SoundRabbit

So I’ve heard from many of you (via IM, email, texts, etc.) that it’s taken me way too long to add a Road Journal post about something as exciting as a debut SoundRabbit Red Rocks show. My apologies for the delay! I had to get all of my photos off the ol’ camera and figure out a few other things before getting around to this.

So… this coverage of the show here in the Road Journal will be more of the ‘backstage’ perspective… our personal experience there, with photos taken hurriedly by me with my camera at opportune moments that day.

First I’ll share the bad news… we weren’t allowed to video the show due to Union regulations with the employees at Red Rocks (it would have cost us $6,000 to get video rights), so we brought our trusty Korg MR-1 to audio record the show. I went up to the Red Rocks soundboard and met the lead engineer, who handed me a cable that ran from the soundboard… I hooked it into the Korg MR-1, checked the levels, and all appeared well. Unfortunately when we listened to the recording on our way home from Red Rocks that night, we discovered that the engineer must have given us a bad cable or channel, because the recording mix is pretty terrible. One of our biggest venue shows to-date and we don’t have any footage, audio or video! MAJOR bummer.

Okay, so on to the more positive stroll down memory lane from Sunday…. I’ll do it with photos and captions….

Beers stares down a security guard as we pull up to Red Rocks.

The trusty SoundRabbit Red Van and Red Rocks.

Van, Trailer, Rocks, Sky, Tires, Gravel

Pre-show view of the main stage and fog (it was freeeezing!)

View from the main stage looking up, before we loaded in.

SoundRabbit band & crew get our all-access “Artist” wristbands for the night.
Wristbands = go anywhere and eat LOTS of free food.

Backstage dressing room, complete with LCD tv, vibrating massage chair,
oriental rugs, and giant rock falling into the room.

SoundRabbit hangin’ backstage at Red Rocks

GQ Beers striking a pose backstage.

Map of Red Rocks backstage. Notice that they put the animal-themed bands in
one dressing room (Band of Horses and us) and the Rosewood Thieves
and Tokyo Police Club in another area together. It’s not random, folks.

Jason pre-show, tuning up.

Beers pre-show, setting up the kit.

Anton pre-show, tuning up.

Our first product endorsement, for Asics and Koss headphones.
We got free kicks for doing it, any size & style we wanted! Perks, baby.

Here’s how the setlist panned out:

Turn My Egg
View From Way Up Here*
Don
I’ll Race Ya
Obey –>
Life During Wartime

* nod to LeRoi Moore of DMB in middle bridge

The one thing that I wanted to photograph but wasn’t allowed to (and wasn’t quick enough to snap while security looked the other way) was the dining area by the dressing rooms. All the food we could eat, from sandwiches to meatballs to mexican food to desserts to salads to fruit to drinks… all day. I ate three square meals, taking opportunities to go backstage during the Avett Brothers and Tokyo Police Club sets to chow down.

As noted above, Anton gave a little ‘nod’ to the late great LeRoi Moore of Dave Matthews Band during his solo on View… he teased “Sunshine On My Shoulders” and “Somewhere Over The Rainbow,” two songs teased by LeRoi on DMB’s “Live at Red Rocks 1995” album. For those who don’t know, LeRoi passed away at the age of 46 a few weeks ago and was an old acquaintance of Jason’s back in Charlottesville. Jay had the chance to jam with LeRoi a few times and we all figured it would be nice to pay homage to him at Red Rocks, of all places.

All in all, a great experience for all of us. One of the crew members at Red Rocks told us that they (the crew) consider Red Rocks their “home,” and he welcomed us to their “family.” He said, “we’ve seen it a thousand times… you play your first show here, then you come back and play as an opener on a big night, and then you come back and we give you your own night. We can’t wait to have you guys back.” Much thanks to all of the Red Rocks crew, and to the RabbitReps and Backstage Members who made it out! It was great to see two of you in particular – Claire & Alex – dead center, smiling in front of us through the whole set! We’ll see you there next time!

Anton and I (Russ) just returned home from flyering down in Denver tonight for our upcoming shows. It’s been a super busy week getting ready for the Red Rocks show on Sunday… we got together for our normal rehearsal and spent the entire night running through the set to make sure that it fits the 30-minute time slot we’ve got. We ran it three times, and it came in at 28 minutes, 29 minutes, and 28 minutes… so we’re all set. Can’t believe that the next time we play it will be on the main stage staring up at the rocks. Woo-hoo.

