…from our favorite gingers. Evan’s the singer/songwriter. his sis plays keys and sings. his wife plays drums and sings then a rotating cast of friends around them… the are really the nicest people you’ll ever meet.

Hey, all. What a year this has been!

In November of last year, we sat around as a band and talked about the goals for the next year – releasing a new EP on our own, trying to get the Spaceland residency at some point, getting out on the road more. These were just a few of the things that we discussed. Well, fast forward to April of 2008: we started out the year by playing the Spaceland residency. We have already made quite a few trips out of town for shows, and have more in store. And next month we are releasing the new EP! That’s a busy 4 months!

The residency at Spaceland was everything we imagined it could be and more. It was a month of getting to play to a great audience of friends/fans, and a month of getting to play WITH and watch some of our personal favorite bands. It was really like a party every Monday night. Can’t beat that, can you? Some of my favorite moments were watching our friends bands – bands like Light FM, The Monolators, Flashing Red Lights, and Everest – play INCREDIBLE sets. Those were moments where you realize exactly who you’re surrounded by, and the sheer talent level that is all around you. That made it even MORE of an honor to play for all these people, and made it feel all the more special when they responded with such enthusiasm.

Spaceland Recordings made a live album out of our last performance of the month – January 28th, 2008. They recorded all the songs, the whole set, in all its glory. There is a moment captured on that recording that you can hear, if you listen close – a really special thing to me. I didn’t even really notice it until listening back to the recordings. Our encore song of the set was a tune called “Mossback”, which is off of our first full length. It’s a fun dance-y number. It ends with a bang, and a chorus of harmonized “ooh-la-la-la”s. When you listen to the closing section of this song, you can make out that a whole bunch of the audience was ooh-la-la-ing right along with us. It sounds great! It is a sound that can’t be achieved with just a band, playing to itself in a practice space, or in a recording studio. That is the sound of a band and an audience not only connecting, but joining together, and having fun TOGETHER. We weren’t just showing them a good time, and they weren’t just showing US a good time. It was a shared thing, it was mutual. And it is easily my favorite thing about listening to that show now – just hearing a mutual exchange between audience and band, and feeling the real energy of that show. It was an amazingly sweet way to end an amazingly sweet month.

As for the EP – we began recording some material for it in December. We recorded two songs right before Christmas, one of which ended up on the EP (“Got It All”). After our residency in January, we pretty much spent all our free time, and all our time that we normally spent playing shows, either at The Boat Studios, or at David Swensen’s apartment (David is our bass player, and also produced the record), recording various things for the record. This was our first time really doing EVERYTHING ourselves – from engineering, to producing, to album art … it is quite a labor of love. We are really really proud of how it has turned out. Because it was all on us, and because we were so invested in it, we really feel it turned out to be something special – something that really sounds like a lot of effort and pride was put into making it. We worked hard to get the sounds we wanted on the record, and David spent hours upon days mixing it, until we really felt it was layered right, and that everything was just as we heard it in our collective (Red) head. “Owl & Timber” is kind of like our new-born baby. We’re VERY excited for you all to meet him (her….it…).

Cheers!

Evan

The Parson Red Heads
“Mossback” (mp3)
from “LIVE [Mondays (in Spaceland) Vol. 6 - January 28th, 2008]”
(Spaceland Recordings)
Buy at iTunes Music Store
More On This Album

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hey everyone. I thought that it would be fun if as we put some of these tracks up, we got the artists to chime in, a bit. This one is from Joey. the singer of The Henry Clay People. He’s brother is the other guy that looks similar to him, playing guitar… that’s andy.

At the bottom there are some reviews of some of the residency shows for you to check out too. At spaceland and the echo we have a resident band that plays every monday in the month. its FREE to attend and a great way to see a band “grow up” some of my favorite shows at the club have been these. -kV

The Henry Clay People
“Children of Chin” (mp3)
from “LIVE [Mondays (at the Echo) Vol. 7 - February 4th, 2008]”
(Spaceland Recordings)
Buy at iTunes Music Store
More On This Album

FROM JOEY:

The residency was a blast.  We tried to have something a little different each night to keep the spirit spontaneous.  Rock and roll should be shot from the hip.  We relearned some Op-Ivy covers that we hadn’t played since high school, we got alot of friends to join us on stage.  It was chaos and I loved every minute of it.

REVIEWS:

http://classicalgeektheatre.blogspot.com/2008/02/henry-clay-people-w-monolators-service.html

http://squaregirls.blogspot.com/2008/02/see-her-runing-around-shes-girl-about_19.html

http://classicalgeektheatre.blogspot.com/2008/02/henry-clay-people-w-happy-hollows-death.html

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So check it out… we just started working with our new friends Elliot, Michael (technically old friend) and Kevin. They run RCRDLBL.com and now have some of our live tracks. Bands get paid but you don’t pay anything! So, if you wanna help out our bands go download our live recordings here. us on posting our wares for free to you! This is a big part of the future of how bands can make a living makin’ music and we’re happy to join our friends at Dim Mak, Downtown and Modular as part of the RCRDLBL_ fam!

Check out these links: us featured on the home page, our label page, our first blog post, White Rabbits, The Thermals, Rademacher, The Parson Red Heads, The Henry Clay People.

enjoy!

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out today! Go get it. in the meantime you can download a free track in this thing. Post it on your myspace page to give to your friends.

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Our one-man-band friend Liam Finn will be on The Late Show with David Letterman tonight. While he was in LA a couple of weeks ago we did another amazing LIVE recording. Its coming together very nicely and will be out this summer, after his studio album gets going. Speaking of you can buy his studio album here! We love you.

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