UPCOMING EVENTS She Rocks calendar release party - Elysium - Thur, Nov 8 | Kissinger September 2006 September has been another incredibly busy and productive month. It started with a trip for me (chopper) to LA to work on vocals with our co-producer Phillip Broussard. I worked for 10 days in his studio which is part of a complex called "The Brewery". Its been carved up out of an old Pabst Blue Ribbon brewery. Between work sessions, I was also able to visit Rick Rubin's studio in Laurel Canyon, where Phillip works. It was an inspiring trip. As soon as I got back, we jumped right into it, with a quick flurry of shows, including a very successful night at Stubb's. Among the crowd during our set was none other than Mel Gibson (yeah, the real Mel Gibson). He was not wearing any sort of disguise, but he was enjoying himself. Now Steve Garvey and I are working daily to sort through the files of vocal tracks recorded, putting together the vocal tracks for the record. Garvey did a great deal of mixing while I was in LA, so each song is getting much closer to being finished. It's hard to predict when we'll be done with it all. We'd hoped by Oct. 1, but the comping is very time consuming, and it looks like that won't be possible. At any rate, the work is very good, so we won't sweat it for now, as long as we're going full speed, we know we're doing all we can, and that is certainly the case. We'll meet in the coming weeks to see if our goal of a February release is still plausible. In addition to the work stated above (which is top priority), we are also preparing for a tour through the midwest next month. It will be our first trip back there in over a year. That's a long time considering we used to go through there three to four times a year. It will be a ten day run to Detroit and back. We're looking forward to putting together a new set for the tour heavy with the new material. Rock and roll, chopper August 2006 This month we are working on the prepping the mixes for the record. The next few weeks will be spent getting all that work finished so we can turn in the record on time. This will fall into the capable hands of Steve Garvey. He will be giving us versions to evaluate. Chopper is finalizing the remaining vocal tracks with Phillip out in L.A. They have been working night and day. They have dug in deep, and once they emerge the final tracks will be completed. The Hole in the Wall show we had on August 25th was great. We played with Peter Elliott and the Sellouts new line up which was fantastic. The next night we played at The Barley House in Dallas with a band called Macon Grayson who turned out to be really good. The Barley house is always a great place for us. The day after driving back from Dallas we woke up and got ready for a double header. The day started out at the Austin Skate Park's 4th birthday party. There were tons of kids there, and we were able to make a ton of new fans by giving away some promo cds to the young skaters. We played in the direct line of fire skateboards,and skateboarders. The Skate park was so happy with us that they want to do another show that would feature some of the pro skaters in town. The show would be more like an exhibition than the skating free-for-all we witnessed. It was a fun afternoon, and there were many kids leaving with Kissinger stickers on their boards, and helmets. Later that night we played at Emo's for the Camel S.I.N. party. The service Industry Party was alot of fun there were two stages with a ton of bands, and people there. All four of these shows were FREE! We are currently promoting our next show the CD Fuse night at Stubb's on the 22nd of this month. The line up is Driver Friendly, Seaflea, and us. We are postering, and if you run into any of us you will probably get a handbill. The only other things on the horizon are finishing up the record, and the tour we are planning through the Mid-West in October. We will be doing a ten day run up the old I-35 corridor all the way up to Detroit, and back. This run has become like a home away from home since this would be the 15th or 16th time back to some of these places. We will be piquing the interest of our fans and friends in the Mid-West for the Spring release of the new record. That's all for now.
July 2006 Hello all, It is a very busy month again for Kissinger. We began our lockout at Music Lane on July 10, and have been working every day since. We tracked drums to 15 songs, and have been going through song by song adding bass, guitars, overdubs and vocals to each song. We're just past the halfway point and have about 6 songs close to being ready to mix. We're on pace to finish at least 12 songs. The quality of the tracks we're getting is very high, and we're all excited about the progress we're making. We have a few shows this month to keep paying the bills. The biggest event was last weekend at Emo's. Our intern, Sarah, organized our big show of the summer. "Slushes for Lushes." We had free sno cones, Tito's vodka sponsorship, and four terrific bands (including ourselves). The event was a huge success. We needed 100 people to pay for it to be a success, and ended up with over 200 paid plus a big ass guest list. All bands had great crowds, the sno cones were a big hit, and Emo's manager asked us why we don't play all our shows there. All the bands hugged me when I paid them. Fifty kids signed up on our email list and went home wearing Kissinger temporary tattoos. It was a great night. After we wrap up the lockout, we'll be taking a few weeks off to decompress. We have a few more shows this month during the lockout to finish paying our bills, including a KROX sponsored show at a Verizon store this weekend that may include the Burden Bros. Can't wait for you all to hear the songs we're working on. Rock and roll, chopper May 2006 The writing is going well. We have around 25 songs in progress to choose from for the next recording. They are all in various stages of completion, and we have made demos that range in quality from bedroom recordings to practice room recordings. We've recently begun the preproduction process, and will continue to develop the songs as we narrow down our choices for the tracking. We also have studio time scheduled for July. Our biggest task artistically at the moment is having band/producer conversations about the kind of record that we want to make; unifying our artistic goals. We're discovering through these conversations, that we all have unique interests in this record. Our goal is to incorporate those interests into a cohesive work that transcends each single artistic motivation to achieve a richer whole. We plan to Mix in August, master in September, and send final masters to the pressing plant by October 1. This will set us up for a release in early February. We are currently in the beginning stages of planning the release. Meanwhile, we continue to play 4-8 shows a month in Texas. We are developing six regional markets playing shows in each market every 4-6 weeks. Growth is steady, but we need something new to talk about in each of these places. It will be important that we maximize this new material to build our fan base in each of these markets. We also will tour a familiar route through the Midwest in October and set up another trip in February with the new CD, hitting ten markets in ten days each time.
