Let's make a deal!

There comes a time in some bands' lives when they desire the assistance of businesses with a little bit of capital, an underpaid but dedicated staff, and the means to make more people aware about the band's music than the band can make aware themselves.

Enter the Record Label.

I'm a DIY girl through and through. I was raised and instilled with an obnoxious Montanan work ethic that often hinders my ability to accept help or a leg up from "knowing the right people." As a result, with much assistance from Ben, David, and Marie, I've spent the last couple years working my ass off to get H Is for Hellgate in the "neural networks" of people of Seattle and it seems to slowly be working. Hanging posters. Updating the internets. Annoying the press to just effing write something about us already. Trying to make alliances with the no-bullshit segment of the local music community. Supporting my friends' bands by going to their Tuesday night shows enjoying every minute of it.

I'm fully invested in my art - crafting songs that I hope people can not only connect with, but also be caugth off-guard with twists and turns. I'm also invested in the local music community. There are bands I love and can't believe aren't playing sold-out shows that I champion (sometimes more than I even champion my own band) and there are popular bands that I think are not offering anything new or inspiring artistically. And I will voice that opinion - not because I think those bands are bad people, but because I want us collectively to come up with something more interesting and substantial.

Now that the recording, mixing and mastering of our second album, Come For the Peaks, Stay For the Valleys is done, I'm now starting the process of shopping it around to various indie labels to see if they can help a sister and her bandmates out with some exposure. Especially considering the obstacles we've had to endure to get to where we are...me losing my dad last year while we were on tour and the very recent passing of our engineer, Mark...I feel strongly that this album is very important for us and a lot of other people. I don't want our three consigned copies collecting dust at the beginning of the "H" section at Sonic Boom this time next year. I hope people will dig the album just as much as we enjoyed making it.

So, I have my dining room set up as the temporary Hellgate Mailing Center and soon these envelops will be sitting in piles at select record labels around the country with hundreds of other bands' demos. But, select labels (sub pop), do yourself a favor and take a chance (sub pop) and open that sweet, sweet yellow envelope (sub pop). I'm SO PSYCHED about this album (sub pop) and I want the good word of the Hellgate spread far (sub pop) and wide (sub pop)!

"fun time in the city that doesn't work. ever."

The title was the last line in the last email I recieved on June 6th from Mark Mercer, the guy who engineered the record we just completed, regarding mastering the album. We got some very sad news about Mark...this is from the Seattle Times:

Body of Seattle man, Mark Mercer IV, found in
Mississippi River near New Orleans wharf

The body of a Seattle recording engineer missing since June 9 was found early Tuesday morning near a wharf on the Mississippi River in New...

By Leslie Anne Jones
Seattle Times staff reporter

The body of a Seattle recording engineer missing since June 9 was found early Tuesday morning near a wharf on the Mississippi River in New Orleans.

Mark Mercer IV, 26, was in New Orleans to see friends and attend a recording conference when he drowned after friends said he
spontaneously jumped from a ferry into the river.

Mercer had been sitting with friends Danny Laurino and David Weinberg on a levee near a ferry landing discussing his ideas about finding bands in the South and then mastering their tracks in Seattle, Weinberg said. Suddenly, Mercer jumped up and said, "Let's go," and ran down on to the landing ramp as the ferry was docking, Weinberg said.

Mercer jumped onto the ferry as it docked. When the ferry crew discovered him aboard, he jumped into the water.

Laurino and Weinberg ran down to the ferry as the ferry crew threw life rings, but Mercer didn't try to grab one, Weinberg said.

Mercer's friends turned and walked back up the ramp to see if they could spot Mercer better from above. When they looked back to the water, he had disappeared beneath the surface, Weinberg said.

The chief investigator for the New Orleans coroner's office, John Gagliano, ruled that the cause of death was drowning, according to wire reports.

Friends and family speculate that Mercer underestimated the danger of the Mississippi River. The Coast Guard unsuccessfully searched for him for two days, according to The Times-Picayune newspaper.

Mercer moved to Seattle about three years ago to get in on the independent music scene and record the post-punk band, Masks Phantoms. Mercer also produced the latest album for the local band H Is for Hellgate. Most recently, Mercer was living in an apartment in the back of Avast recording studio in Greenwood, where he also worked.

Mercer was a self-taught sound engineer with dreams of one day building his own studio, Weinberg said.

