…and I’m no exception!
It’s time again for a batch of songs to reach out and swim into Cyber-sea.
Give a listen to six newly recorded tracks on Eljebel’s reverbnation site. The songs include Not Even My Body, Secret Bus, Oblivious, 3 Color Portrait, Ever So Slowly, and Dawn Without Pause.
Go on! All your friends told me to tell you that you should.
Eljebel made it onto a Top Bands list from South by Southwest!
The Washington Post and Yahoo News posted some shots of us as well!
Life is kind.
Planning on being bored speechless on yet another Wednesday night? Oh-ho-ho! Nay, my friend. Eljebel will be featured on the DC radio station WGMU this Wednesday from 10pm till midnight. After Matt and I spin some of our tales of how we came to be as well as moments from our recent tour, we’ll pick up our instruments, get you riled up, and then sing you to sleep. Give a listen at http://www.wgmuradio.com!
Eljebel is gearing up for our last couple of shows in San Francisco, and will then set our sights for North Carolina. So, with the wilder-nest on the brain, here’s a poem for all you out there seeing the dotted lines of your idea of home in the jungles of your travels:
All future landscapes will cling to this,
to this icon of home.The Alps will look like papery billowing bedsheets
with spotlights behind them;
You can see the silhouette of home
leaping across their great blank peaks like a shadow puppet.The prairies will look like they are rubberbanded to the ground,
holding down the specific features and details of home.Home, when reached, will be grinning with the resonance of fitting
within the lines, having finally come into focus.
We spent some time in the desert eating good, earth foods – beets, zucchini, spinach, eggs, garbanzo beans…which we washed down with a bit of tzatziki sauce and a swish of whiskey – and we have our sea legs once more! In the downtime, we burned a slew of copies of our EP, Murmuration. Our individual covers are constructed from old books about cowboys, some about wilderness, others about how to draw the human form. All seemed like appropriate vessels for our music.
Tomorrow morning we head towards San Francisco. Keep an ear out for us on Diamond Dave’s podcast on Friday, live from Radio Mutiny in San Francisco. We’re the 4:20 feature *wink!* and will be playing live at the Mutiny Cafe. If you’re in the bay, come visit us at the cafe on 21st and Florida, in the heart of the Mission district.
The road has taken a toll on the two of us physically, as it can do to anyone who is trying to coerce and wring and milk life of its experiences. (While giving back in our own ways, musically filling the astral soup.) We’re taking a rest in San Diego, preparing to grapevine up the coast to San Francisco. Keep your ears open, Bay Area! We’re on our way!
Beachside Color Spectrum
Tawney Doors at Balboa Park
Our San Diegan host, Tom “Courage” Curry
Inspecting the Coop, Maria the Dark Gem, Ramona with her back turned
Ramona and Ramonita (who will one day usurp Ramona’s throne)
Imperial Beach Shell Hunting
Kafka, Snoopin’
There is a funny tree outside the door of our host’s home that sheds bark in neat wiggly shapes. Matt and I took some choice specimens to a park in San Diego today and gave them personalities. They told us their story:
She heard the Music coming from the sky, from the whole population of wizards, mystics, cooks who erupted in dance in every waking minute, in every traveling beat. The beautiful alien girl with her toes pointed down at the earth. She heard!
To ready herself for travel, she ordered the construction of a silk pink blouse made from the native vines of her Venusian homeland. To help her navigate, she introduced the cartographer and seamstress of her province and had them make a taffeta skirt embroidered with a full-color map, complete with topographical representations. Once she was well-supplied, the alien girl walked to a steep precipice at the farthest end of her planet. She calmed her nerves by breathing in the chill sublunar air and executed a ballerina’s version of a swan dive, hurtling toes-first into the liquid fire ozone.
After pinching out the first and only ember left in her skirt, the girl was greeted by a snow-white jaybird wearing a red backpack. Now, because the girl had never before seen a bird, she would not have known to note that the odd jay was flying on his back with his neck corkscrewed to hold his head aloft.