This past weekend to celebrate the Red Rocks thing and to clear our collective minds and do some writing, the four of us headed up to the cabin in Wyoming (for those of you who’ve been reading SoundRabbit road journals a long time, you’ve heard of the place on many occasions). We took acoustic guitars, an acoustic bass, and some percussion items and hit the woods. Weather was absolutely gorgeous, and Anton had his fancy new camera to take some footage for y’all to enjoy:

The weekend wasn’t without adventure, either…

We had a few 4-wheelers and a boat to play with in between playing music, and we decided to take the boat out on the lake up there. Keep in mind that this lake is very big and this place is very secluded… there might be one or two other boats at most on this very large lake on a typical day. We took the boat out on Saturday evening and pulled it up onto a sandy beach, tied it to a tree, with plans to take it out on Sunday morning… then went back to the cabin and cooked some food, lit a fire, and played music all night.

The next morning, we returned to the beach to take the boat out… and the wind was howling. I’ve never seen the lake as choppy as it was… beautiful sky, but the waves and wind were pretty intense. We shoved off the shore, all four of us in the boat, and attempted to start it – with no luck. It wouldn’t even turn over… battery dead. We floated for a little while and used the one oar we had on board to make our way back to the beach. Problem is, we had to get the boat started and get it across the entire lake to be able to trailer it and pull it out at the end of our stay… so Jason and I went up and got the truck at the cabin, along with a long (15′) set of jumper cables, while Anton and Chris were tasked with somehow getting the boat close enough to the shore that we’d be able to drive the truck down to jumpstart it (without getting the truck stuck in the mud).

In what we all acknowledged (as we were doing it) was an absolute Darwin Awards moment, we got the boat pulled into the shallows of the lake shore in a muddy area covered with moose hoof prints and bear paw prints (seriously)… and pulled the truck down onto the beach as far as we could without getting it stuck… and then Jason and Chris stood in water up to their knees and hooked up the jumper cables to the truck battery, while Anton and I sat in the boat in the water holding the other end of the jumper cables… and “zap!” the boat got started… we unhooked the cables, shoved off… and the boat engine died again. We got one attempt at restarting it before the battery died… “vroooom… vrooom… sputter..sputter… dead.” Back to the drawing board, re-hooking the jumper cables and risking life and limb in the middle of nowhere in 50-degree water… all in all it took us 4 separate “unhook-start-die-rehook-jump-unhook” series before we finally got the boat started and Anton and I raced it across the lake to the dock where Jason and Chris drove around and met us to unload…

Chris and Jay getting word that the boat requires another “jump.”

…aaaand we’re off!

But not before finding ourselves (Anton and I in the boat) directly below a giant American Bald Eagle. He was perched in a tree on the shore above us… then he took off flying and we followed him in the boat, Anton snapping photos the entire time. We’ve got a whole series of pics of him, but here are a couple to give you the idea…

All in all, a fantastic weekend up at the cabin… we all came home refreshed and ready to rock it this weekend at Red Rocks. Can’t wait to see y’all there…

I’m about to hit the rack, but I wanted to update the Road Journal to thank the kind friends, fans, and new friends/fans whose company we enjoyed on Saturday night up in Fort Collins. We played in the backyard of a home on the Colorado State University campus, and got a good recording of the set, which has now been tracked and uploaded here to the Backstage (under “Music” > “Live Tracks”). The police came and killed the concert after 5 songs, but we had a ball up until that point and got in a decent set of tunes. It was a great way to kick off a busy week for us (along with the CU show on Friday night)…

It’s just a bookshelf…

…NO…it’s the coolest bathroom door ever made!

Tuesday and Wednesday we’ll be up at Little Bear in the mountains, for two 3-hour shows that we should get a very good recording of for y’all to download later in the week. Hope the weekend treated you all well… more later from Evergreen in 36 hours!