"He was really into living and doing, more than material things," said Mercer's aunt, Barbara Mercer, of Pittsburgh. "When he
wanted to do something he would just go and do it. He wouldn't think there was any reason not to when he wanted to do it."

Friends and family described Mercer as a high-energy, spontaneous music lover who lived by his own rules.

Last winter, Mercer took a freighter to China and lived for a month with a man he met who offered him lodging in exchange for English lessons for his family.

Mercer volunteered at the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library. Though recording was his passion, Mercer was also a self-taught keyboard, guitar, bass and drum player, Weinberg said.

Mercer grew up in Aurora, Colo. He attended Colorado State University, where he received a degree in sociology. He is survived by his parents Jeri and Mark Mercer III of Aurora, and an older sister, Kristin Mercer.

On behalf of Ben, David and Marie, our deepest sympathy goes out to Mark's family and friends. We only knew Mark during the short time we worked with him on the album over the last six months, but we spent a lot of hours with him in the studio and felt like he was one of the Hellgaters. We were very excited when we decided to work with him on the album and he helped make recording the album a very fun experience. He also pushed us to not settle for anything but the best performance we were capable of, even if it was 2:00 AM and we were 16 hours into our recording session.

As the news story states, Mark seemed very focused on fully living life and had some amazing stories he shared with about his adventures. It's tragic that he died so young, but he did seem to live a lot more of life than other people my age. Even so, the thing that's hitting me the hardest is that the song on the album that he felt the most connected to, he thought was the "centerpiece" of the record, and wanted to make absolutely perfect by having it delivered with all of the appropriate emotion was "Blood", a song I wrote about my dad's death last year.

We finished mixing the album just before he left on his trip to New Orleans. He cared very much about making not just a good, but a great album and I'm honored that we will be able to release a project into which Mark put a lot of time, energy, and his artistic vision.

Last show with David and Marie Wed, June 11th at the Comet

Please come out and support Noise For the Needy this Wednesday at the Comet Tavern (922 E Pike) with us, Hungry Pines, Capillary Action, and Red Sea Sharks.

This show will mark the end of a chapter of H Is for Hellgate as both David and Marie move on to bigger and better things and leave Ben and I whispering “hooray” with single tears rolling down our respective cheeks. It will be our last show for a few months while a new Hellgate line-up is determined, so please help us celebrate David and Marie’s awesome two years with the band and send them off with a lot of love!




David and Marie at The Spread in Spokane on our first mini-tour, June 2006.



Hellgate at Room 710 in Austin during our April 2007 tour.


Photo by Emily from the first Hellgate photoshoot at the 711 house where the magic began.

I could continue the photo journey and accompany them with the lyrics from Sarah Mclaughlin's "I Will Remember You", but you get the idea. We've had A LOT of fun times and it's going to be a hard transition, but I wouldn't have wanted to spend the last two or so years any other way with any other people.

So please, come out and yell one last round of "HOORAYs!" for Marie and David.

I just peed my pants a little

Jenny Jimenez, mastermind behind our press photos, just gave her website a facelift. You should check it out. While browsing through her goods, I saw this:

I'll happily be the bottom to Sleater-Kinney any day of the week. Those Night Canopy/Bruce Springsteen/Neko Case people are cool, but since I'm mildly obsessed with the SK, this totally made my day.

In a world...

...where a gallon of gas is $4.00 per gallon, one band will find the strength to take on the open road and play rock music where rock music has been played plenty of times before. This Memorial Day weekend, H Is for Hellgate Pictures presents, What's The Capitol of Thailand: Bangkok!, playing soon at a theatre near you.

Until then, here are the pictures:

Ben and David having my back as we get a coffee for the road before leaving Seattle.















The unspoken reality about touring: A LOT of sitting around before the show.















And when you sit around a lot of have digital cameras, this kind of crap starts happening.



















Mootsy's in Spokane. Show 1 of tour.














This is La Cha Cha. La Cha Cha got us very drunk in Spokane. We will get them back when they come to Seattle.














"Fuckin' tiiiiiiiiits!!" brought to you buy Crown Royal.














Entering Missoula, MT. Day 2.














Hanging with our host and hostesses at the Union in Missoula.














Again with the killing time before the show.














The Badlander with a peculiar amount of Seattle posters.














MahaMawaldi was a metal band. The guitarist f-in' SHREDDED. With one arm. One.



















Van Hellgate outside of Luckey's in Eugene, OR.



















