February 13th, 2010|8:35pm.
So as anybody who keeps up with various pieces of news from The American Autumn may have noticed, we've had some ups and downs lately. Sadly, Dane recently left the band and to be honest, this really took the wind out of my sails. I think we were all really unsure about the future of the band and it left me with a really strange, empty feeling about things. Fortunately, our buddies James and Brain (formally of "...The Nominees Are" fame) recently agreed to join the band. We met with them last week and so far I think that things are going to work out just fine. I'm really excited to see where things will go with this chapter of The American Autumn.
In the midst of this rhythmic unrest we finished up our cover of Vanessa Carlton's "A Thousand Miles" Justin did a great job on this track, it's really fun to see how we've grown as musicians and he's grown as an engineer over the years. We're using the song on a promotional project that I've wanted to do for a while. We made a little 3 song "record" called Pass It On, and we're basically just giving it away however we can (free download, bit torrent, burning CDs, last.fm, whatever) and asking people to share the music with as many people as possible. Here's a link to download the record: http://tinyurl.com/taa-passiton and you can read more about this on the band blog.
I had posted earlier about Packets and Waves, a musical project that Eileen and I are doing, and I really think that doing that helped me keep my sanity while things were up in the air with The American Autumn. I'm REALLY happy that things are coming together with the band again, but I want to keep doing some Packets and Waves stuff, so I started working on the music for another song tonight (another cover). It's sort of liberating to play some music in a totally different style than I normally do, and to just play with arrangements and instrumentation in a different way. I'm really excited about how this next song is turning out so far and I'll post it here when we finish it up.
In non-music related news, I'm going to Taipei and Bali over Spring Break (woo!). I finally got all the plane tickets worked out this week and I'm really excited about this trip. It should be really awesome and I get to go to 2 countries that I've never been to before. Now I just need to get through a bunch of stuff at work and school, then it's off to far away lands!