Hoy hoy,
On the 30th of this month, this blog – along with the entirety of Charm City Current – will be sucked into the ether forever, pulling up a patch of virtual turf next to Geocities, Netscape and whatever’s left of Xanga. Instead, the Sun will be relying on a network of “community bloggers” to add some ground-level context to what’s going on in the news. I don’t imagine they’ll be writing much about the insides of men’s gas station bathrooms or the hierarchy of budget motel chains, so my opinion will be sorely unconsulted.
When that happens, Party On It will migrate over to the band’s website, where it will hopefully be updated more than five times per year. I got an external hard drive for Christmas so I was able to liberate four years worth of band photos off my old desktop, and…wow. I’m pretty sure if Vince Bugliosi was so inclined, he could convict me as a member of the Manson Family on the strength of those pictures alone. We’ve had weird times to be sure. Plenty of them.
In the meantime, we’re hard at work writing and demoing songs for our next record, which we hope to have recorded by early-Summer. Thus far, the process is already much different than how we made our last two album. Those were culled from big batches of songs that we had written over the intervening two (in the case of the self-titled album) to six years (in the case of Hail Mega Boys), and we sorted out the favorites. You can hear different eras of Rod’s songwriting butting up against one another because of how wide the swath of time between the oldest and newest tracks were. For this next record, most everything will have been written over the last six months and arranged by the band in a eight-week frenzy of activity. On January 1st we didn’t have a single song ready for the next record. By February 29th, we hope to have twelve. We’ll see.
And none of this begins to speak to when the album will actually be coming out, who’ll be producing it, who’ll be releasing it and whether the Mayans are going to wreck this whole thing in the end. Things for another time.
But in just a few weeks time, we’ll be leaving for our Annual Pilgrimage to South by Southwest in Austin, TX. Along the way to and fro, we’ll be stopping in a collection of our favorite cities, joined by our good friends The Features from Nashville. All of these shows will rule.
3/5 – Richmond, VA @ Strange Matter
3/6 – Athens, GA @ 40 Watt
3/7 – Chattanooga, TN @ Rhythm and Brews
3/8 – Birmingham, AL @ Work Play
3/9 – Baton Rouge, LA @ Chelsea’s
3/10 – New Orleans, LA @ Maison
3/14 – 3/18 – Austin, TX @ SXSW
3/21 – Nashville, TN @ Exit/In
3/23 – Louisville, KY @ Headliner’s
3/27 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry
3/30 – Chicago, IL @ Double Door
3/31 – Columbus, OH @ Super-Secret Radio Thing (Details to be revealed soon)
Then, after a scant rest of two weeks, we head out with Lucero for a two-week run that will test whether our livers – or any livers – can long endure. This will mark our first foray into Eastern Canada and we’re very excited for the poutine and close proximity to manageable socialism.
4/14 – Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace
4/15 – Montreal, QC @ Les Foufounes Electriques
4/18 – Northampton, MA @ Pearl Street
4/19 – Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club
4/20 – New York, NY @ Webster Hall
4/21 – Pawtucket, RI @ The Met Cafe
4/22 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
4/24 – Harrisburg, PA @ The Abbey Bar at Appalchian Brewing Company
4/25 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
4/26 – Richmond, VA @ The Hat Factory
4/27 – Asheville, NC @ The Orange Peel
4/28 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade (Heaven Stage)
If I don’t see you again in this space before it all disappears with a click of a few small buttons, I hope you’ll stay abreast of our travels elsewhere. I’ll always remember this as the two years where Billy Ripken was my co-worker.
Lastly…
RAAAAAVVVVVVVVEEEENNNNNNNNSSSSSSSSSS!!!
