March 2010
1 post
New EP! New CD!
Happy birthday, everyone. We’ve got presents.
We have a new 4-song EP available right now, for free, right here:
http://vault.newneighbors.info
(You’ll notice, when you visit the vault, that every album we’ve ever made is up there, including 2002’s The Things That Tie Them Down. I think this is pretty sweet.)
Our brand new full-length album comes out on Tuesday, March...
January 2010
1 post
New Music
First:
I’d like to some music by other people. Portishead is working on a new album - I’m confident it will be awesome - and released this video single for amnesty international that can be found here (thanks to pitchfork for the heads up):
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=11755
Great song, simple yet brilliant video concept. These guys just do things right.
...
December 2009
1 post
Winter Show
Teachers teach, drivers drive, and bands… gig. But we haven’t gigged in far too long.
Time to change that. Saturday, 2 January 2010, we play the Wildfire Lounge in Ithaca, NY. Incidentally, this is also my dad’s birthday.
: .
C
November 2009
1 post
Porn Stars
It has recently come to my attention that both Dana and John were 70s porn stars for halloween. This happened with no coordination between them whatsoever.
At first this surprised me, but it shouldn’t. They are one instrument.
October 2009
3 posts
Monthly Music part II
First, I’d like to announce that my band from school, Verbs, just “released” our first record, called Living Room. We did some serious outsourcing to New Neighbors: Dana mixed and mastered it, so it sounds great, and Chris built us a website, so you can download the whole thing for free. If you are so inclined you can get it at www.verbstheband.com, and if you are SO inclined, you can let me know...
St. Vincent and Andrew Bird perform at a lucky... →
These kind of intimate house concerts are what attracted me to music in the first place, and these are two of the best musicians out there. Really just stunning performances.
September 2009
6 posts
How?
My friends, I’m going to join with Chris and Nate in the game of music sharing. I’m also going to join with them in saying Why?’s ‘Alopecia’ is a fantastic album. It’s absolutely fearless (take the lyric: “In Berlin I saw two men fuck in the dark corner of a basketball court / Just the slight jingle of pocket change pulsing”).
I live two blocks from a used record store, and have been making an...
Here is a song that I wrote and made a rough...
Why?
I started listening to Why? after reading Nate’s last post, and Mr. Terepka has discovered one more musical place where our tastes overlap completely. Considering how much time he and I spend making music together, you’d expect there to be more such places, but, well, there aren’t. That’s part of what gives our music such color.
Anyway, I’m delighted to find...
Since this is a blog about music, I decided it might be fun to use it to talk about the music ive been listening to. Bands end up defining small subsections of my years, so this might be a good way to keep in touch. John, Chris, Dana, maybe you could share as well. Why?, a band from California, has made the biggest impression on me in the last few weeks. This is truly genre bending music, and...
The Brothers Frank—that’s me and my little brother—have just booked their first show. He (the little brother) doesn’t know this yet.
“And I’m like, ‘Well, here is a song I wrote for our new album. I wrote it when I missed New York, in the Autumn.’” - Herman Dune
August 2009
18 posts
No pictures. Just words.
I’m listening to the final mixes of the songs we recorded over the past month. And I’m really happy.
It took me nearly 23 years to realize that Sinatra is great.
This is Full-time Work.
I’m sipping coffee and waiting for Nate to arrive for our afternoon session. We’ll finish the last of sixteen recordings we’ve made this month. Sixteen! The last time we recorded sixteen songs in a batch we were sixteen ourselves, working on the IY record Further Gone. That was seven years ago. For better or worse, our teenage stamina hasn’t left us.
These days are long. We work late...
Mandatory fun!
Home Studio Shots.
For the second stage of our recording process, we escaped from the clutches of Wilburland only to land in the clutches of Chris’s parents’ basement and wine cellar. We occasionally referred to it as ‘The Dungeon” for reasons that will become obvious shortly.
The first picture is of the live room, where we played the new music. The second picture is of the control room,...
