Last Year, This Year
2011 was a terrific year for us. Not only did it mark the completion of our second year together but it was the year in which we decided what we mean by full-swing. We released our second record, the making of which was largely new territory for us. We played shows in DC, Philadelphia, Rochester NY, New Haven, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, and were thus given the opportunity to see and play with some old friends and make some new ones.
If we’ve made some choices we might not make again, we continue along our path without regret, preferring simply to not make those choices again. That is, we’ve learned a great deal about what matters to us and have been fortunate enough to find like-minded bands and individuals with whom we can collaborate, travel, and perform. Frankly, these lessons remain the most important aspect of our time together. Weeding out the crap of so-called promotion, exposure, and other aspects of the music industry in which we explicitly take no part and from which we ask nothing, has freed us up to do what is most important to us: put our music together and make it public in a manner that enlivens and sustains the kind of culture we want to be a part of, however marginal it might sometimes appear. We encourage you to do the same.
Some of our plans for the coming year are less-baked than others but all of them are derived from and hopefully contribute to our ideas about community, independence, and the necessity of establishing and doing the right thing with and in support of things and people we love.
So we thank you for taking part in our band. Your enthusiasm for our work has been and continues to be a tremendous inspiration. We look forward, as ever, to the next time we see or hear from you.
