

**hat winner to be announced tomorrow morning!

ugh. he’s so dreamy

Jenny is the greatest ever, RESPECT.

My band has played it’s first show with a new lead guitarist. At our next practice we’ll tell him he’s in, officially. Very nice guy and minored in music, specifically guitar, in college. I think there will still be an adjustment period for all of us as we get used to his style and he gets used to our songs and what we do. I’m excited to be moving forward.

Our show was at a small hole in the wall place in Olympia. We played the 8 songs that Bryce knew and rocked the crap out of them. In a month we have an All Ages show next in Chehalis and a show at a bar the next night in Olympia.

Above, an obligatory picture from the show. We also have another show booked in Olympia at the end of January. I’m pretty happy with how things are going right at the moment.

Also in the world of music, I am one of the lucky 75 people who will be in attendance at Tegan and Sara’s next show in Vancouver, BC. They will be filming it for their next DVD. I’m not entirely sure what to expect. In fact, it’s just a couple days away and they haven’t even told us the exact location of the show! I’m excited to see them again, that is for sure.

Outside of the world of music and in my world of teaching, we’ve had two student pass away so far this year, both seniors. Between that, not coaching volleyball this year, and preparing for basketball season, it’s been a whirlwind of emotions. It will be good to try to return to some normalcy when basketball season starts again on Monday and be part of the team.

kristinetuna:

weezer - “falling for you”

Instant reblog.

I posted a few months back about Allison Weiss’ new album and how incredibly impressed I was with her and how she has gone about making a name for herself and her music using the internet. Two days ago Jenny Owen Youngs used kickstarter.com to fund her next album. Her goal of $20,000 was reached in just 28 hours, rather than the 42 she was hoping for.

It’s really made me realize that my band has been nonexistent outside of facebook and posting some songs on myspace.

Next plans of attack include a Livestream account. Allison has done an awesome job of posting her own videos on there which include tour videos, live videos, music videos, videos made in her living room playing her songs, and even covers people send in. I love it, it’s like having your own music video channel. It will take a while to have a fair amount of “programming” for it but it will be worth it in the end.

Using Allison’s ideas again, really work on a mailing list. One of her strategies was to announce that there’s a mailing list at the beginning of her set and that one of those people who sign will be randomly selected to win a CD at the end of the set. It a simple a great idea. Ryan’s girlfriend, Michelle, usually does merch so this could be as simple as her walking around with a clipboard during our set.

A website. This one needs little explanation really! However, I love sites like Third Eye Blind and DIY artist Scott Andrew who have some sort of built-in social networking or club aspect into their site. 3EB.com allows Third Eye Blind fans to connect with other fans from all over and was really a brilliant idea to regroup the fans they had gained since the mid-90’s during their own DIY campaign for their latest album (which did break the top 10 on the Billboard charts). Scott Andrew has you sign up for a mailing list and you gain access to demos and videos made exclusively for that club.

Finally, utilize the tools we already have. Facebook and Myspace are not updated enough by us, even if it’s just to say “we’re at practice having a good time getting ready for our next gig in 3 weeks.” Same goes for our Twitter. I’ll be sending more invites to become a friend of our band to my friends on facebook and make another concert announcement soon for our next gig in Seattle.

So this is the plan, along with booking like crazy. Next will be making more friends so we can trade more shows.

A lot has happened in the past couple months professionally, personally, and musically. Since this is supposed to be more of my music blog, I will focus on that.

We released our first album in April after a year and a half of working on it, tinkering, and waiting. We played a great CD Release show with about 70 people in attendance. I think it could have been more if we had taking more time to promote it. We were all busy with work and our personal lives at the time. I won’t let that happen again, I can assure you that.

The bittersweet part is that, after thinking he had totally bought into the band and wanted to do more writing, Kyle has quit the band. It’s kind or rough since it was maybe 6 weeks after the CD release show. We did a show last night in Seattle, which might be his last with us. He was so sick but made it for me, as he said. He did it because he wanted to show he still cares about me and the band even though he’s leaving to start a metal band. It was very cool. I would like to do a couple more shows with him during the summer.

