Hey Rosetta! News

first i feel i should apologize to the nations of great britain, ireland and france for not writing any words about them, after i wrote the last blog entry specifically about our time in germany and switzerland. so i should apologize, and i do. though i’m sure they’ll get over it. they’ve seen much worse. my only defense is that the last four shows of the tour took place inside some sort of time warp where there was neither sleep nor wakefulness. there were ferries, i remember ferries - a different ferry everyday, all leaving port at some dim, ungodly hour. and berries, strangely, i remember berries too (european promoters really know how to lay out a fruit and cheese tray gaad love em!) I remember i woke up during the crossing to ireland, and looking up, i thought that i’d dozed a little too long and was heading towards bell island back in conception bay, newfoundland. gorgeous. and speaking of ireland, i’m remembering now there were wonderful, well-appointed rooms full of wonderful, well-appointed people awaiting us wherever we went on those days. oh…that’s how we recharged. some sort of futur-euro-eco-energy exchange, where we’d show up for the gig haggard and hallucinatingly unslept, and then the smiling people would set us right! it is coming back now. and it is good. so thanks. et un grand merci. 
and now the damp chill of our st john’s ‘spring’ seems to have finally broken, just as we’re getting out of it and down into the full-blown summer of the american south. but it has served us well, as we spent the last two weeks shut up in the house rehearsing and recording new tunes and old, with not a hint of sunny-weather-jealousy that must plague all you other slim, tanned, vitamin-d rich, emotionally resilient bands. but now we’re off into their bright corners to share all the things we’ve been working on, which is entirely the point i suppose. so, enough of this, to the end of the point! and on off the dock! and up off the stage into the fine shiny light and cool water waiting later.
au soleil!     

we arrived after the longest day. monday’s night was swallowed by flying five hours ahead over the atlantic, and so it went from midnight to morning in one mere episode of modern family (air canada ads included). we recently lost elite status with old ac, which, though it may make us less bourgeois and mincing and entitled, it also makes us broke as jokes when we add together our 18 extra bags of guitars and mixers and merch. yeesh. but it all arrived miraculousy unbroken and then we picked up all the rented gear (most of which WAS broken) and played our first ever german shows in hamburg and berlin. viel spass! so many people came! we expected, i guess, very little, having never set foot on that faraway soil. but the shows were full and full of friendly, attentive, actual fans of the band. who knew. so many friends to be had all over the world. and last night’s venue too (the charming ‘parterre’ in the border town of basel, switzerland) was full of beautiful swiss and french and germans. and i’m not just saying that. they were all hot. it was eerie. but after so much whiskey and chocolate and cheese we had to tear ourselves away for a long night and morning of thudding across the french countryside. but the french countryside is a thing that will always lighten the heart, despite whatever ungodly hour and everyday ills lay upon you (i wish that we english could employ the 3rd person singular that’s so readily used in french and german, that is, without ‘one’ sounding like a complete d-bag). and after the grey, clinical blade of the autobahn, it was a bit like ambling through an antique shop full of old armoirs and dusty, gilded oil paintings. my scene entirely. but we’ve only one quick stop here tomorrow night, for a big canadian student conference for the 95th anniversary of several integral gruesome canadian ww1 battles (vimy ridge, beaumont hamel, la somme, etc). and then its on to the rocky road to dublin, glasgow and london before we make it back to the giftshop of paris for the last show of the run. so a mighty thanks to jedermann and tout le monde and everyone who’ve been so good to us thus far. danke schon indeed.    

the variety of landscape in this country is unreal. to drive from texas to michigan, via colorado, in early march, is to go from summer to winter to spring - from desert blaze to mountain snow to flat, damp hayfield in a handful of days - a handful of days if you’re stopping to play shows along the way. and now we’re leaving chicago for a long day on the road over to new york and so now bound for the big, deciduous, slopey green of pennsylvania and the glare of the industrial east. and lately, in my mind, as on the highway, i see america broadening and dividing and getting harder and harder to pin down. from the couch in canada its easy to think you know what the country is or what its people are about, but like with so many things, the closer you get, the further you are from knowing exactly what your getting closer to. i have to say its seems much worse from afar, because all you hear is that this maniac is trying to illegalize abortion and that maniac is trying to give tax breaks to the power elite, and this school was shot up and that platoon was shipped out and theres the pharmaceuticals and the biotechs and the weapons and the evangelical pyramid schemes and yeah its fucked up but on the ground - its humdrum. and i’m still not sure how the two americas connect. okay this is all a bit heavy for the band blog…lets see…the shows are going well. yes! gomez are excellent people, fast becoming fast friends and their fans are attentive and awesome. only a week or so left and we’re up on our east coast for a handful of headlining shows we missed on our recent fall tour. a week more we’re at the junos. and a week beyond that we’re over on the autoban eating waffles and soundchecking in the small brick venues of western europe. hard to imagine. but shouldn’t be too hard to endure. in the meantime, i hope spring is generous. and that the world in your mind and the world in the air are clicking into place magically.        