I’m back on the internet after a long hiatus, and it seems pretty much the same as I left it.
We’ve left Wilburland and are building a studio in my basement. I forgot how much fun this is.
Casting Things Away.
Hullo.
Last night we played our last show until our yearly hibernation, a hibernation that will be marginally more literal this year. You see, we will only be playing one show between now and Christmas as opposed to several. Although, to my knowledge, none of us is prepared for a fully literal hibernation unless you count Chris’s beard as a winter coat of fur.
So here are (you guessed...
Dana’s playing a rototom instead of a snare. Sketchy. New Neighbors play Castaways with The Family Knife on Friday. Not sketchy at all.
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We took the weekend off, which was absolutely necessary. Today it is absolutely necessary that we record again, so we record we will.
Return to Blog.
The title of this post is a reference to a famous jazz-funk fusion band that included Chick Corea called Return to Forever. I didn’t intend to form a link between the words blog and forever, but then again maybe I did.
I’ve decided to stick with the 3-photos-per-post motif as I’ve been generally uninspired by any other format, and inspiration is key to avoiding wankery in the...
We’re feeling ambitious today, recording twice our usual 1 song. Still Ones is finished and Untitled (working title: Pulpy) is on the way.
July 2009
10 posts
We’re almost finished with Small Heads. Dana and Matt drum on two kits, and I got my acoustic to sound more electric than a tesla coil.
Stones Growing Green today. (That’s the name of the song we’re recording, not a zen koan.) Dana’s kick drum quivers unnervingly.
Yesterday we recorded all of Up a Down Ladder, every goddamn track. Today we’re at work on Open Ends. Tomorrow… I’m not sure yet.
Today we go to the recording studio to record a record. Good word. Record record record record record.
Dana just showed me around the mixing studio at IC. Neat room.
I’m putting 12-gauge strings on my electric guitar. DR, all nickel. They sound great and feel better.
We have been hanging out in LA for 7 hours now. I feel like I’m Tom Hanks in “The Terminal.”
Drinking red wine and getting ready to call it an early night. We’ve been making a full time job out of rehearsing in a Sydney practice space for the next record, the working title of which is unmentionable. Were taking songs to a deeper level of collaboration than we have in the past; were going so far as to discuss the lyrics between the four of us for each song so as to be on the same page in...
It's all getting a little too squid orientated...
We spent much of the last two weeks in Melbourne where our normal communication methods (landline telephones, wireless internet, homing pigeons) were difficult or impossible to come by. The fact that we’ve not been blogging often stems from this rather than an absence of blogworthy happenings. Take this happening for example: My father’s childhood friend was on tour playing guitar...
June 2009
26 posts
Day Off
We have arrived in Sydney again at last. With nothing planned for the day, I am in search of drum shops, both small and large. I will traverse to the city centre and work my way slowly outward. When the day is done I will have hopefully annoyed many a music store owner. Good day.
We're not musicians. We're META musicians.
So. We got way behind on our blogging, and all the long stories I wanted to tell about this and that have faded into little snippets. Maybe it’s better that way. We’ve been working on music, mostly, which ultimately you’ll find more satisfying than a large set of blog entries anyway. Right?
Friend: Hey, so did you guys write any great songs during the tour? Me: No, but we...
Blessed Solitude.
There’s a little downtime here in Adelaide, so I thought I’d share a few more of my photographs. The flash on my camera died too (well it’s my mother’s camera… sorry mom.) so all of my photos henceforth will be of sunny places.
This section is dedicated to Solitude (capital ‘s’), something that can be difficult to find in the conditions of extreme...
sleep
We just drove 11 hours to Adelaide. Exhaustion. Goodnight. Gig tomorrow. The End
Dana and I are in an internet cafe in Canberra. The blog is getting out of date, but internet has been spotty here and there’s not much we can do. We’ve had our hands making music, keeping fed, and visiting burned down observatories.
Next stop is Melbourne, where we may or may not have better luck with the internets.