If you write enough songs about someone, they will eventually either file a restraining order or invite you to come over.

For those of you currently living in Southeast Asia, Misha and I will be playing a handful of shows in Vietnam this month. Venues run the gamut from tiny urban art space to US embassy to nationally televised sea festival.

We’ll try to remember to bring a camera.

(Speaking of which, photos from my last jaunt with Justin Carroll can be seen here. You may or may not be in them.)

Shaving and manufacturing both underway. EP hits the streets 3/14.

Misha continues to hold down Hanoi.

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

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.

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

Weirdly enough, the next day people suddenly stopped posting in our forums.

We assumed the world just ran out of things to talk about, or that there was maybe a silent protest going on against this “Yuku”, but it turns out a switch had gotten flipped in the process and we forgot to unflip it. (Specifically, the switch labeled “Let people post on your message board: Yes or No?”)

So: we unflipped the switch, and now everything’s better. I guess the moral of this story is to start taking people a bit more seriously when they say things like, “Your message board is broken and it isn’t letting me post.”

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.

What I mean to say is that we’re 7 years old, that this is the time that you pat us on the head and ask, “So Speechwriters LLC, what do you want to be when you grow up?” Do we want to be firemen? Veterinarians? Corporate financiers or chief technology officers?

When we grow up we will be rockstars. Here’s our 1st grade talent show: