For those of you who are into side projects, I’m taking a couple of weeks away from the Speechdesk to tour California with the insanely talented Ramona Falls. If you’re one of the 30 million people going to see The National next week, you already have a ticket. Stick around after the show and say hi.

If you’re one of the 6.8 billion people who aren’t going to see The National next week, here’s a music video to hold you over:

Regular programming to resume shortly.

Xoxo,
Dave

UPDATE: More shows just added – Boston, Burlington, others. Visit our tour page for details!

They’ve been up for a while, but if you haven’t just been randomly clicking around our website, you probably missed them.

Samantha Murphy and I are touring, hard, and you can see exactly where by clicking here. Or you can follow us on Twitter, which we’ve pledged to start using properly.

As part of, like, lent.

You can probably even do both.

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.

High school is and was a special place for we of the LLC, and, as such, we try to respect the sacred space cordoned off therein, keeping reality away from teenagers and teenagers away from reality as much as we humanly can. But tonight we have to break with this (heretofore) unwritten rule and encourage every man, woman, and child who’s reading this in time to make a pilgrimage to Portland’s Lincoln High School, because their theater department is currently running a truly awesome show.

We’re a little biased, in that our good friend Liam Kaas-Lentz is the director and one of our songs is featured in the show, but it’s a pretty ballsy piece of devised theater from the 14-18 year old set, and we can’t praise it enough.

Go art! Go kids! Go deconstructionist theatrical karaoke!