We did get played on the radio again, which was pretty cool. Nothing major yet though. Time to make a big push this summer. What it will be, I’m not sure, but we’ll figure something out.

One thing that I love about Allison is that she has done this all herself. Unsigned, unmanaged, and yet her album is on Amazon, iTunes, and a ton of other places. Seeing this is going to make me want to do the same with my band and really kick things into a higher gear. Now, time to make a website, get a band bank account, get onto iTunes, Amazon, other places… this business of art is nauseating.

…But Yay Allison!

allisonweiss:

ALLISON WEISS WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG is out today and available everywhere mp3s are sold including iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, Amie St, you name it! Look it up!

If you cut out the middleman and download the whole album directly from me, you’ll get a hidden bonus track. Whoa!

You can also stream the whole thing on MySpace RIGHT NOW!

Life gets better every day! I’m gonna go walk the streets like a champion!

Love,

Allison

I need to keep this up to date a little better but things have been slow on the band front and crazy in the personal life. Since our last show and my last update:

-My sister passed away from cancer

-My aunt passed away from old age and various health issues

-My car was totaled after I ended up in the ditch avoiding a head on collision that would have surely killed me.

-High school volleyball season, which I coach. My team’s final record was 6-8. Not great but we won 4 of our last 5 games.

The big news for the band is that Kyle has rejoined the band to play lead guitar. He, however, hurt a tendon in his pinky finger and his doctor told him not to play guitar for a month.

The other big news is that our record, the audio portion, is complete. The art work will be changed slightly now that Kyle is back full time. Once that is taken care of we’ll send it off. I’m pretty excited about the songs though. Sonically it’s not 100% perfect, maybe more like 90-95% (still in A in my teacher gradebook), but that’s still great considering it cost us very little and we did it all ourselves.

Next up: more band practices and booking a crap load of shows.

Last night’s show pretty much completely sucked. It was like everything went wrong. Let’s break it down:

- The monitors were completely FUCKED. They had them labeled backward at the mixing board, as I was told later. Grant kept asking to hear more of his guitar in his monitor and next thing Ryan and I know we are inundated with nothing but Grant’s guitar in our monitors. After that was fixed I had almost nothing in my monitor, namely none of my guitar and barely any of my vocal. For a couple songs there I wasn’t sure if I was 100% on pitch or not, I wouldn’t know, I couldn’t fucking hear myself! At that point my ears were also ringing because the monitors were so hot to start the show. During the middle of the show, between my ears ringing and nothing in my monitor, I pretty much could only guess what sound I was producing.
- Couldn’t use my wireless microphone because it was getting too much feedback (realized later that the monitors were louder than needed, that didn’t help).
- My wireless for my guitar went dead even though I put a fresh battery in. Obviously the gods conspired against me on that one. I had to grab my extra cord from backstage halfway through the set.
- Dan dropped a stick on one of the first couple songs which made the ending pretty lame. He ended up breaking two sticks during the show. I don’t recall him ever doing that.
-Grant fucked up one of his solos to an epic degree… as in he was a full half step off the whole time.
-Ryan and I were off on two songs together. We eventually got back on track but it added insult to injury at this point.

It was such a fucking disaster that I’m still super upset about it today. I probably will be for a couple weeks as we don’t have another show until Seattle on October 5th. We pride ourselves on our lives shows so having a show like this really hurts. Part of me wants to just say fuck it, I’m done, I’m out, I quit. IT WAS THAT BAD. Add this to the last 6 months of utter frustration on my part with Kyle leaving, getting the album finished, doing ALL the booking and band business BY MYSELF and I’m pretty burned out right now.

What we are going to do is probably take a month off. Today will be the first day I haven’t practiced or played a show in a week and a half and I, at very least, need a day off. The three big reasons for me for taking some time off are volleyball season starting next week, my sister’s declining health and me needing to spend time with her, and my lack of money. All the traveling I’ve done in the last month and a half has used up all my savings. There is no way I can continue to drive to Chehalis for practices as much as I have been.

Speaking of using gas frivolously, I left my cell phone at my parents’ house, so there is an unneeded trip to Tenino I have to make today. I was planning on not going ANYWHERE until Saturday when I go see my sister.