April 2006 It's been a great month for Kissinger. Lots of good shows, lots of new songs, and some new folks too. LIVE SHOWS RECORDINGS NEW FACES This weekend we play Dallas and College Station. We'll be debuting some new songs, and playing some new clubs. I'll have more to report next month. Rock and roll,
March 2006 Things are going great this month. The biggest news is the addition of a new team member. A great booking agent in town has started booking Kissinger. We have weekly face to face meetings scheduled as well as lots of emails and phone calls while we transition things to her. We are very excited about the change, and it has cleared up an incredible amount of time for Chopper, who has written nearly 8 new songs just this month. We have a busy month ahead, with 9 shows in Texas in addition to the demo and writing process. We also have booked a day at recording studio to record drum tracks for this next round of demos. Kissinger was booked as the opener for Collective Soul at the Glenn (the new stage at the Backyard in Austin). We're doing a great deal of promotion around that, including radio and TV interviews. Once the next set of demos are done, we should be in a position to choose a producer, and begin the recording. We're very excited to keep exploring these new songs, and to begin the process of recording this record. We also broke ground on a new type of performance this past month, playing our first acoustic show at the Austin Bergstrom Airport. We have a second acoustic show scheduled for April, and look to put more together in the months to come. We'll keep you posted! Rock and roll,
February was a good month. We had a good show in Dallas, made great headway on songwriting, and got some valuable feedback from some of the mentors on our first round of demos. The hunt for a producer continues and begins to narrow as we began talking with some of our favorites, and scratching others off our list. A disappointing treatment by a club in Houston ended a good run there, but good things lurk around the corner, as there are a number of new venues coming available to us there. Here in Austin, we opened for the former Sony band "Wheatus" last night. We were able to get both KLBJ and KROX to sponsor the show by giving away tickets on the air. A show opening for Collective Soul was confirmed for April. We also will be headlining the Texas Music Fest during SxSW. If you are in town for the conference, you can see our show with a badge: 10:00 Thursday, March 16 - Outdoor Stage - Between 6th and 7th on Trinity. Our new intern is doing great work. She's been contacting press, taking over our email list, and managing our contact data base for the last month. She is very bright, motivated, and is catching on quickly. She came with us to our most recent Houston show, and captured a ton of email addresses by working the crowd. She's not afraid to call anyone, and she's very charming once she gets them on the phone. We're lucky to have her with us! We've got upcoming shows in San Angleo, College Station, Dallas, Fort Worth, Wichita, Austin and Houston that we're promoting. We're also working up an "akoustik" set that we will debut at the Austin Airport on March 30. Look forward to seeing you during the conference! Rock and roll,
January 2006 Music Music Music... This month contained many successes. This past weekend we headlined our first show ever in Houston and our first show in Dallas in several years. Both were great successes as a result of our new promotional efforts. They both led to great bookings for February and March. We got paid better than we ever have in either city, and brought out a new core of fans in each place that we think we can build upon. Another piece of news is that we got word that a second Kissinger song has already aired on the TV show Veronica Mars. The episode aired in November, and contained �Girl on the Bus,� a song from our CD Charm that came out way back in 2000. More regional shows are scheduled over the next few months that will build on the strong inroads we made in January. We are scheduled to play our first acoustic show on March 30 and will begin rehearsals for that this month. Lots to do, and lots to be excited about. Rock and roll, December 2005 Music Music Music... Since I last wrote, I�ve returned from Oregon, and am still suffering a bit from the shock of returning. After being able to spend 8-10 hours a day on songs for so long, it�s pretty frustrating, and bubble bursting to be back in Austin where I�m lucky to be able to carve an hour or two out every other day. This morning is a perfect example. I had thought I would spend the morning tracking some demos to hand out to Lucky to start learning. I even got up early, but instead I�ve spent the morning sending overdue emails to friends about our show at Beerland tonight, posting a bulletin on myspace about tonight�s show, trying to line up February�s shows, and book the opening bands for January�s shows. Now, I have only an hour before I have to leave for a rehearsal, and I�m going to spend