This week in Bender Band
Posted by tyler | Filed under Uncategorized
I’m tired of Facebook events….but they’re effective, and I’ll probably bow before them again by the end of the week. But for now, I want to post what I’d say there, here.
Come to Birdy’s on Wednesday night starting at 9:00. I’m doing a solo acoustic show. Amy Duke is also playing. I haven’t done a solo show in quite a while, and don’t know when the next one will be, so for all you people who ask me why I don’t do more solo shows, I expect to see you there. I know it’s a week night and people around Indianapolis complain about that for some reason, but what else are you going to do? You’ll be awake until 11-12 anyways. Head to Birdy’s.
Saturday the band is playing at MoJoe’s Coffeehouse downtown. It’s for a benefit show, so it’s all ages (calling all minors….)…I think the show starts at 8. I’d tell you more details, but those are the only ones I know right now.
tb
April Show-ers
Posted by tyler | Filed under Uncategorized
Last night we had our first show in months. We competed in a battle of the bands contest down at the Hard Rock downtown Indy. We didn’t win. I didn’t even check to see where we stood with the judges since only one band can move on. Congratulations to Henry French and the Shameless, the winners of last night’s contest. They’ll be competing against The Last Good Year next week to see whose video will go on hardrockcafe.com. So if you’re a fan of local Indianapolis music, go to the hard rock website in a few weeks and vote for one of those bands.
Like I said, it was our first show in a few months, and we had what seemed to be the biggest and loudest turnout out of all the bands. I think we performed well, but my only judgment came from the crowd reaction since I couldn’t hear anything on stage at all. The one band (us) who got a sound check sounded like someone was mixing our stage mix with their feet.
As soon as I saw who the judges were, I thought the writing might have been on the wall for us. No need to have a pop rock band threaten the Hard Rock image of the sponsor.
I do want to thank the Hard Rock Cafe and Mark Dubec for giving us the opportunity to be a part of a great opportunity. They were great to us all night with the free beer and food revolving door all night.Very hospitable. Thanks to everyone who showed up to watch us play. It’s good knowing that we’re still worth seeing (even though it was free) after taking some time off.
All in all, it was a good night. Good people showed up, and I think I speak for everyone in the band that it was a good “return” for the band – even though we didn’t win.
Next up: I’m playing a solo show at Birdy’s on Wed April 15 with Amy Duke. So come out and watch us.
April 18 – We’re playing a benefit show at MoJoe’s Coffehouse in Indy.
See you then,
tb
Nashville Final Day of Recording
Posted by Ryan | Filed under Uncategorized
Andy got a little trigger happy when he was counting the days we spent in Nashville in his last post. We ended up spending three full days recording at LyricCanvas Studios (Saturday, Sunday, Monday).
For weeks, I heard “you will never get 10 songs done in three days.” Anyone who acted like they knew anything about recording told me that reaching such a goal was impossible. I wasn’t allowing the band enough time, we weren’t tight enough to move fast enough, my voice wouldn’t hold out long enough. I basically felt like the Mugsy Bogues of recording artists in the NBA of studios. I’m currently lying on my couch, and announcing that in fact, we did not get 10 songs done in three days. We got 11 done. Boom.
Monday (our last day) was penned to start at 9:00 am. Heading into the morning, we had exactly 3.85 songs done – Chicago, Wolf, Simple Man, Sound of Waves – which left 6-7 songs left to complete. Which meant that I had to complete the vocals on one song per two hours if we wanted to successfully walk away from the weekend.
The idea was that I’d do one song, take a break and let someone else handle a tambourine or the Rhodes as filler for other songs.
To make things easy on myself, I knocked out “The Rain” first thing in the morning. While I’m happy with the vocals on this song, I’m 100% positive that no one will be listening to the vocals on this song since Phil Keaggy’s awesomeness is now injected into it…which is fine by me.
About 30 cups of boiling Refresh Tea and a bottle of honey later, I finished “In Between,” “Simple Man,” “More Than a Word,” “So Cold Alone,” “Stir,” and “It’s Okay.”
Before we wrapped up our time, I told Andy that I wanted to do a new song on keys. It’s called Fight in Me, and I thought it’d be a pretty addition and closing to the album. So we tried knocking it out live together. I’m not sure if I like how it turned out or not. Only because I don’t think I gave it enough time. So I’m trying to see if we can record that back in Indy, or if I should just keep it acoustic-guitar-driven.
So that’s it. We headed home and arrived back in Indy at 3:00 am on Tuesday morning – which also happened to be my birthday. Gotta say, it was the most anti-climactic birthday ever. All I wanted to do was sleep. Drinking green beer was the last thing I wanted to do…besides sing. But we made it happen. 11 songs.
Rumor has it that Jason will have all of the songs mixed to our liking sometime in May. The plan, as of now, is to throw the album up onto Itunes first, and then get some money to print tangible cd’s later. Not sure if I’ve ever heard of anyone doing that, but I’m also not sure we have another choice if we want to get these songs out on a reasonable date.
So now, we can look forward to scheduling more shows and trying to expand our name into different markets. First things first – I think we’re playing in an Indianapolis Hard Rock Battle of the Bands contest starting in early April. So stay tuned for more on that.
Once again, thank you to everyone who kept up with us throughout our time in Nashville. Whether you were watching the live stream or you were sending us texts, it was good to know that you were out there rooting us on.
Later,
Tyler