This is Winter Tour… brought to you by StereoF and fans.

Yeah? So what? So what that it’s been almost two months since we posted a new blog entry?  Do you care? I don’t. Point is, I’m doing it…. geez….  So this tour has been awesome…. by our count it’s our 14th or 15th tour in the last three years (depending on what you call a tour…. in our book one week on the road is vacation, not tour….).  Infact, we marked our three year anniversary as a full-time touring back back on February 17th (incidentally the first day of this tour).  We have had some amazing shows and feel so blessed that so many people have been coming out to support (thanks!).  We’ve gotten some great press coverage, awesome photos, did a sweet live, multi-media recording in Grand Rapids with Halfway House Music Blog (kind of like Daytrotter, but way cooler….).  Feast your eyes on some cool photos by some really talented, cool photographers:

We have a new webpage that is almost done… pretty soon, you’ll have to read this damn thing because it will be right there on the homepage…. BAM!

Hibernation. Tips, techniques, etc…

So we recently returned from a 10 day mini-super-short-tour to the Northeast in late January.  Ridiculously cold, but a hell of a good time.  It was awesome to see so many folks come out and brave the cold during our shows in VT, NY,PA, and TN and really cool to get to play at Jay Peak, one of New England’s premiere ski resorts!  So, thanks to all the love and support from the fans:

So we will be leaving for our first long tour of the year starting on February 17th and are very excited.  We will be playing in some awesome theaters and venues throughout the country as well as some of our old favorites; make sure to check out http://www.stereof.com/tour for all venue listings.  Until then, we will be hibernating and storing up energy to push through the first few weeks of the aforementioned tour… mid February in the Midwest can be less than pleasant, sometimes…  Some things we will be doing…. sleeping, reading, sedations (natural and unnatural), sleeping, eating, eating more.  Some tips to help pass the time: read Phillip K. Dick, listen to your favorite StereoF song on repeat, sniff glue (not recommended), make nice with the local bears in your community and learn their ways, have a snack.

See you in two weeks!

It’s a new year and this one goes to 11…

Ok, so I completely stole that from a friend (Spinal Tap, anyone??) since I am totally not creative enough to think of that myself. We’ve been super-busy lately, despite the holiday-ness of this time of year. We’ve been working up some new songs (one of which I can’t seem to think of any words to except “gorilla, gorilla, gorilla,” so we’ll have to see how that one turns out in the end) which is mega-exciting for me and Chris, and will hopefully become exciting for y’all as well.

Other exciting things:

Thanks for voting our album, You Are Having A Wonderful Time, #81 in WNCW’s poll of the Top 100 Albums of 2010. We feel pretty special to be included in a list with lots of the Big Dogs of Popular Music and feeling special is pretty cool.

We got a pretty smashing review of our aforementioned album on popmatters.com. Check out the whole thing at http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/133877-the-stereofidelics-you-are-having-a-wonderful-time/ .  Again, making us feel pretty special.

(One of my New Year resolutions is to not use as many !!!!s as I am naturally prone to do. Please do not interpret the absence of !!!!s as a lack of enthusiasm; I’m just trying to make my writing appear more mature than that of a twelve-year-old. I’m also trying to stop dotting my i’s with little hearts. It’s difficult, but with the love and support of my family and friends, I think I can do it.)

Hmmm, what else has been new since I last posted a whopping 6 months ago… oops…time sure flies when you’re having fun…

Pictures taken by Heath Patrick from our fantastically awesome show with the Eyes of the Elders at the Neighborhood Theater on 12/5/10:

Chris at the Neighborhood Theater

Neighborhood Theater 12-5-2010 Charlotte, NC

Neighborhood Theater 12-5-2010 Charlotte, NC

We’re picking back up on our normal, hefty schedule starting this Friday (Charlotte, NC at the Evening Muse), so keep an ear out for us coming to your neck of the woods!

VT

Writing to you from the comfy confines of Essex, VT (about 15 miles east of Burlington). The last two weeks of fall tour have been pretty awesome; we’ve seen increasing numbers at our shows and have been finding our reputation precede us more and more. As always want to thank everyone who has come out to support the group and who has been telling their friends/other music fans about us. We have two Halloween shows coming up in VT (Monty on Saturday and Turn of the Tide Music Series in Mid-town Spgs on Sunday). Afterwards it’s a slug fest back home with shows pretty much every night until November 15th. Interestingly enough, the goal of this tour was to keep it short and sweet; hit all the places that we love going and also keep us sane by not being on the road too long. Turns out that after we get home we have a 9 day extension of shows, albeit local and regional, that will make the Fall run seem as long as normal. Not to worry, we’re bred for this stuff…. As long as we keep feeling the love as we have been recently, we could do this forever. As always, more to come and thanks for reading.

C

Fall tour underway!!!!