it writing this journal, effectively pushing the demos off for another day. Time management is a bitch. A hopeful help to this time crunch may be arriving next week. O3 has recruited at recent UT graduate to sign on as a Kissinger intern for the next 6 months. Our plan is get her to help us build our master database, run our promotional cycles for each show, and create a manual that details how to do what she�s doing so that when she leaves, we can hand her duties off more easily to the next person (whoever that may be). If I am only doing booking, that may leave more time for the music, and relieve some of the bottleneck problems that we have created for ourselves. We recently heard that not one (as we expected) but THREE of our songs are coming pre-loaded on every Dell computer that comes out this year. We hear there will be 4 million of them. We�ve already had people contact us excitedly explaining that their Xmas present of a new computer came with three of our songs. It will be interesting to see what that does in terms of bringing in new fans. We also are meeting with a friend who works at a prominent local ad agency. He is learning about Kissinger and our promotional cycle so he can help us develop an integrated ad campaign. Ideally, the structure he�s helping us create will serve us well through this upcoming release. Many New Year�s resolutions, but the management of time has to be at the top. I have another month and a half to write, and we need to find a producer soon. Nothing can move forward until we have some completed demo�s. So between paying the monthly bills, we will be working toward that goal. That�s all from Kissinger for now.
November 2005 As I write this entry, I�m sitting, perhaps for the last time this year, at a kitchen table that looks out over a Christmas Tree farm in Corvallis, OR. The dining room table hasn�t been eaten on in a month, although I have sat at it every day. It�s loaded with my recording equipment, MBox, hard drives, stereo, Radio Shack adapters etc. For the last 4 weeks, it�s been my workshop. My wife has worked 100 yards away, but it may as well have been 100 miles. She worked on the farm itself, making wreaths for the holiday season rush. Because I�ve been here in Oregon, my only contact to Austin has been via telephone. So for a day longer, I�m relishing the trees in front of me being more real than Kissinger credit card debt. Still. I�m packing up the �studio� today, and we�ll be driving back to Austin for a show at Emo�s in a week, and finally allowing the business side of the band, which has consumed me up until this month began, regain its grip. PROMOTION PLANNING AHEAD THE NEAR FUTURE That's all for now. I have to go get the oil changed, and gas up. My wife and I have 2000 miles to drive in the next 3 days.
October 2005 STREET TEAM NEW MUSIC MENTORING
August 2005 As I write this, I'm waiting on o3 to come pick me up at my house. All of this is part of a new effort in promoting our shows. We've severely cut back on the number of shows that we're playing as we work on writing new material for our Incubator record. So it's important that we make the most of each of these shows. Gone, for now, are the days of playing 12 shows in a row where we wonder where we are each night. While we focus on building a few key markets in Texas only, we must fine tune what works and what doesn't work as we build the fans that will be with us when we release this next CD. STREET TEAM STRUGGLES NEW MUSIC o3 is due to arrive shortly, and I've covered most of the hot topics in our world right now. You'll have to wait until next month to hear what great ideas we have in mind for our all ages show at Emo's on Oct. 21!
July 2005 Here we are in July. It is hard to believe that we have been in the Incubator program for three months. We have had a seemingly quiet summer so far, but we have really been planting many seeds. We had a successful tour to the East Koast in late May where we gained fans and kontacts in New York, which was our primary goal. Since then we have not been playing live this summer, but that is all about to change. We have shows and a tour booked for the next couple months. We have secured a permanent rehearsal space and are about to begin what you call wood-shedding (spending all our time in the rehearsal room working on new songs for the new rekord). Some of our main objektives lately have been to organize our street team, divide band business responsibilities to allow more time for song writing, and to meet with band management experts to learn more about what Kissinger is looking for in management. Lucky has taken over the Street Team (working one on one with our friend heather to organize promotion), o3 has taken over treasury, I the Great Garvino (The Garvinstigator, Garvey the Green and Gold) have taken over e-mail duties. Chopper has been writing (very important). We are investigating ways to promote our kurrent rekord Me and Otto, but are most excited about rekording this next one. Last updated on October 4th, 2006 by Nikki Rowling |
