It’s basically demos & alternate mixes of songs from our Indifferent Cities EP.

The last song is our favorite. During the production of the album, we were emailing audio tracks & Pro Tools sessions back and forth, but Team Vietnam’s hard drive died before they could make reference mixes from the final recording session. This means that Team America was basically putting together a pile of puzzle pieces without any idea of what the finished puzzle was supposed to look like.

The only session that survived the crash intact was “Tay Ho”, though something awful happened to it along the way. Maybe it went mad from watching so many of its brothers die in the drive failure. In the weeks before we realized what had happened, Misha and I had some fairly tense discussions about quality control. He thought I was being racist; I thought he had finally lost his mind.

We eventually got it sorted, put it on the album as a secret track, and were soon playing “Tay Ho” to appreciative crowds across Vietnam. The rest, as they say, is history. But, generally speaking, this is why you don’t record an album over the internet.

In other news, our store’s back, just in time for the holidays. Probably the only place you can get five albums for $20 this side of Moscow.

So we figured we’d bribe you into following/fanning us with a totally unreleased and never-before-heard studio MP3 from the Indifferent Cities sessions. (Don’t bother clicking that link, it’s just text we turned blue and underlined.)

Here’s the deal: everyone who befollows/befans us on:

…will be beTweeted/beFaced with four and a half minutes of audio awesomeness come mid-September. (Again, ignore that link, we’re just being jerks.) Everyone who doesn’t, won’t.

Cool? Cool. Let the games begin.

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.

In the meantime, may we recommend a little something from our archives.

We’re giving our media section an overhaul in much the same way as the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon – slowly, and wetly, but for keeps.

Also, a new show just got confirmed, but we don’t want to steal the tour page’s thunder.

hi myspace friend,

about a month and a half ago, our myspace account got deleted. like, completely wiped off the face of the internet, and we’re still not sure why. our online operations ground to a screeching halt, as we realized we no longer had any way of letting the friends we’d made on myspace know about upcoming shows, albums, and other mission-critical band stuff.

it was pretty awful.

then one morning, just before thanksgiving, it came back. like, all the way back – friends, favorites, the whole nine yards. and we said to ourselves, “you know, we should really make sure this never happens again.”

so we’ve recorded four new songs, and on december 15th, we’re giving them away for free. the catch? we’d like you to sign up for our actual, real-world email list:

http://www.speechwritersllc.com/signup/

you have our word that we’ll *never* share your information with anyone outside the band. we just want to make sure we can find you when our next album comes out, which is sooner than you’d think.

(seriously.)

thanks for reading, and enjoy the rest of your day.

sincerely,
dave and misha

Dave Lowensohn Plays SF Startup Weekend from Tyler Willis on Vimeo.

Thanks for the celebrity treatment, Tyler. Everybody else can click the big link just above this to watch the whole thing in HD, though why you’d want to see my beard in that much detail is beyond me.

So it seems only natural that Misha and I should publish our most embarrassing moment at this time. While there’s no shortage of candidates for the title, if you were to put us each in separate rooms and ask us, “What’s the one thing you’ve done as a band that you really never want anyone to know about?” we would each, without hesitation, say: “Granola Morning Goodness.”

A bit of backstory: we have a friend in LA who works for a film licensing company and occasionally asks us for weird, highly-specific concept songs. Sometimes we take them on, just because there’s usually something like a 24 hour deadline and it’s a fun “songwriter’s challenge” kind of thing. For instance, Temporary States was originally written for “a hard PG-13 animated romantic comedy.” (It didn’t make the cut.)

But this was probably the weirdest set of instructions we’ve ever received, for anything, in our lives:

From : The Amazing LG
Sent : Tuesday, February 15, 2005 6:47 PM
To : Speechwriters LLC
Subject : Cereal commercial?

Hi guys,

Please let me know if you have anything you would like me to pitch…see description below:

We’re testing a new campaign that’s a cross between a granola, healthy morning cereal spot and a cosmetic/beauty ad. Looking for a track about beauty, without saying the word ….not too slow, should have some energy, music to make you move/wake up/feel good – nothing moody/chill out.

Key Words:

glowing from the inside
shine
happiness
alive

Please send me ideas by end of day Wed or first thing Thurs morning.

Thank you!

-LG

To this day, we still have no clue what it was for or who wound up getting the contract, but I think you’ll agree: we hit this one out of the park.

Happy Earth Day,
Dave