Sorry for the lack of posts!
If you are a frequenter of this particular URL holdendaniels.wordpress.com, but don’t actually follow me on Twitter, then you’re not getting updated that often. My apologies.
Also, I used to blog thinking that no one I knew was reading it – but now that it gets imported into Facebook and it shows up in feeds, etc, then I’m more reluctant to say what’s on my mind. I guess this blog used to be more of a random thoughts things (with MSO updates of course), but since I can post random thoughts as a status update now, it’s fallen quite behind.
So – let me catch you up.
This year my wife is still on maternity leave until September. I’m supporting the family (wife and 2 daughters) with video and audio work. It’s been a lot of fun and a lot of work. I’m a night owl but my family isn’t, so that means I’m tired a lot.
My Sister Ocean released an EP (locally) on Feb 13th, 2009 at The Urban Lounge. Over 400 people showed up, which made me very happy as we’ve been playing to 100 people (or less) at the Urban Lounge for a decade. It made me think about how success for some bands come easier than others – but due to perseverance, we finally had a good payoff moment. It’s one thing to open for bigger artists and play to their crowd (which is awesome), but it’s another thing to know that a show with your name on the marquee was a successful one. (Now it’s just a matter of duplicating it in more cities around the world!)
We’re releasing a new single soon. Working out some details but we hope to have it out in a few weeks.
I’ve been doing more audio production with singer/songwriters – it lends itself well to the home studio setup. I still like to bring full bands to Powersound. Speaking of that, one of the bands I’ve worked with (Jezibelle) reached #4 at the U of T campus station. I’m happy for ‘em! (They beat my band that reached #9 on that station in October 08).
Our trip to CMW 2009 was awesome. (We won the Canadian Radiostar Songwriting Contest in Edmonton and were flown to Toronto for free to attend CMW 2009. We also won in 2007.) We got to hang out with tons of the up and coming bands in the indie scene as well and meet and greet with some cool industry peeps. One thing about CMW this year that was different for me on a personal level was that in 2007, we were pretty overwhelmed by everything and was just starting to do radio promo and promote Nucularboy. Since then we’ve achieved some minor success and have charted in the Top 40 in some markets, so this time around I really noticed the desperation that many of these bands were exuding, and the lack of originality from almost everybody! At any rate, my business success helped me look at everything from a different angle this time, and Eug and I really got more out of it this time.
We also did a photo shoot with a smokin photog named Brooks Reynolds (I met him last year working on a job together and was hoping the band would get a chance to work with him). http://www.brooksreynolds.com/ I’ve always loved his Ten Second Epic photos, and he also did a cover shoot for Tegan and Sara. His portfolio is outstanding.
Our photos are up on http://www.mysisterocean.com
So – other than that, still just working on band stuff as usual and doing audio/video stuff to pay the bills.
You can also follow me on Twitter. http://twitter.com/holdendaniels