Happy 2012
Hey friends, Happy new year from the consummate professionals here at Ascetic Junkies, LLC. We just wanted to drop you a line about our plans for 2012, as the end of the current Mayan long-count approaches. Not that it ultimately matters, since we’ll all be converted to pure energy just before next Christmas. First of all, thanks to everyone in Portland, Bend, and Cottage Grove who made our last few shows of 2011 a huge blast. These shows were notable, as you know, because they marked the last shows our long-time banjoist Graham Houser played with us before relocating indefinitely to South America with his wife Michelle (side note: if you know them and are interested in following their adventures, Michelle is blogging about it here). We were sad to say “good-bye for now” to our good friend, and spent some precious anxiety on wondering what to do to replace his unique sonic position in the band, but we’ve arrived at the following conclusion: four-piece bands are easier to manage than five-piece bands… let’s try it for a while!
We just had our first sans-banjo practice of the new year last night, and we all feel pretty good about reworking old stuff to fill out Graham’s parts and writing new stuff that’s pretty different from anything we’ve done. Expect some re-arrangements and lots of weird new pop songs this year as we figure ourselves out. We also had the pleasure of jamming a bit with a talented violinist before Christmas a few weeks ago, so hopefully we’ll be able to have her guest with us here in town occasionally. To close this paragraph and to assure you that, having lost Graham, we at least still have a passing commitment to putting a beard on stage for you to look at, I submit this current picture of myself (note: yes, I was too lazy to put on a shirt. Frequent shirtlessness is a perk of self-employment. I am wearing pants, although to be honest, I’m not sure why):
In other news, we have a small army of new songs, some that we’ve been trying out in various forms this last year and some that we haven’t played yet. We’ve been terrible about crying wolf regarding new releases in the past, but I’ll put it this way: we sincerely hope to release lots of new material this year. Either an album, or multiple smaller releases, or something. We’ll see. On that note, in case you missed it, we did get a special acoustic version of a new song called “Thought Thief” on Tender Loving Empire’s 2011 “Friends” compilation - check that out here.
For those of you in Portland, Kali and I are doing a couple acoustic performances next week and then we’ll do our first full band show without banjo to try out new songs and arrangements on January 25th at Backspace with our friends/co-band The Glyptodons (fronted by a talented couple of teachers and backed by Kali, Cole, and myself) and California Stars. We’re also taking a brief NW tour in February that’ll hit WA, ID, and MT (still finalizing that, but we’ve got a few dates posted), and have a couple other cool shows in the works for this winter, so check the shows page for details.
Here’s to a fun, un-apocalyptic year full of music, friends, and, hopefully, fewer half-naked photos of me.
Matt // AJs
