Live at Empty Bottle (rerun)

As I was browsing through my DVD collection I noticed an unmarked generic black case. I had to think for a second as to what exactly it was. Riiiight, it was the only existing live video of me performing solo in the last few years. My pal from college John Weaver shot it when I played the Empty Bottle in September of 2006. I remember that show for the reason that it was the first time I was back in Chicago after having moved to Sweden. It had been 10 months since I had seen any of my friends back home.

The performance itself isn't much to look at if you want my opinion. This was post guitar and pre knob-twisting. I sang along to my music and walked around the stage drunk. That was my thing. I don't know if it really worked.

Anyways, I liked how some of the songs sounded at least. I liked the fact that the room was filled with my friends that night. So I dumped the audio and selected 5 of my favorites. I would've put the whole set up but since the audio was coming from a video, a few songs were shot a bit too close to the main speakers and were a bit too fuzzed out to post.

Anyways, I thought I'd share this with you. This is a bit on the lo-fi side, but it is the only documentation of what I was doing live in 2006.

Mike Downey : Live at Empty Bottle, Chicago, Sept. 6, 2006
1. The Team That Never Wins
2. Oh, Randomness
3. You've Your Spymap Out
4. Comforter
5. Families

Download it in this zip file

Beaujolais : Love At Thirty

Joe Ziemba is Beaujolais. This is his debut album entitled Love At Thirty. I received this in the mail today but have been spending quality time with a cd-r of the album for a couple months now. I can't tell you how well-crafted and meaningful this record is.

Joe and I go way back. We went to high school together. Before I even knew him personally I started by watching him play drums in a powerful punky band that was tighter and, well, just plain better than all of the other bands in our high school (and there were surprisingly a ton of them). I was jealous and I was inspired.

Joe and I got to know each other and became quick friends. He got a Tascam 4-track before anyone else I knew. Joe also played guitar, sang and wrote his own songs and would make side project cassettes and pass them around school. This was the first time I realized that you didn't have to have a record label or be famous to put out an album. It pretty much changed the way I think, even to this day.

Before too long I was playing bass in a band with Joe. We started playing his solo songs live and eventually I started bringing in my own songs, which I sang. We recorded these songs on Joe's 4 track and even though I had a 4 track of my own by then, he really taught me how the machine worked. I watched him twist knobs and bounce tracks together. He would give me tapes of his songs and I'd pass him a tape of my songs. There were many hours of discussions about these songs and many more hours of us rehearsing these songs and performing them in front of audiences.

We learned to be musicians together. We experienced the good and bad of it together. We always managed to let the good, no matter what the ratio was to bad, shine through and grow, never seeming to get discouraged.

We then started the band Wolfie together and released a bunch of stuff and toured around. To make a long story short, what I basically did for a good long while was make music with Joe. And more importantly, we grew up and experienced life with each other to lean on.

For some people making music is just something you do for a while, then move on to something else. For Joe it is how he documents his life and deals with it. It's not a novelty and it's not temporary. This album is a document of a dark and promising time. There are really shitty times in life and it's up to an individual's inner strength to move forward and somehow come out a better person in the end. Everyone deals with life in different ways. Love at Thirty is how my good friend Joe does it. And it's quite an amazing thing to observe.

You can preview songs and purchase this album via Parasol.

Speechless

On the morning of July 1st, 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden at precisely 6:38, Nilla gave birth to our daughter Tilda. My life will never be the same after experiencing this. I simply don't have the words to explain what this means to me. The words don't exist.