Nerves

...is the name of my new band. We played our first show last night, and it went alright! Here's a video of a song named 'Four Hundred and Nine' -



p.s. I know I've been slack around here lately (I had actually forgotten my password and all), and the truth is bloggin' comes in pretty low on my list of stuff I want to do in my downtime. However, I have been taking lots of photos still, and some of them reside on my flickr page, pop on over if your bored - http://www.flickr.com/photos/lookwhatgodjustdidtous/

Go and listen to 'The Window is a Door' by Maritime.

See you next year!

Into the Wild (Kinda... [Well not really {But still... sort of}])

Hello esteemed blog-readers!

I thought I would share some photos taken during a bike trip to Bruny island that Chris and I had recently. I had heaps of great shots that got ruined by dust on the sensor of my DSLR, but these came out alright.

I am pretty sure these are all taken with an old manual focus 50mm lens my dad bought in the 80's.











Anyhow, I will be posting more recordings as soon as I can afford new guitar strings and a spare afternoon, which will be hopefully soon! So watch this space.

Go and listen to 'Reconstruction Site' by The Weakerthans

Peace and love!

Kiss the Bottle

Hey people, I've been setting up my recording studio in a new room and for the first time in a while, so I decided to play around with it for a few hours and record a cover to get a feel for the new version of Cubase I have, to see how I want to approach my solo recordings.

Anyhow, as I said, this is a cover of 'Kiss the Bottle' by Jawbreaker, a song that's been covered lots of times by lots of people/bands (rarely successfully) that I did in first takes over a couple of hours on one of my holiday-days before christmas. I only knew how to play the song on banjo, so I ripped the guitar riff from Lucero's version (by far the best ever done) and added some glockenspiel and tamborine, and some fairly shotty vocals... I don't really know if it worked, but thought i'd put it up, as the demo I promised a while back was a victim in the great harddrive failure of late 2010.

Go and listen to it

Kiss the Bottle (rough mix) #2 by Andi Cocktails

Whores will have their trinkets

Hi folks! I know I’ve been very slack around here, keeping you completely uninformed and all that… so I pray to sweet baby Jesus in heaven that you will forgive me, look passed my wrong-doings, and give me another chance… I haven’t even had a chance to shamelessly promote myself yet! (probably because I haven’t got anything to promote at the minute, but still, yeah…). Bad stuff has happened to my removable hard drive causing me to lose the demo I was going to put up for you, along with every-fucking-other-thing, so that’s on the back burner until I can fix it… or, Dad can fix it, either one.

So having promised readers a song then being unable to deliver it, the blog got put to one side for a bit. To be honest, I really thought ‘fuck yeah, I’m finished study so I’ll be able to blog more and shamelessly promote the living shit out of my self, I’ll have a new song up every week and be getting all kinds of fanmail and love from my soon to be fanatical followers!’ But in reality, I’ve just avoided even sitting in front of a computer when I can help it, and have been playing guitar and skating and generally whooping it up during my little holiday time with the family. It hasn’t helped that family are sleeping in my recording room, and I do my best work at night. However, I am part way through doing a demo of all the (still unnamed) band's songs on acoustic guitars with Chris, so if they’re any good, one might find its way onto the net, in which case, I’ll point you in it’s direction.

Anyhoo, whilst I have been doing lots, nothing is going to be interesting to you, as it’s mainly family stuff and every-day stuff (eating, sleeping, talking etc…). I am planning a three day bike trip for next week with my brother, so I’ll put some pics up when I get back.

I’ll leave you with a pic of K-Dub drinking beer in the park, off an old roll of film I only developed the other day.

Talk to you next year!

Go and listen to ‘Hours That You Keep’ by Maritime

They give it by the inch but they take it by the mile.

