come dance a little closer

So, I had been purposely avoiding the blog thing for a little while, and then I accidentally stayed away for so long that I psychologically locked myself out of it; the inertia got into me. This is a bit more personal honesty than I usually put here. We're not turning emo on you or anything, don't worry about that. It's just that some things need to be said before we continue with the self-promotion.

In the last eight or nine months, we've made some new music as a group that even I couldn't have predicted, played Abbey Pub on a Friday night, headlined Double Door on a Friday night, and somehow became quite a good live band. We got to see ourselves in the Chicago Redeye, a huge photo of us along with an article that we were really happy with. I started writing songs with Gabe again, finally, and we're sitting on a lot of thrilling new material. We've been up to great things, and if you were lucky enough to be a fan of ours on the Facebook during this time, you got to see a lot of it while it was happening.

We have always been in a state of perpetual flux as a group, both with our direction and our personnel. This is by design; for me, things are most creative when they're least predictable. Sometimes the flux creeps into my life, though, in places where I can't deal with it as well. A couple of times in the last eight months, I was totally sure that I was going to quit music altogether and pick up something else. The same force that drives me to do this music thing also drives me kind of crazy; I feel the deepest thrills I've ever felt, but I also feel very alone, like I've been left out in the cold. I considered leaving my day job to do music full-time, and thought about moving away from Chicago a whole lot too, but instead I started dancing at nightclubs, DJing again, trying to remind myself of what I love about music and why I started down this path so many years ago.

Listen. I have decided to make a go of this again, harder than I ever have before, to give Chicago a chance to show us the kind of love that we need in order to take this project to the next level. There are a whole lot of you who would like to see us succeed; I hear about it when we run into each other on the street, I read late night emails about it from you when I really should be sleeping (like now). If you are willing to help out a little bit, then I am willing to push forward as hard as I can. We're going to need your help, though, I really mean that.

Some of what we do as a group is a bit surreal, and some of it is downright frightening. I think that means that we're growing. You're going to see some experiments coming from us, some of which aren't going to work the way we wanted them to. I'm going to drown in disbelief when we play bigger venues like Metro for the first time, and freak out as I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to hand out 2500 fliers in 2 weeks. This is a necessary phase of growth. If I don't say hello to you the way I used to, I'm probably just completely frazzled; don't take it personally. If I forget to call you, it's not because I didn't want to.

I still believe in this group. If I didn't, I would have quit long ago; this is so much more difficult than it looks. At the end of the day, what we do is about you as much as it's about any of us; I sing the songs but you're the one who feels them. And I think that's how it should be. The only thing I ask of you is that you keep supporting us in all the ways that feel right to you, as long as you still believe in us, too.