Where Does It End? tours more than we do...

tracking on UPS is great, since it looks like we'll actually have the shipment of lots of new cds, potentially tomorrow, with plenty of time to spare before next Friday (see you at the Whistle Stop!). but at the same time, it kind of makes me feel like a bum. i mean, here it is the end of May, and we Modlins have so far played in 5 states this year: CA, OR, WA, AZ, and NM : but our cds have already been in 4 states, just over the past 15 hours! i guess all i can say is, Where Does It End?

look! finally uploading video from february...

that is me attempting to make a youtube playlist containing the videos i'm (finally) uploading that Matt took via eric's camera, during our last recording session with Deborah (and Mark) at Signature Sound. granted the recording session took place on 2/14, and it is now 4/6, but hey, better late than never, right?

also, the first video clip matt took was 12 minutes long, and youtube has a 10 minute limit, so i'll need to cut it in half, or take out 2 minutes, before i can upload that, which is why the first clip up there starts at "part 2"

coincidence?

upon closer inspection, there are 88 albums in my itunes that have exactly 14 tracks on them. my birthday is on august 8th. if that means i should not add any more albums with 14 tracks on to my itunes, then i think it invalidates the email i just sent to Matt Eric and Stoph. and that would probably mean that the mysterious song known as "It's Out of Your Hands, Chuck Berry" will once again be back on the chopping block...

prowess

so last night before eric and mark headed over to meet up with roy, gabe and chicken at The Habitat, and before matt and i got to work fine-tuning more vocals and making it so noone will ever know i messed up the bass part at 1 min 56 seconds in to [insert super secret song title here], there was a discussion on the word "prowess". actual, it wasn't really a discussion as much as it was a sentence, a sentence saying that the word "prowess" is only really ever used in either the context of superheroes, or immediately following the word "sexual". what does that have to do with anything? who knows. what i do know is that i just finished updating the left column of this blog : The Modlins are coming... : with the next 7 shows, all of which happen before the end of this month of March!

yes, the Modlins are coming to The Radio Room here in San Diego, The Que Sera in LBC, The Knitting Factory Hollywood, and then we go up, up to the Red Room in the PDX, Eugene's Black Forest, Olympia WA's LeVoyeur, back to the PDX for Mississippi Pizza, and then back home. Sadly, we are skipping NorCal entirely because apparently, noone wants us there. Oh well. With friends like these, you know?

Or something. Poster coming soon?

props to Crocodiles

we are (slowly) moving towards what might be considered the start of finishing touches on album 3, which might actually have a name before it comes out, and getting ready for a tour up the west coast in a few weeks. on a similar level (or something), Skull Kontrol reports that The Crocodiles are going to be opening for The Faint in April and May. nice.

Don't Pass Us By

with the weekend gone ..... and another successful recording session under our belts, we turn the heat up and trudge on full steam ahead this week with recording, with the exception of a short session over at The Habitat, we'll be doing the rest from our house, so it's all up to us now.

here's a little something for all those readers out there, the audio's a little shoddy, but hey, we had fun. this was the end of the day on saturday, al gave his camera to renee to record Don't Pass Me By at the end of saturday. enjoy!



p.s. i'm sure Al knows the slick way to embed this and make it nice. if so, please do, but i figured the link would work just as well for now.

Where Does It End?!

so i just checked and the last time i updated this blog was back in november, coincidentally (or not coincidentally) regarding the same subject matter .... yes, the modlins third album.

originally when i thought to start up the blog i thought it would be something great to update daily, or fairly daily, discuss the goings on within the band, put up pictures and what not. oh, how overly optimistic and naive young eric was. now, only a tad bit older, i realize "daily blog posts" is on par with TPS reports to your boss. talking about the slow progress, mistakes, days off that you needed but probably shouldn't have taken ....

i just read the 33 1/3 book for Belle and Sebastian's "If you're feeling sinister" and it was very warming (i highly recommend it, but first get the Neutral milk hotel one), but also very depressing. to know that Tigermilk was recorded in 3 days, and If you're feeling sinister in 8, truly is impressive. And now that our album is going on 7 months, you start to wonder if we've done something wrong. Granted Stuart had dedicated time in a studio to do it, and had been flushing the songs out for years on his own, but anyway .... though a lot of people have complained about production on B&S's early recordings, in reality the songs speak for themselves and i'm sure many people (myself included) cite them as some of the best records in my collection. so it's no surprise that i would start to have doubts about our own recording endeavors.

but i really think, when all is said and down, my doubts will be washed away by a truly great finished product, one that we just can't seem to get out fast enough to .. you. whoever "you" maybe. though in the middle/end of last year when work began on this record, we worked on it only occasionally, and most often were just messing around with the songs in our practice space while constantly playing shows around town, nowadays, the amount of work i spend on the album rivals my day job. recording additional percussion, reworking harmonies, rewriting songs. i mean, hell ... one of the songs in contention now has it's own reprise. We've been trying to put off shows, but the occasional one comes in that you can't turn down (Beauty Bar 3rd anniv w/ Darker my Love anyone?). But when i'm not at work (or traveling for work, damn you Erie, PA), Matt and I are holed up in my room or the upstairs hallway constantly reworking and overthinking every choice. all the while, attempting not to piss off our girlfriends or our roommates (Sixto's usually at work, but man .. Kevin, that guys a trooper)

something i should've mentioned awhile back, but has slipped my mind, is that Stoph, Matt, and myself sat down with our friends Spencer and Dan (of Specific Oceans, not Wolf Parade) to discuss the album. i don't know exactly how to get to it, but if you go to iTunes, you can find a link to podcasts somewhere and in there you can look up Specific Oceans, and there should be something about an interview with The Modlins regarding our third album. we even gave them some exclusive sneak cuts of a couple unfinished tracks, so i guess for that alone it's worth checking out.

