Best day of my life.

Dear Journal,

Today Patti and I went on our first real date..... er um... yeah... wrong thingy....

Anyway, blogging community, hopefully you got my mid 90s Nicktoon reference. Now let's get down to business - Today is the best day of my life. Lately this is something I've made it a point to say every single day. It started as a joke. I'd get an office with a window for the day or find out that my paperwork had been done for me and exclaim, "This is the best day of my life!" to fuck around with coworkers and see if I could get them to shake some of the glaze off their faces and smile a little. But as I started to do it more and more I realized I really liked this little saying. I like believing it was true. So I'd start looking for stupid little good things to happen so I could say my little saying... and I started finding more cool things... and days kept getting better and better and here I am.

I don't know if you've seen Office Space but there's a part where the lead character is seeing a counselor and explaining that every day is worse than the day before so every time you see him it's the worst day of his life. The therapist just stares at him and finally says, "that's fucked up". I don't know why that stuck with me for so long but I decided one day that the opposite can be true. Things can keep getting better and better if you let them. I'm psyched on a pretty regular basis lately and it helps to remember to be excited that it's the best day of my life (for you fans of my boy Gautama Buddha, I'll concede that the reason it's always the best day of my life is because it's always the ONLY day of my life. For the rest of you- just trust me). So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

Anyway, I didn't trick you into coming to this blog to bore you with my hippie bullshit. The reason I'm writing this is 1) to document that I'm in love with my life right now because I'm sure it will come as a handy reminder in a couple of months when I'm locked in my room for a week writing about death, and 2) to tell you a little bit about how fucking excited I am about the new Another Breath songs.



After an entire day of internship and class I got in my car and went straight to practice. When I got there the other dudes were tightening up 3 songs that they put together at the last couple of practices that I couldn't make it to. All I can say is holy fuck. I walked down the stairs and listened to them rocking out this incredibly groovy riff that literally had me pounding my fist in the air and smiling like an idiot before my feet even hit the bottom step. I can't really explain it other than it sort of sounds like Quicksand and sort of sounds like newer Achilles ... you know... if you put them in a blender with some cumin or something. It is so fucking heavy and just had be bobbing my head and stomping my foot immediately. (I made a recording of it and I'm listening to it on repeat as I write this. I literally cannot get enough of it.) Then when they're done and I start hooting at how good it is, Steve shoots me a smirk and says, "Seriously, check this one out." Then they tear into another song that rocks my face. This one more straight forward and balls out rock and roll. At the end I just stood there with my jaw dropped to the floor. All I could think is that there's a possibility that I am suddenly in my favorite band... It's like The Smashing Pumpkins suddenly zapped to our practice space and I looked down to notice that I'm Billy Corgan and have been all along. It was a really surreal feeling. I mean, I've always liked my band. If I didn't I wouldn't be in it. But if I wasn't in the thing I don't think I'd want to kick down anyone's door and be all, "you have to check this band out. They are incredible." Right now though I feel like I want to do that. I want these songs to be recorded so I can listen to them on repeat. That's a cool thing.

In any band the aim is to get everyone in the same boat and do the best you can with your combined talents. You argue over stuff and compromise and in the end you come out with something that works for everyone. Nobody gets their own way entirely but you swallow the differences opinion in the name of the greater good. Lately it just seems like we are all on the same page and we all love everything that's coming out. There's no bitching about which part should go where. We're all so pleased with what we're doing that we don't WANT to change anything. People who haven't in a band before might not understand this but that NEVER fucking happens. It's hard enough to get the 5 of us in the same room, let alone get us in the same room and have us agree on something. We've caught an incredible stride and the songs that have come out of it have been phenomenal.


We've started playing a couple of the completed new songs live and nobody seems to know what to make of them. I really feel like Jon and Scott just got annoyed at all the Mill City reviews that likened us to Verse, Modern Life is War, Comeback Kid, The Suicide File, Bane, and American Nightmare and blatantly missed every other band we ripped off that sound nothing like late 90s fast hardcore. It's not that any of those bands are bad. We're influenced by those bands a bunch. But we really tried to push the boundaries of that style of music with the last record by incorporating elements of bands that are in no way shape or form related but just happen to all be on the same playlist in our van (Green Day, Johnny Cash, Tragedy, Isis, Bad Religion, Third Eye Blind, etc.) and nobody got it. So this time I feel like all the stops are pulled out. Every one of these songs screams "Fuck You" and I think that's what I love about them. Every one is straight forward and will rock anyone with ears and a sense of rhythm and at the same time every one is weird and seems to say, "I dare you to try to put me in a fucking box." I like that. We tried to do that with Mill City and in some places we failed. Now it just seems that those dudes have the balls to tell everybody to fuck off because we're going to write the weirdo record we want to write.

The bottom line right now is that I am beyond psyched on this band. Every song those guys bring to practice is better than the last. They've thrown out the complicated writing process that we used to torture ourselves with by trying to add all sorts of parts and transitions and musical snobbery into and simplified the whole thing by sticking to one or two riffs and just rocking them. What is coming out is brilliant in my mind and if this theme and the lyrics attached to it can do them justice then this record is probably going to make people forget about anything we've ever done before (if they ever knew about it to begin with). Mark my words. This thing is going to rip.


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