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

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

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!

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:

To add our $0.02 to the discussion - Speechwriters LLC is and always has been a self-distributed band. It’s a model with more than its fair share of attendant headaches, but on balance we’re pretty happy with the way it’s been working out for us. It’s forced us to learn things like HTML, graphic design, audio engineering, contract negotiation, orienteering, and ground combat, all of which have made us better, more interesting people. It’s given us the freedom to take breaks when we need to, without worrying about violating the terms of our contract or having to produce a sub-par album under duress. It’s given us closets and closets full of t-shirts and CDs.

That said, there are a lot of times when we feel like it’s Thanksgiving 2007 and we’re still at the damned kids’ table. As great as it is to own all our own masters, we tend not to play the same caliber venues as our major-label friends, and the extra $0.33 we get for every song we sell on iTunes loses a bit of its luster when we realize how few we’re actually selling relative to, say, J-Gro.

But, for us at least, the pros have definitely outweighed the cons, and often in ways that aren’t readily apparent to those outside our immediate circle. It’s a topic we love talking about, to the point where we’ll hijack unrelated conversations if left unchecked, so we’re probably going to start peppering the band blog with Hunter Thompson-esque anecdotes from our not-so-illustrious past, in hopes that any would-be DIY rockers among you can learn a thing or two from our successes, failures, and outright disasters.

Happy New Year,
Dave

UPDATE: The whole Everything Pack can still be purchased at www.speechwritersllc.com/holiday - we just took it off the front page because it’s not really front page material anymore. ]]> http://www.speechwritersllc.com/blog/2007/t-shirt-fever/feed/ http://www.speechwritersllc.com/blog/2007/free-ep-coming-soon/ http://www.speechwritersllc.com/blog/2007/free-ep-coming-soon/#comments Thu, 06 Dec 2007 11:38:05 +0000 Dave http://www.speechwritersllc.com/blog/2007/free-ep-coming-soon/ 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