“May I escort you to the Bayou Cathedral, my dear?,” asked the Jay. The girl had no notion of what a bayou could be. She didn’t even know that bayou is concrete noun that describes a southern region of the United States. Nonetheless, she was intrigued and agreed to go along, proffering her skink-like forepaw.
Only moments after flying side-by-side over scattered trees decorated in Spanish moss, the girl and Jay were bum-rushed by a fish who had strapped himself to a home rigged jetpack. The determined scaly bullet was pursuing a chance at flight. He hadn’t realized that it was essentially, swimming. Just then, he he collided with an iron skillet raised by wing of Bayou Cathedral’s own Fiona Clük, who was in the midst of preparing the evening’s meal.
Upon seeing the pair of motley winged creatures that had just arrived, seemingly, from outer space, she exclaimed, “By corn! What’s got a’holt o’you two?”
Jay said, “I’m not so different,” while comparing his piecemeal backpack to the lacy finery of Mama Clük, her Victorian plume, her hose absent of runs and tears.
The alien girl leaned her tall conical ears to the back of her head and, smiling knowingly, opened her throat and let out a bright courageous note which pierced through Mama Clüks segregation and deflated it. Within minutes, every animal alive that day in the bayou became juggernauts launched at the one-note song of the alien girl. They shook dried gourds and slung rocks at trees to keep the beat. They added what had been missing in the vacuum of space – they gave their souls. Jay said to the alien girl as she closed her grass-colored eyes and took another breath, “I thought you might like it here.”
We never did find out what exactly a Frito pie was, but the ad it was featured in was among the more interesting of the South By (insert name of object of promotion).
Austin, Texas has provided us many generous returns! We’re couch surfing at the home of Kozy Soul, one of Austin’s finest musical duos. They could only be classified as Lady Liberty bending her voice like a saw – pure, clear and psychedelic – over choppy, driving acoustic guitar. Their themes are often the familiar ones of love or its loss, but their lyrical approach is honest and captivating. They have not yet released an album, but they’re worth keeping your eyes peeled for. Check YouTube for videos made by the plethora of SXSW goes who have filmed them playing on the street.
What we’ve found from interacting with the musicians that have collected here, is that festivals like this effectively cultivate community. People that, in their own hometowns, may not be inclined to sitting, sharing, and jamming with other musicians, are on the streets and in urban parks signaling to pedestrians with instruments to come over and share a tune. This is what we intend to carry with us to town after town after city after city. Togetherness!
Also, if you have the time and inclination, come see our show at The Cathedral if Junk at 4pm-8pm. We’re opening for the wild, the chutzpah-drenched Flip Cassidy and the Junkyard Gospel! It’ll be the time of your life!
The story of the Cathedral of Junk: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/7816
Mr. Cassidy and his belly of whiskey: http://www.myspace.com/thejunkyardgospel
Good day, passers-by, and praise shelter! We spent the night in the womb of a motel, safe from a soggy bottom drear-eyed night of camping in the rain. The lightning was snaggletooth stilts holding up the sky. One mammoth bolt lit a tree on fire! We watched it expel coral colored smoke into the night sky, only a hundred yards or so from the road. But in room 224 just outside of Austin, TX, there were 2 humans and a wolf enjoying their groceries and sleeping soundly.
A poem then! In celebration:
There is a fog that materializes,
And out of the fog, a heron;
Out of the heron, an egg
From which comes another heron.
The terraces and verdant crescents
That gust out of the craggy
Expanse of our mountains,
All of those standards of form,
Are stamped with impermanence.
We are manicured by our standards,
Our devastating standards.
We bitterly address
The trapeze,
“Why didn’t you provide
Me with substance?
It was all me up there
With only a birth and destination!”
But those are forced words,
Sprung from our sense of entitlement.
Rather,
We were meant to ask questions
And endure till they’re answered.
Those that do so
Get to maintain a significant shape
In the orchard of selflessness;
Strung up, a member
In a rhapsody of peaches
In Time’s grove,
To then disappear again in the fog.
ELJEBEL 