Man, what a fricken flake I am! I just now realized that my personal site has been down for months and I had no idea. I paid to renew my domain not that long ago, too. I totally forgot I was hosting it on Earthlink, and when I switched servers, I just totally neglected to move my site. Duh! I’ve been thinking the past week or so that I really need to redesign my site because I made it in, like 1999, and haven’t updated it once. I spend all my time working on this Lovespirals site (and the Love Spirals Downwards site) so I never think about mine. Plus I’ve got the new Chillcuts site and about a dozen other sites like MySpace and Soundclick and stuff that I maintain… Hmm… I don’t even really feel like I need a personal site, per se, but there is a lot of stuff I’ve done outside of Lovespirals that might be nice to archive. It’ll take a lot of time and work though, which doesn’t sound that fun. I dunno. I just forwarded to my bio on here for now.

Man, we are totally lagging on getting our new album out. Everything is so fricken weird in the music biz right now that it leave a lot to consider. We are in the midst of one of the most revolutionary times, making everything seem really unstable. I mean, seriously, are kids even buying CDs anymore? It seems like all I see are iPods these days. Are CDs going the way of vinyl and cassette? And which digital audio format is really going to win out. iTunes doesn’t actually sell mp3s, they’re AACs. That’s what I listen to, too! I don’t think WeedFiles are going to make it… Glad I didn’t end up bothering with those. Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh, we’re not too eager to sign a contract where the record company (haha, archaic term) will require us to give them our digital rights. It’s one thing to give them the rights to print CDs within a certain time frame, but quite another to let them distribtute digital files. Still lots to think about… Meanwhile, our album sits in limbo and new songs are being written for a third.

OK, I’m going to admit that I watch American Idol. I brought it up at the show the other day, and someone in the crowd shouted out “Scott needs to go home!” But he ended up staying last week. I’m wondering if he might go home tonight, though? There seems to be a strong contingent of teenage girls into Federov, for whatever reason. I find him very annoying. The other 3 have been my favorites all along. But Bo is my boy. Gotta love that hair! And most of his song choices are really imaginative and sound great with his deep, bluesy voice. He has really blown me away a few times, and I don’t ever expect to be blown away watching that silly show. Anyway, the results show is on in half an hour and I feel kind of bad that I forgot to vote last night. I’m really bad about that whole voting part of the show.

I was going through some old recordings I did with my old band, Datura, and decided to put them online for fans to check out. It’s funny hearing them after so much time has gone by. I realize how little I really knew about music or singing when I began. What’s funny to think about is how I kept slacking off on sending a demo to Projekt back then. Veronica begged me to send Sam a CDR, thinking he’d want to release our stuff, but back then I didn’t even have a home burner, so I never got around to it. Someone from Tess was asking for a demo, too… I dunno. We were always popular when we played shows, but I guess I got so caught up in trying to make the perfect recording, doing endless song revisions and new recordings, that I never took it to the next level. It really started out as a recording project just to learn studio techniques at college, but I started getting more serious as things progressed. Eventually I suppose we just got sick of the whole gothic subculture that embraced us, and wanted to move on to other types of music. Of course, I ended up being on Projekt Records anyhow, oddly enough! If someone had told me that I’d be singing for Ryan back then, I’d never have believed it, that’s for sure. I don’t know if Projekt would have really liked the later stuff Datura did, which is some of what I put online. I don’t even want to distribute the more swirly gothic songs, like the one that was on that comp with Jarboe that C. Reider did… People said we sounded like Current 93. Anyway, for the time being at least, there’s some old stuff at www.soundclick.com/anjibee.

Thanks to our fans, friends, and family for coming out to support us last night! Also a big thanks to Rodney Rodriguez for playing guest guitar in our set. Oh, and to Louise Fraser for booking us with her band, The Flir. Ryan and I had a lot of fun hanging with Rod after soundcheck over at Poom Thai and I really enjoyed sharing a drink with Louise after our show. Good times, all the way around! We’ll definitely have to set another show up sometime soon.

Our upcoming show is going to be quite different from our previous ones. Ryan is going all out with his live guitar work now. He’s using my Squier Strat and Fender amp, which gives him a really different sound than the semi-hollow body he was bringing to our shows before. Now he’s all about guitar solos! He did one or two in past shows, but was mainly focused on the rhythm guitar. I prefer what he’s doing now, ’cause it’s a much better use of his talent. It’s a shame that at practically every LSD show he only strummed acoustic guitar. I did see him play bass for “Sound of Waves” live at KUCI, which was cool, but still not that big a deal compared to what he’s doing now. Anyway, he’ll probably be embarassed by this gushing, but I’m just so excited to hear him play guitar solos live. It makes performing that much more cool for me.

PS does anyone get the Bread reference?

Ryan was talking to his old friend, Tom, about doing percussion for our live shows last year sometime. We haven’t taken the time to meet up and work together yet, though. Anyway, it turns out that he’s playing drums for the band Red Lily at the 14 Below show. Great opportunity for him to check out our live set and see if he thinks he’d fit into the sound. Oh yeah, we also heard from Rodney, who we were talking to about playing bass for us. There’s a slight chance Ryan will have him do second guitar for our show, instead. I think that would sound great. Maybe we can still find a bassist in the near future, and really round out our live performance.

I think I’m going to give up coffee for the sake of my voice. I’ve been reading that caffeine is bad for the vocal cords. So is sugar, surprisingly. So sugary coffee is probably really bad. I love coffee, and have loved it since High School so this is going to be a big sacrifice for me. I haven’t had any the past two days and I do feel a bit cranky and tired, but oh well. I love the smell of coffee. I’m going to crave it when I smell it. Just thinking about it right now makes me want some. Darn it. This is going to be hard.

We’ve begun practicing an all-new live set featuring mostly songs from our upcoming album, “Free & Easy.” Last night we ended up jamming for hours and totally skipped Gabe’s housewarming party. When he had his moving out party a few weeks ago, we were recording our cover of “Cymbaline” and missed out. Yikes! Speaking of “Cymbaline,” our live version sounded really good. We might even open with that.

We’re discussing doing a show in Santa Monica next month with The Flir and several other local bands, so stay tuned for news on that soon!

Man, I thought the rain was finally over in So Cal, but here it is, raining again. I think we got all of the Pacific Northwest’s rain for the season. Houses are sliding off of hillsides everywhere, streets are crumbling away… When will it end?

Picked up a copy of Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad the other day and was blown away. I loved Goodbye and Hello but had mixed feelings about some of the other stuff I’d heard. This album is really dreamy and groovy all the way through. One of the songs that most grabbed my attention was “Love from Room 109 at the Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway).” I’ve read that Buckley was originally an Orange County musician who performed locally, and The Islander sounded familiar, like I’d seen it around, so I looked it up. Indeed, there’s an Islander Motel not too far from here. On a whim, I went out to see it, with Happy Sad loaded into my iPod shuffle. I can’t say for sure it’s the same place, but the architecture is classic 60’s and it’s right near the beach (hence the ocean sounds in the song). The size of the hotel seems to fit the 109 room number. I resisted the urge to get out and actually look for it. Anyway… just a romantic gesture for a romantic song by a romantic artist.