A New Chapter

EAST COAST REPRESENT

A long time ago, in the BEFORE TIMES, we played with Guttermouth in Calgary. (This was one of the many times we’ve helped an American band draw a crowd in Canada without ever being offered gigs in the USA in return... I shall return to this). We love Guttermouth and I was extremely stoked to meet the lead singer. But that night he told me something that blew my mind: he had three different versions of the band, located in three different parts of the world, and he just travelled to them and played shows with them. I thought: that’s crazy. How could anyone do that?

Well. Isn’t life full of surprises. In a previous post, I wrote about this band’s increasing ability to temporarily replace members:

This ability to swap people in has been key to the longevity of the band, and we now effectively have two functioning units, with the SSB (drums) and I traveling to either North America or UK/Europe and picking up three stragglers to play gigs.

But this got me thinking: how many members do you have to swap out before it’s no longer the same band?

I still don’t know the answer to this. But now that I’m a permanent New Yorker, I’ve been thinking to myself: “Two Functioning units? Why not three???”.

So over the last couple of months I’ve been slowly trawling the darkest, dirtiest pubs, clubs and corners of the internet, looking for musicians. And I’ve finally gathered five New Yorkers—who play accordion, violin, bass, drums and mandolin respectively—and we have our first practice next week. It’s an East Coast USA Dreadnoughts, with a revamped set-list, a new set of voices, and most importantly, the ability to easily play in NY, Boston, Providence, Philly and New Jersey.

And amazingly, thanks to the generous folks at Scenic Presents, our first show is booked; New York City (Brooklyn to be exact) in July. Some people would say that’s too soon for a whole new lineup; but as band members of mine have often learned, I prefer the “fuck it, let’s just play” approach.

I’m also very excited to actually jam with a band again and write songs collaboratively. Since Foreign Skies the Dreadnoughts have done literally zero writing together. It’s just been me sitting in my home studio trying to come up with material. Seven years of that. Not great. The best songs come from collaborative efforts; I remember bringing “Poutine” to the band without an instrumental part, and Druzil just sat there with his mandolin and made one up on the spot. You just can’t replace that.

And to be honest, all the connections we’ve tried to make in the US over the years have amounted to jack shit; none of the bigger punk festivals in America have ever responded to our management, none of the bigger US bands we’ve played with have ever reciprocated with US gig offers (save for the wild ride we took with the extremely German Mad Sin back in 2010). It’s time to build from the ground up again: gain fans, make local NYC connections, and so on. Let’s fucking go. Carthage must be destroyed.