Well, we had a great show last night at the University of Colorado here in Boulder. We headlined their “WelcomeFest” event, with The Heyday supporting. Those guys are great guys and they’re touring all over the place, so check them out and if you dig the sound, go to a show or three and buy some merch to help cover their gas! Here’s how the setlist panned out:

ZED
Story Of…
Hazel
Obey –>
Life During Wartime
View From Way Up Here
Marula Binge
Don
Nightlite Jesus
Heat
Eoghan, Late Saturday
Park
Emil
Turn My Egg

The mix was a bit weird in the room… vocals were distorted among a few other things… but the recording came out decently, so we’ve posted a bunch of it to the “live music” section of the Backstage for your listening pleasure. You’ll have to excuse some vocal pitchy-ness, as we were basically unable to hear ourselves on stage. Gotta love nights like that. Anywho, we met some great folks after the show, who left with CD’s and t-shirts to help spread the word to the CU student population. Woo-hoo. Tonight we head up to Fort Collins, CO to play a Colorado State University “welcome back” party. Some of our favorite friends and fans are hosting it, so we’re really excited to go enjoy their company and share some music for an evening. We’ll post the setlists here for both shows some time tomorrow. This is a great week – 5 shows, concluding with the big Democratic Nat’l Convention show on Friday… and then two weeks later, our first show at Red Rocks Ampitheatre! Thanks to all of you who are helping make all of this great stuff happen… more later!

Hello from the mountains of Wyoming. Russ here, spending the weekend up where the mercury rides a bit lower… approximately 15 degrees lower, to be precise. On an already chilly weekend (highs in the 50’s tonight in Denver), I’m enjoying the wintry crisp air in the Snowy Range. This will be a quick update, as I’m going to post in my blog in a moment… but I wanted to let you Road Journal readers know that our October tour is coming together very nicely, with some great rooms that we’ll be rockin’. The Road Journal will be full of new notes, as we’ll be taking the southerly route (I-70) to the East Coast this time, rather than the I-80 route we’ve taken in the past. I’m looking forward to checking out the truck stops of Kansas, writing to all of you from Nashville, and snapping some new “RBT” photos from landmarks from D.C. to the Canadian border. Woo-hoo. Thanks for reading and for all of the emails you send us on the road. We appreciate it more than you know… more later from the road!

We had two fun shows this week here in Colorado – one up in the mountains on Thursday night, and one on Saturday night in downtown Boulder. We were fortunate enough to make some new fans and friends at one, who then came down and joined us for the other… it’s always nice when it works out that way. The show up in the mountains was in Dillon, at a small bar/restaurant with a lot of locals sharing the evening with us. It was our first time playing in the town, but we’ll be sure to go back this winter when the ski season is in full swing. On Saturday night, we played at the b.side in Boulder, formerly known as Trilogy. We really enjoyed ourselves, and shared the stage with our friends in Boulder Acoustic Society. It was a weird night in downtown Boulder, as if the plague had chased everyone out of town. We had about 60 people in the room total for the night (circulating in and out), and the staff told us that we were “by far” the biggest draw in town. Other bars were literally closing their doors at 10pm for lack of business – on a Saturday night. Really strange. Anywho, we did our best to entertain those who made it out, and we had Kailin Yong, BAS’ violinist, join us on Don, View, Eoghan, and Egg. We taped the entire show, though I’ve yet to listen to it to see how the recording turned out. We don’t have the best luck in the world with recording live shows… lightning seems to strike almost every time, whether it’s the ProTools freezing up midway through the set, or the computer being accidentally shut down before saving, or microphones crapping out or weird noises (air conditioners, loud bartenders) interrupting the music, or whatever… so here’s hoping that Saturday’s show is audible. Here’s the setlist from Saturday (the Thursday show was a setlist on-the-fly, so I’ll have to consult with the guys to piece it together from memory):

Park
Heat
Story Of…
List
Marula Binge
Sketch30 (aka “Sunny Clouds” as named by a new fan/friend)
Don*
View From Way Up Here*
Nightlite
ZED
Hazel
IIOKYN
Obey –>
Life During Wartime
Eoghan, Late Saturday*
Turn My Egg*

* with Kailin Yong

The next live show is July 11th in Denver, and in the interim we’re going to be working on a lot of writing and web work. The former will result in some new sketches (MP3s) here for y’all to check out, and the latter will result in all kinds of locations for you to hear and share our music with as many friends, neighbors, pets, and neighbors’ pets as you can. We’re also booking our midwest and northeast shows for October, as well as a Pacific Northwest tour in November. If you have suggestions for venues or towns we should visit, drop us an email!

First off, I hope you all had a nice weekend. Secondly, this will be short, as I have to get up in 4 hours to head to the airport. My cousin was in town visiting from Spain, and he heads out first thing this morning. He’s a fantastic pianist and musician, so it was a nice couple of days discussing/playing/idea-izing with him.