PS: Our first show at the fair, on Tuesday, was cut short to five songs because they took so fucking long to set us up. The sound was great, we rocked the hell out of those five songs… but motherfucker.

Today is the first of two shows we’re playing at the Southwest Washington Fair. We played there last year on the main stage is it went pretty much as I expected it: people would rock out for about 10-15 minutes, think we’re cool, and promptly go check out the exhibits, rides, and food court. I expect much of the same for this first show. We’re on at 5pm, on the main stage again, and I don’t think too many of our friends and regulars will be at this show.

Wednesday night should be better. We’re on the South Stage by the main entrance, and many of our friends are coming out because we’re scheduled for two hours (we’ll only play an hour and a half). We’re playing our normal set of 12 songs, adding an old song of ours that we haven’t played in a year, and adding 5 covers. I’m not exactly stoked that it came down to playing some cover tunes as I’d rather play our own material. We just didn’t have the time to finish up a few songs we had been working on. The upside to it is that we are playing Say It Ain’t So and I’m going to be playing the solo on it. This is the first time I’ve had to play a guitar solo that wasn’t super easy and could be played in my sleep.

We also finished any mixing and recording to be done on the record yesterday. We started the mastering process but as we went on we just couldn’t stand the opening drum fill for “Wookie” and I never felt the vocals were mixed right on “Can’t You See.” Dan took his bass drum, floor tom, snare, and ride over to Ryan’s and re-recorded the fill yesterday morning. Afterwards Ryan and I remixed the vocals for “Can’t You See” and gave them a little boost. The song instantly went from something that made me cringe to a favorite again.

The artwork is also completely finished and paid for. I’ll have to post pictures of that soon, it’s really amazing. It was a little more expensive than what we were hoping but the final result was worth every penny.

I better get ready, Grant will be picking me up soon. Time to rock.

kristinetuna:

noncanadianbryan:

Because I love Jenny Owen Youngs (at least musically, I don’t know her all that well as a person and she could be horrible for all I know).  Anyways, the title track off her album, “Transmitter Failure”.

“You say, I don’t want the pieces, I just want the break.”

can anyone who writes this music really be a bad person?

This just might be my favorite song of the year. Plus, Jenny seems to be pretty kick ass despite being full of girly feeling (which I apparently share because I love this song so much).

Today my Santa does not have a white beard or live in the North Pole. He’s actually younger than me, lives int he Seattle area, and is half-Chinese.

My friend Ben has been a believer in my music for quite sometime. It was at his house that I finally finished the lyrics to “Dungeons and Dragons,” which is now one of my band’s most popular songs and got some airplay on a commercial Seattle radio station. We’re now out of college and while I went the “poor-ass teacher/musician” route, he went the “well-off manager at Boeing” route. He is fronting the money for my bands first (demo) album. It isn’t a ton of money but it is about $1000 we wouldn’t otherwise have. Essentially he is our music label, fronting the money to complete this process and needs to be paid back as time goes on.

It’s cool to see the ball rolling with this project, even if it does move ever so slowly at times. I’m also pretty damn grateful to a good friend who had always looked out for me in college and is doing the same now.

I’ve seen several musicians with Tumblrs recently and I figured I would try my hand at it. Hopefully it won’t turn into an all out bitchfest in which I write about my woes as a beginning musician because, trust me, there are a lot of woes.

So, where to begin?

I sing, play guitar, and am the main songwriter for Neon State, a band out of Olympia, Washington. Sounds sexy, being in a band from Olympia, but it really isn’t. The scene is all but dead and we can’t wait to get a foothold in the greener pastures of Seattle and Portland. We’re about to put out an album, which we recorded ourselves, and it’s been nothing but headaches. The mastering has been taking me forever and the costs are more than we anticipated. At very least, the album art is dead sexy and our production quality isn’t bad for having been recorded in a basement by a bassist who has had only one semester of training.

Hopefully in the near future I will venture out on my own a little with some solo work. Most of my songs are incredibly catchy and poppy and belong with my band. It’s not the only thing I do though. We shall see how it all goes down.

Until that great big something happens for us in the music world… I shall eat breakfast.