The Hellgate gear sans the Hellgaters.














Okay, so not the most exciting pictures in the world. The excitement was reserved for the mock movie trailer voices we (I) did all weekend, finding out the capitol of Thailand is (Bangkok!), talking about scissoring, and Ben tearing the only pair of pants he brought.

Hooray!

The life I love is making music with my friends

Since we learned that David is leaving the band (David is leaving the band, BTW, so work on his solo project, Zero State Reflex) last week, plus the potential of another internal shake-up, the band has a lot of realizations that things that have been regular for us for the last two years will come to an end. For example, the rampant use of the word "tits" as an adjective.

This weekend we're embarking on a mini-tour to Spokane, Missoula, and Eugene and it will be the last tour for H Is for Hellgate as we know it. It will be the last time I'll hear a 90-minute lecture on the year 2012, 911 conspiracies, aliens, and republican douchebags within the confines of a van barreling down the freeway slightly over the speed limit with three of my best friends. We played a kick-off show last night at King Cobra in Seattle and it totally felt like those last days of senior year in high school where I really just showed up to be with my friends as we shared the anticipation of the final chapter in a phase of life. I'm simultaneously really excited to spend one last trip soaking up every ridiculous band moment and saddened by, and nervous about, the impending changes to come.

H Is for Hellgate is not going away. We're going to take the summer off to regroup, restaff, and I'm going to volunteer for a few weeks of Rock N' Roll Camp for Girls in Portland. I know we'll emerge an awesome band with an awesome record in hand.

The show this weekend will be weird, but I know all four of us will be putting all of our hearts into playing.

Just how holy was that matrimony?

Here are some photos from Ben's Wedding Weekend Bonanza. First, we'll start at the Blue Moon where Hellgate, A Gun That Shoots Knives and We Wrote The Book On Connectors played a pre-wedding show to a packed house of Ben and Emily's friends and family. Photos by Bronwyn Kalish.

The groom-to-be on his last night of freedom:

Mid-Tina Fey: the only chance I have to use my hands for something other than playing guitar.

Stubby from AGTSK helping us out with a "HOORAY!"

It was a super fun show and a fairly weirdo-free night as far as the Blue Moon goes - no old guys asked if they could shit in my lawn and David didn't see anybody puke spaghetti in the alley.

The next day, Ben and Emily got married at Golden Gardens. It was beautiful and amazing. They walked in with Daft Punk playing, said some words about how they would take care of each other for all eternity, kissed, and three minutes later, there was dancing and food.

The members of AGTSK, WE and Hellgate, along with Matt Brown, Andy and others, sat together at the tables closest to the food and the bar. Guess who the rowdy people were? Guess who got the dancing started? Guess who continued the dancing? Yep. Photos by me.

This is the pretty table setting:

This is Marie and Matt Brown waiting for drinking to become acceptable. Note the "HOORAY" endorsement:

This is me waiting for drinking to become acceptable:

The first dance (I know, I should totally become a wedding photographer. What a poor photo of such a nice moment.):

Rick, drummer for WE, got his ass dirty doing some fresh breakdancing:

Mike from WE putting the moves on Marie as Jimmy from AGTSK checks out Mike's moves. Mike was an animal and was rumored to have fallen out of a car and onto his face at the end of the night. I have video footage of him that I'm a little uncomfortable putting on the internet. It's awesome.

Emily the bride and Matt Brown, The original Lady's Man:

Kristen in a Matt Brown and Marie sandwich. Obviously, the vodka lemonade drinks were 1) flowing freely and 2) taking effect:

I don't know what this was about, but it looks like Rick was being dressed in the table cloth and Ben had something to say about it:

Mike doing some unsolicited drrrty dancing with me:

Never afraid to break from tradition - Ben's car didn't get the usual post-wedding treatment of strings of cans and "just married" written all over, but MY van got crap put all over it by someone in my band who plays guitar and isn't me:

Sadly, I failed to snap any photos of the post-wedding trip to Mandarin Gate where a party of about 25 of us took over karaoke. It was a remarkable night of singing, more dancing (Have you ever seen dancing to karaoke? STELLAR.), and me being pulled on top of the crowd of everybody and being forced to crowd surf while I was belting out Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'."

BEST WEDDING EVER.

The end.