Our fall tour is well underway and has been rocking since the day we left!  Covering some serious ground, we’ve been having some great shows and are loving all the fans returning to see us as well as the new converts!  Big thanks to everyone who has come out to support and we will have a bunch of new video and audio coming up very soon!  On a side note, we were pleased to hear that we are #1 on WGDR radio in the Montpelier, VT area.  Baby steps…  A few more days in CO and then heading east through the Midwest and into the Northeast… keep an eye of http://www.stereof.com for all the details!

Here are some pics from our show at The Ghost Room in Austin, TX!!

Free live downloads!!!

Three live songs recorded on WUGA last Friday (8/27/10) Hot Slide, Only Sleeping, and Spinning–download them here: http://www.mediafire.com/?esmbnvqhvkg1w

CD Release shows at home!

We made our way back to Asheville and no sooner was the tour laundry done and we were working on pulling together a couple of CD release parties to rival the best… The first in our hometown was at the Grey Eagle Music Hall. The Galen Kipar Project (Asheville) and Jacob Johnson (Greenville, SC) joined the bill. Amidst sweaty dancing, playing, cookie-eating (I actually made lots of chocolate chip cookies the night before) and general frivolity, You Are Having A Wonderful Time was officially released to an enthusiastic crowd of awesome folks! We all were, incidentally, having a wonderful time…

We were lucky enough to get a live recording (Chris is mixing it down as I type) and a few videos of the show. We’ll be working overtime to try to get that ready to post online for your listening and viewing pleasure!

The second of the two CD release shows was at the Evening Muse in Charlotte, NC with our good pals, Actual Proof, splitting the bill. We found a review of the show in the Charlotte Examiner the next day: http://www.examiner.com/music-in-charlotte/stereofidelics-continue-rocking-charlotte-with-a-great-live-set-and-a-new-cd . Thanks to Monty for taking photos and writing kind words!

Also, just in time for the official release of You Are Having A Wonderful Time, it is now available on iTunes! (http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/you-are-having-wonderful-time/id381897891) Happy listening, y’all!

M

Grey Eagle Music Hall 8/12/10

Grey Eagle Music Hall 8/12/10

Bing!

Last night we played at the Cyber Cafe in Binghamton (I was extolling the virtues of their fantastic draft selection in my last post). They had a fog machine and laser machine on order and got them shipped overnight so they arrived just in time for our show. So, needless to say, we had much fog, lasers, and in general, a pretty high-production evening. Our friends Jamie and Ali made the trek out so we were sure to enlist them to snap a few pictures. As it was our first fog-filled show in a while (pretty exciting business!) I’m making sure to attach a picture highlighting said fog as well as the green lasers. You can’t see us very well, but the fog looks great! The lasers do look a bit strange captured still in a photograph, but trust me, they were wicked awesome dancing all over the stage. Even with the fancy production aside, last night was a great evening. The place really filled up with enthusiastic listeners and we really played our butts off for ’em. After the show, we had a chance to stick around and visit with everyone for a while (while we finished our delicious brews, of course!) before starting the looooong drive to Kalamazoo today.
M

New Hope, PA to Bing…

Tuesday night in New Hope, PA = good times at John and Peters. We survived the daytime heat (we were just in Vermont for, like, a week where it was very nice-temperatured–it feels really hot down here, ok?!) by staying holed up inside working on really exciting administrative band things and hiking by a river (and hopping in a few times). As is usually the case with J&P’s the crowd is really, really late, so at around 12:30 there’s folks coming in to watch the Great Pack Up that we do so well (practice makes perfect–we also do a Great Set Up too…). It’s hard to straddle the fence for the folks that had to get up for work this morning and the folks who didn’t care that they had to get up for work this morning, so we played a loooong set to unwind to and to rock the &$&@ out to (tryin to keep it family friendly here in rock-blogland).
Tonight we’re in Binghamton, NY at the Cyber Cafe West which is neither too Cyber or too Cafe-y, but quite artsy and music-y and beer-y. Deliciousness awaits at the 623 taps of craft beer they have. Ok, maybe it’s more like 15-25, but still, that’s a lot of deliciousness. My plan is to have 4-6 half-glasses throughout the evening–the Great Pack Up may be a bit slower tonight…
M

BROOKLYN!!!

Here we are again! After navigating the whole parkway/expessway thing coming into The City (our van is considered “tall” so we have to be careful not to get stuck under a bridge) from Vermont we wound ourselves around into Bushwick to get to Goodbye Blue Monday. It’s always tricky trying to figure out how to get to our destination with the least amount of toll charges. Our first tour, I remember crossing lots of bridges and spending lots of money to do so. Pretty much, if you can find a cheap/free bridge, do what you gotta do to get there and remember it for next time. We always forget that part. Anyway, I digest… Goodbye Blue Monday is always a very welcoming oasis in the middle of an aloof-ish city. We always amaze at all the fun stuff in the venue: a plastic Christmas Bing Crosby missing his chin, an IKEA clock from the ’50s, an action-figure mirror (we had to pose with that one), tons of books…pretty much a big living room with a bar in it. And live music every night. Wonderful! Tonight was no exception–great audience, saw some friends and met some new ones, and had a great time. Now we’re leaving Brooklyn, Oy Vey!