The Blue Wires were formed out of the ashes of two great Boston bands, Catapult and Baby Strange. Rock music will never be the same. With blazing guitars, melodic bass lines, and flavorful drums, the Blue Wires know how to kick ass.
If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s pretty good. I don’t know what’s scary about it though, the fact these guys spent all this time on making music with an iPhone, an iPod Touch and a Nintendo DS, or the fact that I actually really like the song!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh0VX74alwk
Tonight Viper’s Tooth, um, I mean Minor Planets, er… damn it, The Blue Wires had a rehearsal, an unusual event for a weeknight, but I digress. At that rehearsal we decided the time has finally come for us to (insert trumpets here) start recording!
That’s right, this weekend, the process of recording three songs will commence. It’s a process that frustrates my poor wife to no end, but what can you do? There’s a demand out there. Our loyal fans are chomping at the bit to get their first taste of The Blue Wires sound.
We’ve chosen three songs that we’ll hopefully have finished by the end of March. The songs are called, Like You’re A Mouse, Go Love Yourself, and Yellow Star. I’ll try and post some lyrics soon, if I remember.
Each of the songs are quite different, and each had it’s seed in a different member of the band.
Like You’re A Mouse, was a song I wrote just before putting together this band. It’s a great, at least in my opinion, rock/pop number. It’s definitely one of the strongest songs the band has, and one of our earliest as well. I believe it was the second song we actually worked on together as a band. The first being a song called, At The Speed Of Time.
Go Love Yourself, was the brain child of Peter. He came in one day with this Stone Roses-esque riff, and we just worked it up into one of our funner numbers to play. The song rocks hard, and for some reason my voice sounds a lot like the guy from the Cult. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’ll let you guys tell me when you hear the final recording.
Yellow Star, comes to us courtesy of Kevin the drummer man. Kevin sent the band a demo of a riff he had, and we tore it apart, rebuilt it and ended up with this Radiohead meets Silver Sun Pickups track. The title comes from me trying to come up with something to sing over the song at rehearsal and Kevin wearing a t-shirt that had a picture of, well, a yellow star on it. Inspiration, eh?
One thing I would love to share with you, our loyal fans, is the original email that Kevin sent with that demo:
“I’ve never sent a song idea to a band before, so I figured the best way to do so was to create a incredibly rushed, incomplete and out of key song idea. Maybe we can work on it? Maybe we can all just not acknowledge that this ever happened. Whatever floats your whathaveyou”
Anyway, it’s late, and my ears are still ringing from rehearsal. I’ll try and keep a log of the recording process on the site so you can follow along at home.
Joining my other band members I’m refraining from talking about ‘the game’. Because of that I held off posting on the site for a few days, which meant this post is a bit of old news, but I’m going to write about it anyway.
Back in the Catapult days, I was lucky to meet and play with some great guys in a band called Scamper. Catapult and Scamper played many a show together over Catapult’s tenure in the Boston music scene. About six months after Catapult broke up I was working in a studio called Q Division. Who comes walking into the studio one day? Scamper, that’s who! I ended up working on that whole record with the guys, and we had a great time doing it.
Over the years I’ve remained good friends with the boys in Scamper and when I heard that they were breaking up, I was bummed. Last Saturday, the night before the big game (that we shall not speak of), I took my buddy Simon out and we headed down to the Middle East to check out the boys last show.
It was a fun and extremely emotional night for all involved. The guys rocked, they laughed, they cried, all in all it was a great way to end a run. They even played the best version I’ve ever heard of ‘Wait Wait’ my favorite Scamper track written by Mike the drummer boy. They’ve never played it better. It was an amazing acoustic performance of the song that really hit the right now.
Guys, the Boston music scene will miss you. Luckily there’s now the Brendan Boogie Band to help fill the void left by Scamper.
Writing music can either be the easiest thing in the world or nearly impossible. I find that I’m either drowning in ideas, or rehashing the same 5 licks over and over again. About a month ago, I was in a dry spell. So I changed up my listening, and waited. Sure enough, the block started to thaw a bit, and a few ideas slipped out - then a few more. The trick, at least for me, is to keep my listening varied. Jazz, Blues, Electronic, Rock, Country – I try to hit it all and pull in as much as I can. I have yet to scare/confuse my band mates with my iPod, as it’s a jumble of genres so tangled that putting it on shuffle leads to motion sickness. But it’s that dizzying shuffle experience that shakes me out of a rut, gets things moving again, and keeps things interesting. All those different sounds bounce off my head, sticking in the subconscious, only to come out as something entirely different. And for the first time in a while, I feel the flow of ideas picking up. Now, let’s just hope it doesn’t come out as a Polka. Oh, and I’m not going to comment on the game. Not now, not ever…
Well, apparently, everything! This band, is having it’s fair share of difficulties with it’s name, or rather, it’s lack there of.
When we first started this thing we jokingly called the band Viper’s Tooth, a name that a friend of mine from England suggested. We soon came to the conclusion that we needed a less ‘leather’ name. Emails flew back and forth, names suggested and names shot down. Eventually we had a naming session at one of rehearsals. We each put 5 names in a hat and had a ‘March Madness’ like competition to find the perfect name for the band.
We ended up with a tie between, Minor Planets and The Derivatives. We sought the guidance of the guy working the desk at the rehearsal space and ended up with the name Minor Planets. We were happy. We had a name! We got a website, www.minorplanets.net, put up a site, and continued on with the process of making music.
That all changed recently when a band in Michigan called Minor Planets contacted us and let us know of their existence. So clearly we couldn’t keep the name.
Now we’re back to square one again. We’re back trying to figure out a good name. We toyed with The New Derivatives, after finding another band was already called The Derivatives. Then we toyed with Viper’s Tooth again. Now it looks like we’re doing our ‘March Madness’ again on Sunday to find a name.
I would like to take this time to invite all of you out there to contribute your suggestions for band names. God knows any name has got to be better then some of the ones we’ve come up with.
So write `em in, and if we like `em they’ll end up in the ‘hat’.
Hopefully on Monday we’ll finally have a name for this thing.