About our show this Sunday at the High Dive

This Sunday we're scheduled to open for Kelley Stoltz and Vetiver at the High Dive. Due to a death in Marie's family, we'll be playing a stripped-down, three-piece version of our set which should be an interesting flavor of Hellgate for the patrons of the High Dive to witness. It should be an over-all chill evening, at least according to what the Stranger wrote about it:

There's a peaceful easy feeling that pervades the music of both Vetiver and
Kelley Stoltz. The former are the neighbors of freak-folk: a breezy, laid-back
collective who borrow the back-porch aesthetic without sacrificing tunefulness
or melody. The latter is Sub Pop's criminally overlooked pop troubadour. You're
unlikely to find a record as buoyantly sunny as Stoltz's recently released
Circular Sounds. It's got a golden '70s AM-radio glow that radiates simpler,
more innocent times—a carefree, slacker vibe that saturates some finely written
pop nuggets. If you're looking for an evening of warm, unfussy music, this
double bill hits a grand slam.

Ben, David and I send our thoughts and condolences to Marie's family.

Holy Matrimony!

Some people have all the luck.

A long time ago, Ben told the band about a theory where people who are optimistic and open to opportunity tend to be luckier than their pessimistic counterparts. I believe "luck" in this case was defined by things like winning raffles, finding a $20 bill on the sidewalk, meeting the right people (the people who can help you in life), etc.

I don't know if it's intentional, but more often than the rest of us Hellgaters, Ben fits the model of his own story. Two years ago, just as he joined me to play music, he also met a sweet photographer and printmaker named Emily. The way he tells the story of life lining up for him is way more interesting than I could attempt to regurgitate on his behalf, but let me tell you this - those are two lucky, crazy-in-love kids because they have found the yin-to-their-yang companion and anyone who spends more than 30 seconds in their combined presence can feel the sense of cosmic balance that they effortlessly put forth. They have an interconnection that's almost enviable (for those of us who are loveless, anyway).

Ben and Emily will be tying the proverbial knot this Saturday and, in order to appropriately celebrate, H Is for Hellgate, along with Ben's other band, We Wrote The Book On Connectors, is playing a FREE show this Friday, April 25th at the Blue Moon Tavern (712 NE 45th St) for their friends, family, and anyone else who thinks Ben and Emily are badasses. A Gun That Shoots Knives will also be playing to help make sure it's a total ruckus.

Mixing Addendum

This morning Mark said to me, "I bled all over the console last night."

Apparently, his nose started spewing blood at about 2:00 AM onto mixing board. I'd like to think it's a result of how awesome the album is, but it really it probably had more to do with the 48 consecutive hours he's been here mixing the songs.

Blood. It's how we do.

Mixing (Or, have you ever listened to the same song for six hours?)

Yesterday was Day One of mixing Album 2 at Avast Classic in lovely Wallingford. Mark, our engineer, is indulging in my insane notion that we can mix 11 songs in two days, so we're back in the sweet cradle that is the control room getting cracking this morning. Yesterday, we started off the day getting kind of a baseline level and EQ set for the instruments which involved what seemed to be endless tweaking of knobs and faders. Six hours later, we had ourselves a mix. From there, it's been fairly zippy mixing since we have everything set, more or less, based off that first song, but let me tell you people, you don't know madness until you listen to the same song over, and over, and over again for half a day.


We're using this old German plate reverb that's about the size of a ping-pong table. It's wicked.
Personally, I just feel a glow from the studio because one of my favorite albums of all time, The Hot Rock by Sleater-Kinney, was recorded here, in addition to some Built to Spill albums I really enjoy. Oh, and that first Band Of Horses record I that I don't really give a shit about was mixed here.

We have a long day ahead of us, so I anticipate getting out of here in about, record in-hand, sometime during the wee hours of Wednesday morning, but goddammit, the record sounds rad! You should be excited to hear it.

Rock Lottery 4

Tomorrow, I have the distinct pleasure of participating in a brilliant fundraising event. Behold:


Good/Bad Archive Project presents a benefit for Arts Corps
Rock Lottery 04
Sunday, April 13th
Doors open at 8pm (1st band starts PROMPTLY at 10pm)
at Neumos - 925 East Pike Street Seattle, Washington 98122, www.neumos.com, 206.709.9467
Advance tickets available at - www.ticketswest.com
$10 admission, 21+

10AM - 25 individual musicians... 10PM - 5 new bands...