right now my laptop is baking my thighs as we fly down the I-10 south through arizona. cartoon cacti and tumbleweeds and all that. distant mesas and blue hills on the horizon. its beautiful, although always a bit sinister too. all the heat and death and everything in shades of brown, even the scrubby bushes, even the houses, the tortillas and the beans. its like some sort of drained sepia film or something. in fact everything about the desert is cinematic to me. it must be the most photographed landscape on the planet, forever etched into the western forehead. other than perhaps california. and that is it, thats thee place. its no wonder pop culture never stops its brain-mushing cali-exhortations. it was so lush and the weather perfect and the beaches and the food and the people are actually so friendly and there are some towns (petaluma, solana beach, santa barbara for ex) that seem to be actually approaching paradise. you walk through this quiet neighbourhood under palm trees and great bursting flowering bushes and these smells that like thicken the air and the air is the perfect temperature and the buildings are clean and true and there’s a child and her father and a puppy and surfboards against the porch swing and you can’t help get the feeling something bad is going to happen cause everything is so placid and calming and genuinely lovely, but then nothing does. contrary to every television crime show or drama or soap or sit-com even, nothing does. the earth is still and the pacific breeze stirs the stripes and all is quiet. someday the quake i suppose. but not today. actually today we’ve not much to do ourselves. only short drive down to tucson to our 7th gomez show and then the ol “day off” to drive 1500km to dallas on friday. but the miracles of wifi in the van will see us less bored than we used to be. it’ll see me posting this note to you in fact. here i go. then off to find the day’s balance between being sufficiently hydrated but never having to pee. may you walk that line effortlessly in your own way. xo. tb. hr!    

we’re in a little holding pattern in the crisp air above our frozen hometown. not far up mind you. just a few feet, running all over town in the usual patterns, preparing for another tour down into the southwest states and back. i myself am only a few inches off the ground, supine on the couch, convalescing after a quick visit to the o-r getting an angry appendix out over the weekend. it was bad timing (i’m sure its ever thus) as we were just about to finish the last bit of vocal tracking on this little christmas ep we’re putting together for next year. but it’ll have to wait a few more months to see the final touches. hopefully we’ll get to head back into the beautiful space we’ve been using (the stagehouse studio in st phillips) overlooking the immense weather of conception bay. i’m sure phil has posted a few images of it, and though he’s a damn good hand on the camera, they can’t do the view justice i know. its been nice to be home for more than just a couple weeks. time to actually rearrange the old furniture of your previous life and see and think for a minute. even if its seeing and thinking of things falling apart in your absence. but the movement of another tour will shake us into action again and i look forward to that. isnt it good that stillness and movement can heal us both? speaking of, its back to the daybed for this old man and his stapled bluing torso. off to sip water and itch and think on how to best open the next 20-odd shows for the mighty gomez. perhaps we’ll open with the mighty pathological lovers ode to february  - “the shortest month, is by far the longest, you gotta be at your strongest, in the wednesday of the year”. though somehow, in the desert sun of nevada next week, it might be less appropriate. see you out there, healing and reeling. xo.tb.hr!    

just spent the last few days in montreal mixing this little acoustic project we laid down back in november in melbourne. its been our luck and my pleasure to have had the great howard bilerman working on it beside me in his beautiful studio in the mile end. he’s a talent and a zen master and now its basically done and good and the whole process was uncommonly smooth. and now i’m sitting in my seat on aircanada2032 homeward bound on a flight that’s also uncommonly smooth. i’ve always had some inborn nfld-protestant distrust of the smooth and the easy, but this is just disarmingly so. running along the ground and lifting off and turning up in an arc over montreal this morning was so smooth and easy, i want to say it’s like cutting into white cake, or gliding down through clean virgin snow, or dragging your fingers through fine flour and blowing it into a slow cloud and seeing it bloom and sail towards some old familiar kitchen tile - but really its just like flying. like flying in thin winter air over snowy suburbs, the bleached mont, the strangely stockstill granite st laurence, the blank canvas of white fields beyond. like flying with not a hiccup nor dip nor bounce, and none of the usual nausea and sweat and morbid resignation, but instead up like a hollywood shot. like the flying of dreams, where you just lift off and float up. and the engines making only the most steady, almost leisurely, 200hz drone and the whole world seeming indeed frozen, and frozen still, and you thinking, as you have often through the tumbling years, that you wished every day was christmas eve. christmas eve and us ascending into a clean, vivid picture of winter, perhaps sleigh sat, with the sun just coming up over the slightly rounded east horizon, and knowing just a little further over that curve is home and the promise of time spent there - drunk and sober, together and alone, idle and inspired - amongst those you’ve been thinking on. i hope and wish the same promise for you in the new year and all the fun beforehand. promise over present(s) i say. yes but a very merry christmas and very merry everything from all of us.

