A song and a dance

‘Aye, I’ve got heavy hands lately, and for no good reason at all.  It will pass, I know, but man does it get hard to believe some days.

I meant to say something else today, but have deferred that to another time, hopefully on some evening when I can’t see that daylight passing me by and making me feel guilty.

I have preemptively put my swimmers on, which means I am going surfing whether I like it or not.  It’s freezing cold here and I haven’t bought a new wetsuit since my last one slowly disintegrated, but I keep telling myself that the water will wake me up.

A curious thing about no wetsuit: you get no “tough guy” points out there.  You only get “obviously retarded” points.  And looks.  Lots of sad, curious, and disbelieving looks.  As Summer fades the number of people without wetsuits gradually decreases, and for the past month or more it’s been me and only me, in all my idiotic glory.  I’ve resolved to make it one more Winter without a wetsuit (making it a total of three Winter seasons in the flesh), and then I reckon I’ll buckle and treat myself.  I must have a desire to somehow “earn” the right to wear it, or at least earn the right to spend money on it.  Apparently pain and suffering are the only acceptable currency.

With that being pointlessly said, I thought I’d get around to sharing something that’s been stumbling around the edges lately: my first solo release in a long, long time.

It’s called Hold On Heaven, and I wrote it first as a scattered poem some time ago before putting it to music.  I’m sending it out to a few radio stations here and there, but nothing much to talk about.  There’s not much point.  It’s hard enough trying to push the band along in such crowded times that it hardly seems like there’s much call for yet another sensitive, overly moody, brooding white male singer-songwriter with shaggy hair.

Give it a listen if you are keen or bored, and help me share it around if that’s your thing.  It’s free, as most music is these days.  There’s nothing wrong that, it is what it is.

I’m playing my first out-of-state solo show, at the Music Kafe in Brisbane, on July 5th.  We shall see how it goes.  In a perfect world…

Cheers for now.  Say hi if it’s been a while.  It gets awful lonely here in Winter.

Braggart & Swagger

So here we are, on the eve of the Summer Solstice here in the Southern Hemisphere, and some good news has been filtering in while we’re waiting around for the release of our debut LP, “Raise Your Glass & Collapse”. I’ll be brief, and TRY to be humble, so I’ll lay off the album news and get to the good stuff.

I’m not sure of the details, but I’m pretty sure one of “our” people “did lunch” with some of “their” people, and some trax from our album got unto the hands of the people at Tracks Magazine. (When we say trax, we’re talking about songs, when they say tracks they’re talking about surfing and waves. I don’t know how our industry lingo got crossed, but there’s nothing we can do to fix it.) As luck would have it, they were heading out of the country to cover The Billabong Pipe Masters in Hawaii, and as even more luck would have it, they used a few of our songs to accompany the fury that Kelly Slater, Joel Parkinson, Owen Wright, Jeremy Flores, Kieren Perrow, Dane Reynolds, and others unleashed on the jaw-dropping waves at Pipeline. We’re all fans of water sports here in the Royal Chant camp, but we’re going to cry “mercy” and be glad that our music gets closer to these waves then we ever will.

Have a look and leave some comments here and at the magazine. Let them know you’re listening and that yes, Royal Chant and Kelly Slater make a good combo that you’d like to see more of.

Write back if it’s been a while. The new album is ready to go and you will be hearing a LOT more of it in the weeks and months to come, whether you like it or not.