The Rock Lottery is simple, but effective. Twenty-five hand picked musicians meet at 10:00AM at the evening's performance venue. These volunteers are organized into five bands through a lottery based chance selection. The five different groups are then released to practice at different locations. The musicians have twelve hours to create a band name and three to five songs (with a one cover song limit). The bands will then return to the venue and perform what they have created in front of a waiting audience.

The twenty-five musicians included in this experiment are carefully selected in an attempt to represent a wide variety of musical styles. This event will bring together many facets of the music community that may seem incompatible, as well as musicians whose interests may conflict. The challenge for these participants is to try and go beyond their personal and musical differences and work together to create a unified group project that still contains the personal styles of each of its members.


Participants include:
Paul Austin (Transmissionary Six)
Ty Bailie (Dept. of Energy, Mark Pickerel and his Praying Hands)
Mike Bayer (Amateur Radio Operator, Evangeline)
Larry Brady (Biography of Ferns, Shorthand for Epic)
T. Tacket Brown (Two Loons for Tea, Jonny Sonic, Hayley Sales)
D. Crane (BOAT)
Joel Cupland (The Hideous Thieves, Triumph of Lethargy)
DV One (Rock Steady Crew)
Jesy Fortino (Tiny Vipers)
Jen Gay (Kaliningrad, Minirex, Buttersprites)
Jorge Harada (Ruby Dee and the Snakehandlers)
Jamie Henkensiefken (H Is for Hellgate)
Bill Horist (Master Musicians of Bukkake, Ghidra)
Laurie Kearney (Ships, Palmer AK))
Kevin Kmetz (God of Shamisen, Estradasphere)
Rory McAuley (Eastern Grip)
Tony Moore (Foscil, Scape)
Luc Reynaud (Luc Reynaud and the Lovingtons)
Paul Rucker (Paul Rucker LARGE Ensemble)
Whiting Tennis (Whiting Tennis)
J. Tillman (J. Tillman)
Tilson (The Saturday Knights)
Noah Star Weaver (USE)
Curt Weiss aka Lewis King (The Rockats, Beat Rodeo)
Brian Yeager (Elam, The Bromantics, Strap Straps)


The Seattle Rock Lottery is a benefit, with all proceeds going to Arts Corps The musicians chosen to participate are unpaid volunteers. The participants are chosen by the Rock Lottery participant committee with suggestions from the staff of Arts Corps and other members of Seattle's music community.

On Flipping

Because of some circumstances, I have a lot more free time on my hands lately. I knew the free time would be good for giving me extra "bandwidth," as they say in the corporate world, to put into the business aspects of H Is for Hellgate, it has also surprised me with the gift of being able to enjoy my small record collection. It feels very olde tyme and relaxing to listen to 20 minutes of music, flip the record, and start again.

Last week while listening to Excuse 17's Such Friends Are Dangerous, an out-of-print (I'm pretty sure) vinyl LP I nabbed at Ear Candy Records in Missoula, MT a five years ago, it dawned on me that the subsequent project by Excuse 17's Carrie Brownstein, Sleater-Kinney, is also a dead band and, well crap, might the Sleater-Kinney vinyl be out-of-print someday too? I'm a rabid S-K fan, so I decided not to take any chances and purchased the five of their seven records I didn't already own. Of course, I immediately destroyed any sort of real collectability of the records by opening them and having a few good listens, but what's the point of owning something if you can't use it?

I'm not the kind of person who will pontificate on how vinyl is the ooooooonly way to listen to music and how mp3s are destroying humanity. Records are a novelty from the past...it's like driving a car from the 60's - it's a fun historical experience, but it's not any better than driving in a car that can get more than 7 MPG (or any better than an album you can listen to in your car, at the gym, on the John and all from the same device). I had been kicking around the idea of releasing our forthcoming album on vinyl because I feel like it's solid enough to deserve the extra cash it takes to make a record and, at some point in my life, I would like to have my compositions and recordings on a big black disc simply because having something tangible feels like more of a reward for a bunch of hard work than seeing our album artwork on iTunes.

But it's expensive and I would hate to have a box of unsold records sitting my garage if not enough people cared about records to buy them.

Today I received in the mail The Woods and I flipped my shit. I didn't realize it was colored vinyl and, for some reason, a colored recorded makes the whole experience seem so much more exciting. The Woods is a double album, so it was like pulling out two giant hard pieces of confetti! MP3s don't come in tasty colors! And come on, look at that tree on side D!