we are shaking and banging along grey patchwork from ottawa to montreal. the highway seems to have been cracked open and glued back up every six or seven feet all the two hundred kilometres to that cold, beautiful, saturday city. around us now the woods are grey and the sky is blank and the fields are barren. but still something in me is lifting. maybe its that all these empty trees and lonely radio towers are looking more and more easterly. eastern. its like the word means to be at ease in the stern. not just in the back of the boat, with the lousy view, but in the stern and stark and the hard light, and to feel the best there. that old longing for fog. or maybe this feeling is the simple lifting of calendar pages, just a few more dates left now. but its hard to put words on the things that move around inside your body. in my mind i’m delighted to have a show in montreal tonight, and a handful more down the humming east edge of america. its been amazing. a blur of course (an orange blur: of burnt aussie dirt, dead californian grass, northeast leaves, and all the bright lights of our canadian shows, lit and produced by the tireless talent of joey sadler). a good blur. and yes i always say that, in blog and interview, but i truly mean it here now. we are so honored and grateful to do this. maybe thats part of the weightlessness here bumping along the 417. coming down usually involves looking back up from where you’ve been. and we’ve been all around and we’ve been alright. so i’ll lay off the guesswork and the clumsy pinning of words unto feeling and i’ll just sit here bouncing in the heat, and feel grateful and good.          

all of sudden its freezing. at some point in the early dark we left the last heat of california and landed squarely in fall proper. somewhere in the piney hills of oregon our breath came out steaming, the crunch of gravel suddenly winter-loud. and tonight in seattle the wind off the water is biting. tonight in beautiful seattle the homelessmen have an egde to their voices as they ask for any small blessing sir. and we are snug in the legendary crocodile cafe eating pizza under photos of cobain and vedder. snug, but in large large shoes. yesterday i was roadside pissing and suddenly out in the middle vibrant autumn and a yellow leaf literally hit me in the forehead. yer fall tour has begun. tomorrow we cross the wet border into bc, into the commodore, into the big dates of canada, in earnest. i should go find a coat.  

well it’s almost like we’ve taken up a sort of residency at the hotel here on flinders lane. we’ve been here a week today, with the odd daytrek out into a very charming ballarat and a very rowdy geelong. and i must say melbourne just gets better and better the further you look. it’s almost too bad we’re playing so many shows, as i’d love to have more time to scout around. the days off we had scheduled we’ve taken and booked ourselves into the studio to do some recording. as you may have heard we’ve recently signed up with a.t.o. records in the united states, and we’re really delighted to have finally found the right american family there. they asked us to record some of the unplugged versions of our songs that we’re always doing for radio stations and blogs, and so we’ve put our hands and minds to that. it’s half a shame to be indoors in such sunny clime, but we’re doing are best to take it from the windows and shoot it through the mics for youall. and in a couple days it’s off to adelaide and perth, provided the qantas strike is settled soon. if not, we may truly be setting up residence in melbabes after all. sorry mom. in the meantime, i’m going to thread myself through the zombie walk and get some southern sun while she lasts. happy hallowe’en. 

we’re sitting on a patio down by the coolangatta beach and it just turned into night instantly. the birds began crying and the clouds came in and all the streetlights just flickered on. suddenly our ten-minute walk back to the hotel is regrettable. cause here is the rain. in fat drops, in sheets, with lightning, and long shuddering thunder. the birds are mental. though if i wasn’t eating overpriced curry under an awning (everything is over-priced beneath awnings here) i might be screaming too. it’s mad out there. maybe we’ll stay under until the show. its only a few doors away. our fourth show of an australian tour that’s been decidedly more sunny than this. three days in byron beach is like shooting golden elixer into your bloodstream. but since i’ve had something else in my veins and am battling some awful aussie cold. coughing and sneezing into microphones and generally staying as far away from all the other performers as i can (which, realistically, is not that far). we’ve the pleasure of not only the jezebels playing after us each night, but also of melbourne’s ‘alpine’ playing before us. hot as. things are going off truly and smooth. joey’s only driven on the wrong side of the road once, and phil only sunburnt part of his chest, so we’re doing just fine. oh, another soundcheck beckoning. good day mates.