We have just one show left in our epic White Eagle Saloon Residency. We’ve had three wonderful Mondays with some amazing bands and great friends. Our deepest gratitude to everyone who has made it out and to the McMenamins crew for hosting us. This has really been a blast.

After Monday we’ll be taking some time off from playing shows to put some hard work into our new record. This week we’ll be playing the whole album, and then we’ll spend the next month fleshing it out in the studio. We’d love for you to come take a first listen to our as-of-yet untitled record.  We’re really proud of it.

Our tentative track/set list is after the jump:

We have just two shows left in our epic White Eagle Residency. Thus far things have been awesome. Great bands, good beer, and some solid Tuesday morning hangovers. This coming week we’ll be bringing back some really old songs, and a few things that most people have never heard. We’ll be joined by Sara Jackson-Holman and Ed and the Red Reds. Both put on really solid shows. Not an evening to be missed! We hope to see you there.

We are so excited to announce our ever first residency at the legendary McMenamins White Eagle Saloon. We will be playing four epic Monday nights in a row with some of our absolute favorite bands in Portland. All the shows are FREE, 21+, and start at 8:30.

This is a really cool month for us. We have a bunch of new songs to debut, and old songs to bring back. We would really love to see you there.

Full lineup and details after the jump.

On June 25th we will be doing our first live recording at the Banana Stand in SE Portland with phenomenal Shaky Hands off-shoot, Death Songs . We are really thrilled to be able to put out an album, which we hope will have the same excitement and energy that we feel whenever we play live. This is a really cool opportunity  for us, and we would love for everyone who has been following us over the past three years to be a part of it. We will be debuting a few songs from our upcoming album, as well as playing some of our favorites from Over Wires. Because of the nature of free basement shows, the address is a secret, if you’d like to come out please send us a note, and we will get you the address. It will be a really fun night with some some really killer local music. If you can’t make it the 25th, stay tuned, we will be releasing the album online in the coming months. In summation:

Junetwenty-fifth.NinePM.Free.All Ages.BYOB.

For more information please visit Banana Stand Media.

The idea and most of the lyrics for this song came to me one night while studying in the library when I was in college.  I realized that I wanted to write a song about a man who is haunted by his dead wife.  However, it was important to me to leave some ambiguity in the lyrics so as to let the listener decide whether the man loved her and killed her or just loved her and has not been able to reconcile the loss.

Stay is a brief sentimental mood at the center an album written generally from less hopeful perspective. The song is dedicated to my dear friend Matthew Hancock (from whom I stole the chords to the song) and my younger brother Benjamin. The lyrics were written while away from both of them for a number of months, and as we were all poised at the edge of new things.

When we approached Over Wires, I was initially hesitant to record the song, as I had been happy with the version that appeared on “The Cardboard EP”, originally titled Stay (for Matt and Ben). After some thought, we decided that was an important song to include primarily because of its significance as a part of our history as a band. We all felt that it was important to leave some memory of the place that we have come from intact on this record.

Elizabeth downs is a song which I have to take much more seriously than the others when we play live and to my surprise, even more so in the studio.  Playing this song live is a blast and I’d go as far as to say that it is our best song (my favorite at least) but, playing live is much different than recording in the studio and reproducing it for our friends and fans.

I have always wanted to be a professional drummer, but have found myself at times to be less practiced than I would like. In the studio, I required a level of perfection in my playing which was not readily attainable while recording Elizabeth. Realizing my performance shortcomings and embracing new technology, I was able to make a great step forward into the beginnings of my studio career which I think is just starting to blossom. The whole experience has led me to back to my past attempts as a computer programmer and train that focus on a career in music tech and audio engineering.

Long story short, our recording engineer, Daniel Jones of Marigold Digital, was able to take a combination of my attempts of Elizabeth Downs into the perfect performance for what we were able to offer. I did not play one perfect attempt at the song but it comes back as a pretty good replica as if I had. Thanks to Danny Jones at Marigold Digital for everything. We owe him a lot.

-Aaron

This song took me six months to write. I wrote the first verse in about five minutes, and then sat on it for along time before I started adding words that I actually liked. During the first verse I had a picture in my head of a woman in a saloon in the western half of the country that was consoling herself over a man that had broken her heart, yet whom she still loves. Once the story took shape, it became about a woman who seeks vengeance on men that treat women in the worst of ways, and in the end she kills the man who broke her heart. In my mind he had harmed her physically while continually attempting to win her back. While the character in this tune is very fictional, she is based on a woman that is very dear to my heart.