I'm still undecided on the To Print Vinyl Or Not To Print Vinyl quandary, but damn, it would be cool to listen to my band on a record player.

Yes. Yes! YES! NO! NO!

Last weekend we had our first professional photoshoot with the talented and totally awesome Jenny Jimenez. She told me she reads this blog, so I probably shouldn't talk about how she showed some skin to coerce us into making sexy faces. Besides, it didn't work for me...I just giggled uncontrollably.

It was a ton a of fun. TON! We met at the Pretty Parlor to pick out some fancy vintage duds in place of our worn out t-shirts (of course, I already had on a dapper blue polyester jacket direct from my grandma's attic) and headed over to my most favorite non-music bar in the world, Sun Liquor.

Jenny bestowed upon the Hellgate one very important lesson at Sun Liquor, shortly after the moment you see captured above: "Guys can exfoliate too, you know." In return, we bestowed upon Jenny and her assistant the typical treatment of perverted Hellgate banter and innuendo, which they handled with grace and a limited number of uncomfortable chuckles. Recently, I learned from Jason Rothman (former Disheveled editor, current King Cobra booker) that our band conversations were so offensive and disgusting during our interview for Disheveled last summer that he had to edit out most of the material for our own sake. It was nice of him to not take the opportunity to make us look like the giant asses we really are.

After Sun Liquor, we hit some outdoor areas, drank some Rainer in Carkeek Park, I crushed a beer can on my forehead, and we wandered around nature while Jenny captured some of our most intimate moments in the woods. I have yet to see if it was caught on film, but Ben and David were holding hands for about three seconds as we walked up the trail. Of course, immediately after they talked about football and hunting or something, but it was a touching moment.

It was a super fun afternoon and it made us feel more important than we probably are. Nonetheless, I'm stoked to see how they turned out. We'll post some on the intermet sometime in the coming weeks.

Slightly off topic - sometimes in rehearsals when we practice our song "Tina Fey" I replace the subject's name with names of a similar syllabic structure such as "Jesus Christ" or "Matt Brown" just to shake things up a bit and see how many variations of the song we can come up with. Last night's new twist - "Jenny J." Next time, "Sean Nelson!"

Happy Birthday to Me

Please, please, I (Jamie "JJ" Hellgate, founder and CEO of H Is for Hellgate) am not accepting gifts...unless that gift is your presence at the Sunset Tavern in lovely Ballard for a show featuring some of my most favoritest local bands:

9 PM - Panther Attack (Shredding. Sweet, sweet shredding.)10 PM - H Is for Hellgate (That's us)

11 PM - Hungry Pines (Rock. Ness. ROCKNESS!)

12 PM - Emblematic (Ass-shaking indie rock.)

Because it's my special day, I wrote a special I-don't-give-a-f*ck setlist featuring our weirdest and most instrumental songs (plus one cover). Here it is, with notes, in case you care:

1. Engineering a Loose Cannon (From our forthcoming second album, inspired by something a homeless guy said to me last summer outside the QFC on Broadway and Pike, "You wouldn't be my first choice, but you wouldn't be a bad choice.")

2. Description of the Prior Art (An old song from my Henkensiefken days about feeling bad for dumping someone. I'm a jerk.)

3. Cool Your Jets, Four Eyes (Instrumental from our first album. It's not really about anything other than rocking.)

4. Dusk at Devil's Tower (From our forthcoming second album. References the a Native American story of seven sisters being lifted to the heavens [into the constellation named after the Greek Pleiades]by the monolithic Devil's Tower in Northern Wyoming in order to escape a bear attack.)

5. Thunderbolt (From our forthcoming second album. Based loosely on Athena and trying to find some of her mythical traits of courage and strength within myself.)

6. What It Is (Mostly instrumental song from our first album. The name was taken from a t-shirt given to a friend when he asked the WestCostanostra for a cigarette. The phrase "what it is" was repeated ad nauseam over the course of the drunken weekend that followed.)

7. Quid Pro Quo (Instrumental piece from our forthcoming second album. I tried to write a ten-minute piece. I failed...it's only seven or eight minutes, depending on how fast we play it. The name means "this for that"....I was doing a lot of compromising when I wrote it.)

8. The Chain (yes, the Fleetwood Mac song.)

Please join us for a fun night!

SXSW video diary

I attempted to log Marie's and my time at SXSW. I'm sure by this point, one could read about or watch every moment of SXSW on the intermet, but here are some clips from our first festival experience.

