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

Not 100% sure what happened, but a couple of weeks ago the company that ran our old message board network got “upgraded” to another network.

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.”

Through the miracle of science, there are finally moving pictures of us on the internet. We just kind of threw them up there because we realized the only other clip of us on YouTube was 18 seconds long – please feel free to add your own if you have any, or let us know if we uploaded something you shot without attribution, or whatever.

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.

These are the gap-toothed years, when the ascap tooth fairy leaves quarterly statements under our pillows, rewards for the little bits of “anodyne” and “spaghetti streetwalker” that play largely unnoticed in the living rooms of Swedes and Italians and Mexicans.

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: