Florida on my mind... [01 Nov 2006|08:29am] Here's to new beginnings, you fucks. 7 comments|post comment

Small update... [17 Sep 2006|03:46am] I dont have the internet, so I am guerilla stealth posting. Basically, I am working every day and when Im not waiting tables, I am in a van with 3 sweaty dudes driving long distances to play loud noise. 1 comment|post comment

wowzas [05 Sep 2006|02:37pm] Just a little update. So, the last three TFTF shows were amazing. We completely KILLED the soundvent, left a massacre at Tremont (with Daughters, Lords, and Russian Circles)... And didn't do too shabby at the Ground Zero show (with Terror, Colin of Arabia, and Animosity). I wish I was just more into it. I won't be around much longer. My destiny lay in beside beaches of endless sand, margaritas, and my childhood friends. Over and out. 2 comments|post comment

[01 Sep 2006|02:50am] So, I have a really nice pair of cowboy boots now. Oh! And I got a neeto childs bandit mask, a magic 8 ball, a great vest, and a new tie from value village. The boots are from Lebo's. OH OH! And I saw Crank tonight. A late night screening at the movie theatre for free with Luke in Hickory. It was like a not as artsy Natural Born Killers. Jason Statham is one hunky dude. I would do him if I liked butts. His girlfriend in the movie was really hot too. Oh! And he totally cut this dudes hand off with a butcher knife, then used the same hand (holding a gun) to shoot it's previous hand owner. It was brutiful. So yeah man, good times. It was an awesome day. TFTF plays shows tomorrow, with daughters on saturday, and with terror on monday. Come out! 1 comment|post comment

Chorus of my life... A pointless biography of one white American male's fascination with sound. [30 Aug 2006|05:13pm] So, I was rediscovering the smashing pumpkins today when I started thinking about what music and bands affected me most while I was growing up... so I decided to do a little musical timeline. The Ramones and Social Distortion were the first two bands that I ever really got into. My dad introduced me to them at a very young age, and to this day I have been a huge fan. I suppose these two pretty much sum up my childhood. I enjoyed Smashing Pumpkins and the Offspring recorded on cassette tapes I would listen to on a small boombox. Life was exciting. During the middle school years, I was a huge MxPx fan. That was the first band I ever really got into on my own, without my dad's help or the "super cool" Korn crowd forcing their ignorance on my easily manipulated adolescent head. Poppy punk bands like MxPx and New Found Glory, along with new school ska stuff like Less Than Jake, led me to discover more "underground" acts like Pennywise and Against All Authority. Punk rock just spoke to me, I guess. Then, upon entering highschool, came Dunamis Struggle, my first band. Playing with bands like Evergreen Terrace and the like, as well as the guiding hand of my friend Eb and my youth minister and bassist Dooby, pulled me into the world of metal and hardcore. I became a fanatic for ZAO and absolutely loved Mortification and Living Sacrifice. Later, as I started to grow as a teenager I dove deeper into the hardcore catalogue, loving backs like Coalesce, Shai Hulud, American Nightmare, and Mastodon. Hardcore took that anger and alienation I felt as a kid and tried to push it in a positive direction. I walked the straight edge and held strong my faith. This is also when I started a tragic love/hate relationship with "emo" and bands like At The Drive-In, Cursive and Coheed and Cambria. However, I get bored easily... I evolve faster than most people, and it wasn't long before... Edge is broken, friends are lost, the Florida hardcore scene I knew and loved was gone. I was living in Florence Alabama drinking and experimenting with not so pleasant things. I was an angry teenager who wanted angry music. When I started hanging out with the Florence Alabama punks and discovering the OTHER side of hardcore. Bands like A Global Threat and Descendants ruled my stereo. It was, however, an awkward time... I wore some very, very retarded clothes an account of my party soaked mind and limited maturity. However, it is fun to look back on learning to play drums for The Disease, a horrid street punk band I was in shortly, and laughing in reminisc. Then, High School is Over. Realizing the ridiculousness of the whole "anarchy! oi!" thing I move to Andrews NC and live in the back apartment of my "uncle" Dean's record store. I worked at the store by day, and listened to everything I could get my hands on at night. This is when I became obsessed with the bands I missed... Television, Talking Heads, and "The Boss", my buddy Bruce. I also started delving into indie rock such as Jeff Buckley (Grace is a personal favorite) and Pavement. I started collecting records, and giving things I once shunned... Blues, Jazz, Acoustic, and Hip Hop a second chance. I loved every minute of it. I then moved to Atlanta, first time away from parents and fully on my own... Well, not fully. I lived with a great girlfriend and hung out with friends, but my self destructive young adulthood made it impossible to keep lasting relationships. I had a period of hardcore nostalgia and returned to an extremely fierce obsession with the genre, as I think I always will from time to time, and when I had soaked up all I could from Atlanta I moved... To Colorado. Denver. The viking warriors I met in this cold state introduced me to TRUE metal. Manowar, black metal bands like Emperor and power metal like Sonata Arctica and Dragonforce blasted from my stereo. I drank, I rocked, I played my bass. I also smoked far too much pot, and started listening to alot of "stoner rock" like High on Fire and bands such as ISIS and Neurosis. When I missed the south too much... and had no musical projects to keep me occupied, I jetted back to Atlanta once more. Because of my interest in bands like The Knack and Richard Hell, I somehow ended up surrounded by the same once mohawk and combat boot clad kids I knew in Florence. Only now, the cool thing was glam fashion and straight hair. I started a band that never left the ground with a few kids, and actually became very interested in The New York Dolls and other 70s pre-punk. Overall however, the entire experience was horrible and exhausting. I hate Atlanta. So I moved back home. This leads us to today. I live Charlotte, North Carolina. My family is only a stones throw away in Murphy, a small mountain town. The rocky landscape has pushed my soul toward new passions... Bluegrass, sincere country, and southern rock like the Avett Brothers and I have grown up quite a bit. Im still learning, of course... but people change. If you actually read all this you are crazy or too cute. I can't decide yet. Please don't crucify me for the typos. I am too lazy to spellcheck. 2 comments|post comment

Guess who... [20 Aug 2006|09:05pm] Is playing with Terror, Through the Eyes of the Dead, etc? Im so excited! TFTF has gotten so many good shows recently! Im watching the life aquatic with Hannah. My friend Niki came to visit the other day, and it was really cool seeing her again. She is doing really well, and I like her boyfriend alot. 1 comment|post comment

[14 Aug 2006|07:45pm] THE FIRE THE FLOOD IS PLAYING WITH DAUGHTERS ON SEPTEMBER 2ND. Im so excited I could fart fire. 2 comments|post comment

weathering the storm [13 Aug 2006|10:05am] [ mood | creative ] [ music | Weerd Science: the blueprint ] So, after being fired from my landscaping job a few weeks ago, I have a new job which I am training for right now. Yes, yours truly has joined the wonderful world of restaurant waitstaff at... wait for it... O'Charlies. That's right folks, I will be serving you food for singles and $2.50 an hour. So yeah. It will be nice to get a friggen paycheck instead of selling everything I own that I don't need. Oh, something sorta interesting. I might do a hip-hop side project with this dude Tech Digital I know. For a really long time, I have always had fun with this masked MC alter-ego, Debate, and now I have a dj making me beats. It's going to be friggen AWESOME. Just wait... hahahaha! post comment

I love the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC channel... [10 Aug 2006|12:01pm] Nothing is more metal than a polar bear roaring into the arctic sky with a muzzle covered in blood. I know what my next tattoo is going to be. post comment

Last night... [09 Aug 2006|08:23pm] Was freaking awesome. We opened the life once lost/red chord/norma jean show and, as it turns out, we killed. I felt like complete shit. I was really sick, and I slept like, entire day. Neil, our guitarist, got me some medicine which sorta helped, and I felt alot better when the adrenaline kicked in and we got on stage. I couldn't really hear myself due the head sickness... thingy, so I was really pissed that such a great show was going to suck. Well, we got off stage and immediately sold 3 tshirs and a ton of demos. Guy with the dreads from a life once lost came up to our drummer and said he really dug it, and a ton of kids came up to me and said we were sick. Then this group of like three kids came up to me and said they loved us, bought anothe demo, and said I was a sick bass player. So, after my boy Chuk bought me a PBR I headed outside and ended up with two of the guys from the red chord. I said hi, told them they killed tonight, and they said they really dug our band. So I asked if they wanted a demo, and they got really excited and thanked me. So I gave a demo to the singer and bassist, and ran back to grab a demo for a life once lost as well. The singer from the red chord said he would myspace us sometime when they have time off to give us some critique on our sound and the like, which was pretty rad. I have seen Norma Jean a dozen or so times, so I just hung out with Cambridge in their van during the set. Norma Jean's management were real dicks, and sort of fucked over Cambridge hardcore on their set time. It was not cool, I feed bad for those guys. Overall however, it was a great night. I got to hang out with my sister Jessica, which was awesome. She leaves for Africa soon. Thanks to everyone that came out. This show really helped me feel alot better about what I am doing right now. We are going to start putting together promo packs for labels pretty soon. Over and out. post comment

Morning light is far to bright... [07 Aug 2006|08:51am] [ mood | awake ] [ music | silence is golden ] I have been up all night. Long after the rest of the band fell asleep I was wide awake, unable to fall asleep. No fair. It made me think alot. Reconsider things. Trivial things to some, however they are not so trivial to me... and considering I have to live inside my own skin, one can only assume that it's my opinion that matters when pondering the subject. So, in general, I am very, very bored. A more fitting term would be sick and frustrated, but I don't want to sound melodramatic. I am bored with the south. I am bored with these close-minded people. I am bored with the boundaries constructed with such absurd, redundant and cliche genre titles and the image/sound/vomit that comes along with it. I am bored with hardcore. I am bored with punk rock. I am bored with my life for the past 5 or 6 years. I have these sounds in my head. Numerous times a day these sounds turn into songs. I can hear them in perfect clarity... every note, every beat, every clash of cymbal or stroke of the strings. I want to pull these damned things out of my head and force other people to hear them too. I doubt anybody would like them. My own band really doesn't like them. I feel trapped and sort of useless. I have three things in my life that make me happy: Visual art Music My family I wish I could have a family that at the very least understood my perspective on the first two. Family isn't necessarily blood and kin. Family is what you make it. I have had a revolving door of brothers and sisters through the years. I just want my current one to stop playing the same song. It's a song we didn't even write. It's a song that has been rerecorded and edited and remixed since the 70s. I want something new. I want something that is MINE. I could die a happy man if I knew some geeky 16 year old would be paying out the ass on ebay for a 7" I helped create because for some odd reason it inspired him to do the same. I don't want to be a rock god or anything silly like that. I just want my little place in the only life I have ever really known. I want to accomplish something. 8 comments|post comment

New song... New track... New... New? [04 Aug 2006|03:50am] So, the fire the flood has a new track up on our myspace. It's a favorite of mine. This has been a crazy couple of days. Starting to feel alot better. Been sick for the last few days, and it's fading. I am really excited about practice Sunday. We are working on some GREAT new material. I am super pumped for the show on the eighth. post comment

GREAT band practice [01 Aug 2006|12:23am] [ mood | ecstatic ] [ music | the fire the flood "combines" ] TFTF wrote a new song tonight, and it totally kills. It sounds like a blend of Botch, Modern Life is War, and Regret, with our signature sound. I am so pumped about it... and it is actually a decent length, 3 minutes, while the rest of our library are pretty short tunes. We talked about lighting and atmosphere, ambiance between songs, so hopefully our show on the 8th with Norma Jean will totally destroy. I am so excited! Lauren had to go home today. It really bummed me out. She is such an amazing person, and I was really getting used to having her around. Maybe one day. Patience, grasshopper. 1 comment|post comment

I can't sleep. [31 Jul 2006|04:19am] [ mood | bouncy ] [ music | GUTG "You and Me" ] I have so much to do tomorrow, and I cannot sleep for shit. No fun no fun. post comment

I love horrible bar bands. [31 Jul 2006|01:30am] [ mood | content ] [ music | the fire the flood "therapy" ] Testing, testing... 1 2 3 So I finally caved under the pressure and picked up one of these terrible little things. I have not owned a "live journal" for like 3 years, so it is sort of odd in a comforting kind of way. Lauren has been visiting me since last wed. She flew in from New York and we have been hanging out in this terrible, humid North Carolina heat. Luckily, my awesome sister took us downtown to show her our little city, and we had lunch today at some tiny music festival thing. The cheesy cover band played one of my favorite Bon Jovi songs. Life is good. My band, the fire the flood, is having practice tomorrow after Lauren leaves for New York. We are writing new material and I am sure it is going to be amazing. post comment

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