(Note - we did not meet Dolly Parton.) (Sorry about the shaky camera work).

March 12th - Day 1 - traveling and arrival



March 13th - Day 2 - Out and About




The grand, Grand Archives at Red Eyed Fly



Black Mountain on a parking garage

South By...too much!

I've made a major life decision. Your support is needed, thank you. This is the year I, Jamie Hellgate, will introduce myself to South By Southwest, the monster indie music festival that takes over Austin, TX every spring. Marie will be there to make sure I don't hurt myself.

When I first decided to go, I thought, "Gee, I'm sure going to see some neat bands." but now that I've taken the time to check out the full schedule, it's totally mind blowing how many goddamned bands are playing! How!? Why!? I get stressed out just looking at the roster. It's going to be fun, right? Where do I go? How do I make sure 1) we find the cool shows and 2) we don't attempt to get into the shows that are so rad that we'll never get in anyway?

I'll let you know how this goes...how many awesome or not awesome bands we get to check out. How much bad food we can eat. How many ways the phrase "south by southwest" is cleverly co-oped.

Really, I just hope we run into Dolly Parton.

We are the most awesome band ever.

Show me your riffs

This morning went through my daily ritual of reading blogs and got a little excited when I saw the words "Math Rock" and "Girls" in the same title at the Stranger's Line-Out. The fusion of the two subjects is very near and dear to me. Here's the post:

Do Girls Play (or even like) Math Rock? Posted by Jeff Kirby on February 6 at 17:31 PM


A couple weeks ago I posted a link to the website Stage6 which hosts a bunch of great live videos. Most of the good ones I found were from Philly, but I was recently directed to a video of the amazing set San Diego’s Sleeping People played at Chop Suey last November. The sound quality is not great, but the band’s talent shines through just fine. Watching guitarist Joileah Maddock got me to thinking about girl math rock guitarists, and if perhaps she was the only one. Are there any more? Do any other female musicians care about this genre? I am stumped to think of any other similar band that has a girl in it, particularly one who can shred a guitar like Maddock can. Come to think of it, I don’t even know any girls who like listening to math rock. All of a sudden my loneliness is starting to have new context…


I don't know Jeff and I'm sure intended no offense with his post, and there's a chance I'm just in the mood to get fired up about something, but it's frustrating to think that sooooooo long after the whole riot grrrl era, chicks still are partitioned off into a separate category of musician. The undertone of "for a girl" is still really present when I'm paid complements on my song-writing or guitar-playing (admittedly, mostly by older people and frat boys). Don't get me wrong - I'm happy that people enjoy watching me play guitar and if it's a new experience for them to see a girl tearing it up, hooray for them. If I were a dude playing what I play, nobody would think twice about it, and that's why I will remain adamant that I am an average guitarist. The only reason I seem good is because of something, speaking of math, called The Numbers Game. Just for simplicity's sake let's say for every 100 male guitarists there are 10 female guitarists and that 10% of all guitarists are legendary. That means when you think of legendary performers you're only going think of 10 dudes and 1 chick. So, it's not that girls are any more or less capable, there's just a smaller pool to choose from. Additionally, when people come across that one chick they become convinced that she's the only good one.


I wish the pool of ladies who love math/prog/stuff-that's-stereotypically-male-dominated was as large as the gentle indie-pop pool. Obviously, it's not, but it seems really short-sighted to pose the question asking if there is more than one girl in the former category. It certainly doesn't have anything to do with technical proficiency, it has to do with taste and preference (I'm sure The Numbers Game could be applied here, too) and there are a fare number of us chicks who are into more aggressive and angular music. Remember Sleater-Kinney? (I feel like I just asked, "Remember the Alamo?" Yikes.)

**stage-diving off of soap-box**

If you care, our recording is going really well. David and Ben are shredding because they're dudes while Marie and I play along and sometimes go on coffee runs and talk about shoes.

Use that!

Phase 1 of recording the next record is complete. We had the distinct pleasure of spending 14 - 18 hour days at Avast! hammering out the best drum and bass tracks we could muster. One curious thing about the experience was this: as the day would pass into night and the Hellgaters were getting tired, our engineer, Mark Mercer, perked up and pushed us into the wee hours of the morning, encouraging us to focus and pull the best takes out of us. All and all, it was a lot of fun, there were no melt-downs or fights, and the tracks sound kick ass so we're happy.

