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!"