Man the bank is really bending me over at the moment, looks like I might have to call off Christmas… apparently I am still on a ridiculously heinous interest rate on my land loan because the bank values my property at $105,000, which is well below it’s market value, however the state revenue office still sees fit to tax me for a block of land worth $120,000… I have had 4 rate rises in the 9 months I’ve had the loan which is twice as many as the Reserve Bank of Australia have introduced in this time, and still the bank treats me like they don’t want my business! And the worst part is that they know your fucked whatever you think of their practices, ‘cos every bank is as crooked as the next, and, of course, the process of changing banks will attract so many bullshit fees (exit fee from one bank, new account fee on the next bank, land valuation for the next bank, loan establishment fee on the next bank and whatever other ‘account keeping’ horseshit they try and pull on you) that it’s not worth it for the fraction of a percent interest better off you’ll end up. So yeah, I just have to grin and bear it really! I suppose that I am at least in a position to pay my loan off and get somewhere, and a lot of people are getting houses repossessed and all that, but this is my blog, and I can complain about whatever I like.

I don’t really have any new news, except that one of my work-based goldfish committed suicide last week. I found Bob all dried up and stuck to my desk one morning, the poor bastard made it about half a metre from the tank. I guess an office would be a pretty depressing place to spend your entire fishy existence… I think I will try and find a new home for Shirley before she meets the same smelly fate as Bob.

I got all my assignments in for the year which takes a load off, but I still have an exam next Wednesday standing between me and the ‘holidays’ (not so much of a holiday as I’ll still be working full time… but yeah), my only issues with all this is that the exam looks to be a bit tricky and the day before I sit it I am due to have the cast taken off my wrist, so I might be a bit tender… I guess I’ll have to ‘harden the fuck up’ eh?

Also I am working on that first demo I will upload, and I should have it up by the weekend.

Check out my flickr for some new shots! (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lookwhatgodjustdidtous/)

Here is a shot of a lumberjack named Chris-


Go and listen to ‘Go Places’ by The New Pornographers

Peace

New Moon Baby

So I was rifling through my many lyric diaries the other day and found a concept page I had written for my solo EP, and whilst I have essentially kept to my concept, I had dated this page November 2009… This may not mean much to anyone but me, but I find it very shocking, as I had an EP written but just not finished at the time I wrote this down, meaning that I have spent a year procrastinating and scrapping songs and only have done one solo show… whilst drunk. So essentially I have gone backwards in the last eleven months and am further from putting anything of substance out there.

This makes me wonder how anyone put any of their own music out with any confidence in the quality. When you are in a band it is a lot easier, because everyone contributes towards a final product, everyone has their favourite/least-favourite songs and are able to make decisions about what will work on a record and what can be scrapped or re-written or whatever, but when you are doing it all by yourself, including production, it’s a different ball game, full of self-doubt and double guessing… so my resolve it to just put up a bunch of demos and see what sticks, then produce the most well received and whatever I write in the meantime that is of any good and release it as some kind of free EP that is downloadable. So expect a link to the first instalment in this series of (probably pretty scrappy) demos within the next little while! I still have to finish off the vocals, as I got sick with a shitty virus half way through recording (with a broken arm no less) and don’t really want to immortalise my currant nasally tones.

Here’s a picture of the potted vegie garden K-Dub and I established over the weekend, it’s going to rule!

Go and listen to 'Anchorage' by Franz Nicolay

Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow

Spirits are low today readers... What's worse than having a broken wrist? Answer - Being sick AND having a broken wrist... ON A WEEKEND! I must have wronged the gods recently, as I'm in this situation without any food in the house, and the thought of driving and being in public to stock up is enough to sending me hiding under the covers... much less getting dressed, fuck that... I'm just going to hide in my room in the dark and feel sorry for myself I think. K-Dub is sick aswell (which, of course is the reason I'm sick) so I don't have a personal nurse to fuss over me either. I also have the feeling that work is going to guilt trip me about not coming in tomorrow, as we have a short-staffed week coming up, but oh well, ain't nothing I can do to help that is there?

ANYWAY, end bitch session.

The reason for this post is that I have been able to play guitar and banjo with my wrist in the cast, so have continued recording my EP, I hope to put a song or two up on the internet for free download soon and, when it's complete, put the whole thing up for free download. Does anyone know a website where I can host downloadable and streamable music for free?

Cheers

Go and listen to 'See You In Hell' by Small Brown Bike

I'm off to make soup