click the read more link to read a big blog from meg about the new album.

“I’ve caught one. Then Dia catches one. If we don’t catch them fast enough they flutter off into the hills and they are gone forever. If we look for them we can catch them all the time. The concept is similar to seeing fire flies. If you are in the right place at the right time, a grassy field at twilight, you will see them, hundreds of them. Of course, you would have to be looking for them and recognize them for what they are: tiny glowing fairies. Otherwise, they will blur into bright specks of light and you’ll accept them as highlights on the dewy slivers of grass. Once the song is captured, it must be recorded, written down, or presented; in other words, it must be “given a soul”.

Just like we must be certain of little mundane specifics, such as our fashion sense and our taste in men/women at any given points in our lives in order to live fully, we must be certain of our musical sensibilities and opinions in order to create art proficiently. How many of us have shamefully turned the page of our scrap books when we arrive at the picture capturing us in our frizzy side pony tails and flared denim? Or who hasn’t burned that love letter from a certain lover we’d love to erase? You know, the guy who for some reason thought it romantic to shove a vanilla ice cream cone into your face and proceed to lick it off your cheeks? Of course, at the time, you KNEW that the side pony tail was your calling, and it was an ABSOLUTE truth that your favorite part of the day was the few seconds just before your vision blurred as the mint chocolate ice cream came too close to your face for you to focus. The key here is being sure. And if you’re not, you must learn, and struggle, and fight to try to be sure and accept yourself for who you are at that point in time. Please, don’t give me the existential cop out answer of “one can never be sure” (nothing against existentialists). One can be sure, one just has to accept that one can be wrong as well.

I’m not explaining all of this to make any excuses or apologies for my music. Music is linear and eternal just like time and us. And a record is just a “record” of us at that time. A lyric to one of our songs “Here, Here and Here”, which will be on the new record, is actually very literal. There is a lyric “A time in my life, a record of myself” which translates into: these are the songs that represent who we are right now. They are true. And we have some stories to tell. Incidentally, the title of this song came about after I learned that Mozart once said, “there’s nothing to composing. You just need to focus on here, here and here”. He then pointed to his heart, his mind, and his ears. That story is incorporated into the song as well.

We’ve somehow picked the twelve tracks we will be using for our record. I shouldn’t say “somehow”. The effort put towards creating and writing these songs has been deliberate and conscious. There have been some songs which were written in months and months and some that take half an hour. The latter seem to be the ones which are more smooth and connected. For example, “One Sail, One Sea” and “There’s Something About Giving Up” were written that way. I wrote “There’s Something About Giving Up” and Dia wrote the aforementioned song. As we are out here writing, and working on arrangements and instrumentation, every once in a while we take a night off and go on an adventure. I wrote “There’s Something About Giving Up” after one such night. The night of my birthday my friend Janelle took me out for a night on the town. We visited a few lonely hot spots and a few crowded joints and I experienced L.A. night life. Without revealing any details, let’s just say the happenings were…well “crazy” is a good adjective, although it might be a bit of an understatement. Anyway, I didn’t get much sleep, and I ended up just crashing at her place since we were too tired to drive back to my apartment. The next morning, Dia was doing some sort of online cooking show with Hot Topic and so my manager Mike k. was a little at odds with me since I had stayed out all night and wasn’t prepared to support my sister with her up-coming venture. “Be productive!” he said to me somewhat crossly. So I gathered my weary self, picked up their roommate Eric’s guitar laying next to his hamsters in his room (it had a couple missing strings and the action was very high but it served my purposes fine), and wandered outside to the back patio where I sat on a broken wicker chair next to a stone fountain of angels with their noses broken off. I wrote the song about how I felt about most of the faceless people I met last night. Truthfully, we stopped by a few bars, and all the people were wandering and searching, yet still happy in a melancholy way. At first the lyric of the chorus was “There’s something about Hollywood…” and the first verse was about one man in particular that I had never met before who took the time to place his pinky on the crown of my head and assist me as I spun pirouettes toward the ladies room. I thought that was rather sweet. But I ended up making the lyrics a bit more general to hopefully gain a better understanding from all of YOU, which is how my favorite lyric I have written so far came to be. “Think I’ll throw in the towel right now, but fold it nice and neat,” meaning: I long to give up, but as an after-thought as I’m giving up I’ll do it in a very clean orderly way so as to feel a bit better about it. The whole song is kind of sad and bittersweet and is supposed to signify some sort of ending, departure, or goodbye. I composed the music to be a bit up beat and almost have a blue-grassy country feel. In fact, in practice last night, at the end of our first band run through, Nick let a loud uncontrolled “Yee-ha!” after the last symbol crash. Dia smiled throughout the entire hoe down. And it’s times like that where I want to burst into a cheesy bubble of joy because I’m SO happy to be doing what I’m doing.

We start recording on Wednesday. All the songs have been written and documented (Dia and I have the hundreds of stained and ripped notebook papers in our desk drawer to prove it). Hopefully these documents will be in our album inserts so you can see how utterly unorganized we are in the writing process. But who’s thinking about album artwork? “One step at a time,” Dia always reminds me. One step at a time…

-Me”