That means hello in Vietnamese, which is what they speak here in Vietnam, which is where I’ve been living for the past 21 months.

The original plan was succinct: after romantic life stabilized and inspiration ran dry, a foreign land would spur the creative spirit, I’d write my opus in exile, and SWLLC would return with fury and vengeance (and maybe electric guitars) in mid 2007.

More time has passed than expected - life in Vietnam isn’t very existentially challenging - and SWLLC is limping through the dog days of the Bush presidency (our first practice was the first day after George W. Bush’s inauguration).. I can’t predict what an Obama presidency will bring from a larger, national/global perspective, but I do believe that the traditional first 100 days of the new Administration will be productive ones for the LLC.

Hope is on the way.

Misha

In case you’re somehow visiting this site but still in the dark about where to vote today, click here to find your nearest polling place.

This is literally the least we can do.

Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?

While working on the forthcoming Speechwriters cd, I (Dave) took a few weeks off to crank out a music video with an absurdly talented group of filmmakers here in Portland. The finished product is finally online, and you can watch it here:

www.sexualprofessional.com

As the title suggests, this is a fairly raunchy, NSFW affair, though it’s more of a PG-13 (for language) than an R. It’s also incredibly offensive, and definitely not for everyone.

Please enjoy or avoid as you see fit. Then click here to Digg. The Speechwriters will return in November.

Cheers,
Dave

OK, no more vague innuendoes: there’s a new EP in the works, and we’re hoping to get it finished in time for spring break. Why spring break? Because our last two official releases, God bless ‘em, were a little rough around the edges, at least relative to the Bull Moose. Gibbard and Tamborello had nothing on the 7000 miles currently separating Portland from Vietnam, so we want to make sure we take the time to do this one right.

Here’s a very rough bedroom recording of “Seattle”, for the brave and/or impatient.

In other news, our cinematic stepchild Monster Camp just came out on DVD. We’re totally biased, but we still think it’s a great movie, and now you can add it to your Blockbuster or Netflix queue with the push of a button. Specifically: your mouse button, on those links in the last sentence. You can also pick it up for keeps at Hyrax Films’ online store, along with our original (but mostly instrumental (and weird)) soundtrack album.

Finally, if you’re into live music, there are a few new shows here that weren’t there yesterday.

Sights were seen, things were done, parasites were brought home and hosted for a while. Misha’s grinding away on his half of our latest secret project, while I have a couple of solo shows coming up. Summer continues apace.

We realized this morning that roughly half of our incoming email is now guitar tab requests, so we’ve vowed to start putting better ones online soon. Like, real detailed, down and dirty, “Someday all this will be yours, son, so here’s how you milk a cow” style tutorials that will leave your metacarpals humming and the rest of you ready to take over in case Misha or I somehow simultaneously break all of our hands. Please let us know if you have strong feelings about which songs we should do first, as it’ll potentially take us a while to get through the whole catalog.

Cheers,
Dave