a bone for enquiring minds...

Seriously, I think the iPhone killed the Bad Veins blog. There was a short time, in which I would sit down on a semi-regular basis and shared my thoughts. Then I got my fancy little iPhone, and I could snap a photo of something we were experiencing, throw a couple words of description, and be on my way. The prose, for all intents and purposes, had devolved. I guess I'm beginning to learn my lesson. People (to my surprise) DO care what is going on with Bad Veins, and I suddenly feel like perhaps keeping the communication open between my reclusive self and the general public might be in my own self-interest. Not that I don't enjoy maintaining the blog; it's kind of like exercising. Once you get past the burn, it is actually an enjoyable experience, or so I've heard. So anyway, I'm thinking that I only have myself (and Sebastien) to blame for the breakdown of bloggy-ness. We're going to try to get back on it.

So this Friday, August 22, 2008. Bad Veins will be playing at the Mad Hatter in Covington, Kentucky with VHS or Beta, and its actually the only show we have booked right now. This will mark the last show to fall within our first two years of being a band. (Sept 9, 2006 was the first Bad Veins show at the Courtyard Cafe in Cincinnati with Campfire Crush). I'm sure we'll be going out for dinner in celebration that night. Its funny, in a way it feels like we've been doing our thing for a long time, and I get the impression that A LOT of people feel like we've been doing our thing for a long time. I guess that has a lot to do with Bad Veins getting a little buzz right out of the gate. After our second show, we were getting written about in a bunch of blogs, and playing cool showcases in NYC. 

So here we are, closing in on two years after that first mini-wave of attention, and I'm under the impression that most people (that dont know us, or know what we've been doing ) are confused as to why we STILL don't have our record out. Again, this all comes back to the original mission statement of this blog, so I suppose I've failed! Allow me to explain what is happening....

Bad Veins debut album HAS been recorded. We have a few more sessions of mixing scheduled in Richmond, Virginia throughout the end of August and into September, and the final touches are set to wrap up in LA the first week of October. So if all goes well, we should be COMPLETELY finished the first week of October. 

Then comes the question as to when this will become available to the masses. That is indeed another question entirely. We have a handful of labels that claim to be seriously interested in "doing something" together (which has been the case since that 2nd show). So we'll get copies of this finished record out to all of them, and see who can step it up. I guess since physical music isn't selling as much these days, labels have a slightly restricted cash flow, and they want to make certain that a band can deliver before they are willing to sink in the dough needed for distribution, promotion etc... And at this point, there isn't a lot of proof that Bad Veins CAN deliver a solid record... Thankfully we'll be in a very different position in about 45 days.

But why HAS it taken so long?, a lot of people wonder? That's a little bit like asking someone why its taken them so long to get married, or why its taken someone so long to find a job they love. I didn't really have a plan when I started Bad Veins. Making good music was what I was really interested in, and believe it or not, just making the music was the goal in and of itself. There were no plans for labels, managers, publicists, etc... And when I met Sebastien, and we started working on music together, we never really had time to make a plan, our path just kind of fell in front of us. It's funny, I remember the week after our first show, I was getting my oil changed and sitting in the little waiting area of the station with a notebook. I was making a list of all of the other cities in the vicinity of Cincinnati, and thinking of venues or people that I knew (if any) in those cities. "Lexington, Louisville, Indianapolis, Chicago, Dayton, Columbus,

Cleveland" and on and on... I guess my plan was to get a calendar full of shows, a regular rotating calendar in which we would hit all of these cities on a regular basis, and hopefully start building up a regional fanbase? I guess thats what I was thinking, and I guess its not a bad idea, but oddly enough, Bad Veins has YET to plan any of those cities, except for Chicago. We have however played repeatedly in New York and Memphis,  as well as Little Rock, Austin, Detroit and our hometown of Cincinnati. To cheesily quote Lennon,  "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans",  and a Chris Rock quote for good measure "a man is only as faithful as his options". I guess what I'm saying in my usual longwinded roundabout way is that we rolled with the punches, instead of holding firm to a plan.

Oddly enough the only thing we ever really HAD planned on, was making a record. And that never really had any details locked down, we just kept writing and tracking.  I think a factor that played a large roll in the ever-changing plan was our involvement with management. Ever since the record industry started heading south, from what I can tell, everybody in the music business with a rolodex full of industry contacts got to thinking maybe their job might not be so secure, so they'd take that rolodex and try their luck at artist management.... i can just hear them.... "make some phone calls, and skim a little of the top, piece of cake, right?" Since its inception, Bad Veins has been a target for such band managers. I'm not pointing fingers at anyone in particular actually, there were seriously more of these people than I can recall. We now, however, have management with whom we're very happy, and get the spoiled rockstar attention our delicate egos desperately crave. We've been under our new management for about 3 months now and  have been making solid steady progress since.

One more issue I'd like to touch on, before I get back to work (seriously, I'm supposed to be working on music right now) is the evolving sound of Bad Veins. 

Our Demos EP was a dirty, lo-fi experiment that I still really love. It was however, recorded just before Sebastien joined. Seb's addition to the band turned my lo-fi sound up on its side, seeing as how he has style that is quite heavy and hyper. The buzz we started getting after our second show was spread throughout the web courtesy of the Demos EP, which was a little odd, because our live sound was NEVER anything close to that EP. We've since experimented with different production styles. The songs up on our myspace page are the fruit of our first trip into the studio, under management of someone who was lobbying for a particular mix. Though I've grown to love them, they are very different from that first EP. The way I see it, there is a scale of Bad Veins lo-fi vs hi-fi production (1 being lo-fi, 10 being hi-fi), and the Demos EP would fall on the lo-fi end of that spectrum, maybe a 2 or a 3. The songs on our myspace page would fall somewhere around 8 or 9, being very hi-fi. Personally,  I struggle with where on this scale this first record belongs, and my ideas of where it will end up get more convoluted all the time. I guess we will see where it lands.

Okay kids, I'm burnt out on self-analysis for the day. Stay tuned for more meandering and self indulgence.

-B