On Friday night we played a great night of music at Owsley’s in Denver. It was one of those moments that just came together really well for us, without us really ‘forcing’ anything to happen. We were booked on the outdoor (small) stage, while Ryan Montbleau Band from Boston was booked on the indoor (larger) stage. Montbleau had an opening act from Salt Lake City – Good Morning Maxfield – and they were awesome. Great music and great guys. As it turns out, though, we got the best deal of the night. When we showed up to load in, we heard that Montlbleau’s band had intended to play outside, but that with the weather forecasters calling for a 40% chance of rain, they opted to set up on the indoor stage. We set up outside and ended up with absolutely gorgeous “summer night” weather all night. We played our first set at 8:30pm, then Good Morning Maxfield played on the indoor stage at 9:30pm (so we stopped). They finished at 10:10pm or so, at which point we played again on the outdoor stage… then Montbleau started his set at about 10:30pm indoors, stopping for a set break at about 11:45pm… at which point we played again outside. The weather was so nice that the majority of the people came out for our sets and/or stayed outside even during the indoor bands’ sets. We had many, many people come up to us after our 2nd set, saying “umm… we were here for Montbleau tonight, but you guys are unbelievable,” etc. We were SO happy to have so many people come up and talk to us between the multiple sets, about how they can’t believe that we’re not “already huge around here” and “holy crap, I’ll be able to go see you guys at Red Rocks and say that I saw you at Owsleys back in the day,” etc. Again, we lucked out by chance on the location, and we made a point of really playing tight, short sets that left the audience wanting more. Here’s how the three setlists turned out:

Set I
Park
List
Don
ZED
New Song (“Sketch 30″/”Years Ago”)
Hazel
Heat
New Song (“Sketch 32” – instrumental)
Nightlite Jesus

Set II
Story Of
View From Way Up Here
Obey ->
Life During Wartime

Set III
Marula Binge
Turn My Egg

We visited with some of the Montbleau guys and talked about their touring plans, etc. If you’re not familiar with them, they basically play 200 shows a year, touring around in a diesel van, from coast to coast. They’re definitely feeling the pain of gas prices (check out the CNN article just added to the Backstage homepage on this topic). Conversations like that really make us feel better and better about our strategy of limited & targeted touring, slow growth, community building, etc… and we all feel really good about how the live show has improved and grown over the last 18 months. It was exactly 18 months ago that we played our first show as a four-piece with Anton, and at that point he wasn’t even an “official member” – he was sitting in as a friend/guest. For 18 months in existence, we’re all really excited about how much we have in place and how much we’ve learned and pushed eachother to hone our skills live and in the writing sessions. And on that topic, we debuted two new songs on Friday night – one we did instrumentally, because it’s super groovy and I (Russ) haven’t had time to really sit down and work on lyrics for it yet. The other one we did with vocals as a full song, though it, too, is lacking the actual lyrics that will actually be found on any album/permanent version of it. The reaction from the crowd was great on both. We really want to start “road testing” new material on a regular basis… writing in the studio, then taking it out quickly to the live setting to let that pressure and atmosphere have its effect on what we do with the song. Sometimes you can “catch lightning in a bottle,” as the saying goes.

Alrighty… I’m off to bed to let thoughts of SoundRabbit and music and live shows and touring and websites and music and lyrics and shows and music and … on and on… swirl around in my head until my eyelids give up the fight. More later… thanks as always for reading, and for your support, and for the emails we get from you.

Note to self: catch a CU football game or two from the Stadium Club this fall. Wow, what a room with a view. The event we played tonight was a bit odd… it was some sort of festival with a Pink Floyd theme, but the organization of it left a bit to be desired. We showed up at Folsom Field and loaded in on the 5th floor, where the Stadium Club is located. It’s a huge space (probably holds close to 1,000), with all glass windows running the length of it on both sides, so you’re surrounded by views of the Rockies and football stadium on one side, and the city of Boulder on the other. It happened to be a gorgeous day, too, so we all enjoyed staring out there while we were playing. Here’s the setlist:

Story Of…
View From Way Up Here
Turn My Egg
Nightlite Jesus
Hazel
Heat
Don
Obey –>
Life During Wartime

The Colorado Daily (CU newspaper) was there covering the show, and we invited them to come out to the June 28th show with Boulder Acoustic Society, so hopefully we’ll have some coverage there as well.