Next weekend we'll be laying down the guitar and vocal tracks. Before you know it we'll have a shiny new Hellgate album for you.

Be sure to join us Saturday, January 26th at the Skylark in West Seattle for Ben Baier Appreciation Night. We'll be celebrating all things Ben with We Wrote the Book on Connectors (Ben's other band) and The Dead Americans from Eugene. Bring your best "Hooray!".

Album 2

The past couple of months have been a new type of Hellgate experience for us band members. We've added an additional day to our practice schedule and have played a minimal number of shows in order to gear up for recording our next album and have subsequently discovered that playing shows for other people does a lot to break up the monotony of nitpicking the same twelve songs for weeks on end.

The next album, yet to be titled (suggestions?), will be exciting, I think. It may disappoint those who included "The Next 50 Winters" and "Soundtrack to the Summer" as their favorite songs off of our first album. It's not an enormous departure from the first album, but it's definitely darker and more rockier. Or something.

Also different was the process through which I wrote the songs. When I wrote the first album, there was no H Is for Hellgate. There was me, my basement, a bunch of songs, some recording equipment and wine. Lots of wine. I didn't have a clear vision what I was going to do with the recorded collection of songs until about six weeks into the three month recording process (recording takes a looooooooooong time if you play all the instruments yourself) that I decided that maybe I ought to form a band to play the songs with me. I was really exhausted at just the thought of sifting through the classifieds of the Stranger to find some strangers to join me in the next phase of my musical trek. It had been over three years since I moved to Seattle with the defined goals of 1) find a band to play in and 2) play music a lot. I can't even remember how many bands/jams/beginnings/ends of bands I played with/auditioned for/left trying to find something that fit. Prior to recording H Is for Hellgate I had already decided to go it alone in my solo project, Henkensiefken. I had a couple awesome guys play with me towards the end of Henkensiefken, but it still felt like something was off. So I decided to look for a drummer and a bassist to help me take my dog and pony show on the road.

Filling the drummer spot wasn't difficult. Marie was in the first band I played in after I moved to Seattle. She also was in an early and short-lived incarnation of Henkensiefken when it was a two-piece act. She was looking to drum, I was looking for a drummer. Drummer - check.

I posted an ad in the Stranger and the first (and I think only) person to respond was Ben. In his email to me, he listed music he liked - we shared a love for 31Knots and he had good taste in hip hop. Well, the fact that he even listed hip hop acts had me sold. We first met at the Bad Juju Lounge where another band I was playing in, Ghost Stories, was playing that night and I realized that I had seen him before. His other band, We Wrote the Book On Connectors had played with Henkensiefken at Chop Suey several months earlier and I distinctly remembered his purple sparkle bass and his ability to play it well. We chatted, it felt good, he was in.

Well, not quite. I had asked Jason in Juhu Beach for the buddy referral on a bassist, figuring the Stranger would only get me some psychopath who wouldn't have his/her shit together enough to even form a full band, let alone get a show. He got me in contact with his buddy, David, who could play many instruments. We met for a meet-and-greet at Dad Watson's and he seemed really great. So, I had a dilemma on my hands.

Well, not quite. Because sometimes I'm smart, I figured out that Ben could play bass, David could play guitar and with another guitarist in the band, I could do more crazy crap. So, in February of 2006, H Is for Hellgate as you know it was born.

This story is long. My original point was that, during the writing of Album 2, I had a vision. Not the peyote/lost in the wilderness for 10 days type of vision, but a solid foundation from which to build songs. I now know what H Is for Hellgate is. It's not abstract and in my head. It's a unit of three of the most awesome people you might ever have the good fortune to meet (and one chick who's a jerk...me!) who contributed to the album we're going to record at Avast! this weekend with their energy, commitment and support equally as much as I did by playing some chords and putting words to them. After search and search and search, I can't believe I'm in a band that's so cohesive and fun. We have a friendship and collective enthusiasm I think a lot of bands don't have, and I'm so excited to put that down on tape (well, digital tape) this weekend.

And, we're all sooooo excited for you to hear the new jams.

Oh, in other news, thanks to everyone who voted for us in the Three Imaginary Girls Top Northwest Albums of 2007 Readers Poll. We were ranked #35 out of 50 and beat out some pretty solid local bands. Hooray!! Next year we're squashing those other 34 m-f'ers!