Anyway, Though I can't really say what the album will look like in the end, i can say we're truly giving it our all this time, even more so than in past efforts. We owe a great debt to our friend Mark (who i know we've mentioned before, and we'll probably keep mentioning til the album is released) but he's been staying on the ball, keeping a list, checking it twice, and ensuring that everything on the songs is there for a reason, and any fat we can trim is.

So where are we at? when will we be done?

well, we're really hoping for a release in May still (hopefully at some point before we said we were shooting for May and not earlier), but it could be as late as end of June. but i promise it won't come after that for two reasons. One, I would like this LP to get submitted to the San Diego Music Awards (cutoff is usually june 30th). it'd be nice to be nominated three years in a row for our three albums. and Two, because if we enter July ... our first session for this album was July '08, which means we will have been working on the album, on and off, for an entire year ... and that just is horribly depressing. Though we could make excuses about all having day jobs, vacations, responsibilities, lives outside the band, the fact of the matter is, it shouldn't take a year to make a pop record (or any record for that matter)

... so anyway, thanks for being patient, tell your friends. as for the next few months, well, because we don't understand how to stop playing shows while we work on a record, we're doing a tour up the coast, getting as far as Olympia, WA before heading back down. Portland, Eugene ... cause, why not ... we've got time.

so hope to see you out there, stick with us, it's gonna get really good.

cheers! off to band practice.

oh yeah, we have a recording session schedule for valentine's day ... how very maudlin of us.

in the meantime

first, happy groundhogs day? word on the street is groundhog saw its shadow, so there is more winter, which i can only take to mean that we get more weeks of 85 degree heat here in sunny san diego, before it officially becomes "summertime". that said, themodlins.com is having all sorts of issues right now which i am blaming entirely on iPower the hosting company, so in the meantime, here's the picture i took with my cell phone at the end of runthrough yesterday morning before our Beauty Bar show last night, of the setlist for said show.



other than that, i thought the show was most excellent. the Beauty Bar is always fun, Marshall does an awesome job manning the sound boards (this time it even made Arlene's ears ring, which she said might be a first for Modlins shows), free 3Olives vodka tonics (or whatever the drinks Jess and Stoph brought me were) helped, and the icing on the cake had to be the opening act. See, the two texts I got from former roommates were "Damn! Sorry but not going to make it." and "Everyone bailed on me", which made the fact that The Caburlesque Kittens performed for a bit before we took the stage all the sweeter (spiting those who could have been there, but weren't).

in other modlin news, the only news is that Eric is off on a work trip again, i think in Erie, PA, and work on album #3 continues...

tonight

did the blog title fool you? no? anyways, new Franz Ferdinand album out today. and on that note, i'll also take the opportunity to recommend Lala.com. you can stream full albums straight from there, including Tonight. yes, you read it here: stream Tonight, for free, today!

and as a quick update, while you're listening to Tonight, tonight...



... sorry, couldn't help it. anyways, while you're listening, tonight, to Tonight, i'll be heading to the killian-sheridan abode to (try and) record better backup vocals for a few more songs for album #3! moving right along...

cd track length distribution

some time at the band meeting on monday evening, someone said something like "it seems like more people are doing 11 tracks per album these days"

so i looked at the 20 gigs of mp3s i have on this work computer, and said that of the 277 albums total, some 213 of them have 11 or more tracks, and of those 213, 43 of them have exactly 11 songs.

some notable 11 track albums include: Apples In Stereo Velocity of Sound, The Arcade Fire Neon Bible, Beck Midnite Vultures / Mutations / One Foot in the Grave, Ben Folds Five The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner, Ben Kweller Sha Sha, Cake Comfort Eagle / Pressure Chief, Death Cab For Cutie Transatlanticism / Plans / Narrow Stairs, The Flaming Lips Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Foo Fighters There Is Nothing Left To Lose / One By One, Franz Ferdinand [s/t], Islands Return To The Sea, Jaguar Love Take Me To The Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Ozma Rock And Roll Part Three (hey, at least "three" rhymes with "sea"), Radiohead Amnesiac, The Shins Oh, Inverted World / Wincing The Night Away, Shout Out Louds Howl Howl Gaff Gaff, The Strokes Is This It? / Room On Fire, Tokyo Police Club Elephant Shell, Vampire Weekend [s/t], and of course, Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

to which eric said "So al, you got a breakdown for of the albums you have, what the track counts are. I'd be curious to see a bar chart or something."

how's this? again, out of 277 albums total...

the blizzard man

will the blizzard man make a guest appearance on The Modlins' still-untitled album #3? only time will tell...

... but probably not...

vampire friday

sure halloween was two weeks ago, but hey, whatever. here's some Vampire Weekend for a weekend that may or may not contain vampires. actually, Twilight comes out in a next week, so i guess maybe i should wait til then, cause this doesn't really have anything to do with James Bond, unless maybe he goes to Cape Cod for the Quantum of Solace... i guess we'll find out tonight. and in the meantime...



i especially like the drum line accompaniment. which reminds me, just to give a quick peek of an update, we are withholding Modlin practice to continue focus on the still-unnamed (unless they named it without me) album #3. so to compensate for lack of real rock and roll, i bought Rock Band on tuesday night, and can now play pretty coherently on Hard Mode. also, i got a blister on my thumb. ooh, since my "Yes We Did" album title got vetoed, maybe The Modlins Blisters On Our Thumbs doesn't have such a bad ring to it...