It’s a funny thing, this music thing… there are no guarantees and really no roadmap. One of the other bands on the lineup tonight (young, new band) was asking us how we manage to book so many solid shows, how we made our  album, how we came up with the Backstage idea, etc… thinking us to be quite established. Of course, we’re not, and who knows what “established” means these days anyway. There are 1,000 bands that have done completely different things to create success – some with zero radio play (Dispatch), some with 250+ shows per year (Phish, DMB, Grateful Dead), some with gimmicks (GWAR), some with a combo of clever ideas and luck (see “Ok Go’s” treadmill video – 35 million views so far on YouTube), some with moderate radio play (Guster), some with tons of radio play (Maroon 5). We’ll just keep doing what we’re doing, and try and write better and better songs, and get the live show tighter and tighter, and get in front of as many ears and eyes as we can through the rest of this year. We had two separate groups of people at Avogadro’s the other night told us that we have the “x factor”… the “intangible, ‘it’ thing”… that they were seeing a band that would be “huge” some day. That they’ll be telling people in a few years, “I saw them on a patio at a bar”… etc., etc. We’ve heard that from a lot of people, pretty much since we first started playing together 18 months ago. It definitely makes it easier to keep pushing ahead with those bits of encouragement, especially when we’re all wondering how long it will be before we’re paying the mortgage with this thing.

We’re playing with Ryan Montbleau Band this coming Friday (June 20) in Denver. Should be a great opportunity to get some new ears on our stuff, as Ryan’s music is very compatible with ours, though very different. Overall it should be a great night of music, as we’ll be trading sets with them from 8pm to 2am. If you’re in Denver, we’d encourage you to come out and enjoy a full night of tunes. Tickets are $10 at the door… and our show at the b.side (formerly Trilogy) in Boulder on June 28th is also $10 at the door. The Backstage “VIP guest list” benefit is becoming more valuable by the month.   🙂

If you’d like to be on the guest list for either or both of these shows, please send us an email at soundrabbit@soundrabbit.com and we’ll add you (space on the guest list will be limited at both of these shows, so let us know early!).

More on Friday late night after the show…

Good morning. Guten morgen. Ohio (phonetically-spelled Japanese version).

Last night we played up in Fort Collins, Colorado at Avogadro’s. They’ve got a sick outdoor patio (probably holds around 200+) with a substantial stage and good sound, and, last night, plenty of people ready to hear some SoundRabbit. There happened to be a wedding party from Georgia out there, to whom we distributed copies of TRBAC as wedding gifts after the set. They were recommending us places to play in Georgia and the Carolinas and were overall very happy that we happened to be playing on the night of their shindig. We booked another show there for October 3rd. Here’s how the setlist panned out:

Park
Story Of
Don
Heat
ZED
IIOKYN
List
Around The Bend
Turn My Egg
View From Way Up Here
Nightlite Jesus
Hazel
Eoghan, Late Saturday
Marula Binge
Obey –>
Life During Wartime

Tonight we play up at Folsom Field, which is the football stadium at the University of Colorado here in Boulder. More from there later…

Hiya, it’s Russ. I’m doing all of my Backstage “homework” right now… going through to see if we missed covering anything in the last week… and indeed we did, here in the Road Journal. We played on Friday night in downtown Denver, at Appaloosa on 16th Street. Enjoyed a delicious salmon-and-mashed-potatoes dinner before the set, and then proceeded to play 3.5 hours of mostly original stuff. Saw a half-dozen Backstage members there (thank you!), along with a bunch of people who had no idea who we were or what we were about… but we educated ’em for a few hours and they seemed to enjoy themselves (enough to buy CD’s for themselves and friends who they “know would LOVE [us] guys”). Good times. I’ll post the setlist here as soon as Beers gives me his notebook, where we jotted it down at the last minute before taking the stage. We did try a new cover song – “Yellow Moon,” by John Hiatt (and made famous by the Neville Brothers). It went fairly well for our first time playing it. We’ll probably pull it out for longer sets when we need to fill some space and get people up and dancing. By the time we finished at 1:45am, it was pouring cats and dogs downtown, so we loaded out and headed home. We were all saying that it’s really strange playing in Colorado after being on tour. Every show feels like it’s a random city… when we load in to the venue in Denver, it could be Des Moines or Manhattan or Phoenix… really starts to feel like any stage is “home,” which is a great feeling. Head over to the “Music” and “Forum” sections of the site… I posted some updates from the studio, where we’re recording our follow-up album… posted some MP3’s and pics from the recording session tonight. It’s going to be a busy summer, between tours and recording sessions and family stuff… can’t wait. Oh, and I just added a few more photos retro-actively to the Road Journal posts below, so scroll down and you might see some stuff that’s new to your eyes…