The four main members of No River City, Eric Amata, Mark Carbone, Drew "I am the third revelation!" de Man and Nathan "Peaches" Green, were seen talking about playing music recently. Supposedly, the wheels are turning slowly on a new album. That's the public face of it anyway.

De Man says he's been writing some new stuff and it appears that Amata has too.

There are plans for a new 5-song EP to be released in the early Spring. (Whenever that is in Atlanta.)

Other pots are simmering...

We're apparently bad at keeping this blog up. This year has been a pretty tough, but transformative one. We have been through a lot, ventured into new territory and we've spent the last few months assimilating it all. Come see us next chance you get.

Thanks to all who bought copies of Wolves and Fishes, played it on the radio, told their friends about it (word of mouth is really effective), reviewed it positively, helped make it happen, and most importantly, CAME TO SHOWS.

Personally, as we begin to see light at the end of the tunnel of this dark period in our country's history, I'd like to see more people getting out and forking into life they way we all deserve. Consider this: The Bush Years have been just abysmal. (Pace and pardon me, my handful of conservative friends.) I mean, the economy has tanked, Americans have become zenophobic and wary of international travel and foreign languages. For heaven's sake, we're building a fence to keep out the Mexicans?!! We've been trounced by a creepy cadre of vile, Islamic extremists given to decapitation, our civil society and public life have been invaded by religious extremists from within our own society, we've lost our loved ones, our respect abroad and our pride in aimless, ongoing acts of war; our phones are tapped, our mail's been read, America's natural heritage has been sold to the highest bidder and public discourse has become disgustingly fractured and divisive.

Eh? Sad, you know....?

A great time to be alive, if you can find something to keep your spirits up. For me, it's been music. I feel like I've been in exile for seven years and we're coming to the end of our sentence. No--I don't think a regime change will fix everything, but surely you recognize that each presidency or political period has a corresponding culture. This dismal overcast can't last forever, and the weatherman says there's a high pressure front moving in. Get ready for puffy clouds, clear skies and jubilation. I think we should seek to make 2008 the year we slough off our dour raincoats and ditch our shoes and dance our asses off in the park, TOGETHER, just to make everybody laugh.

From a practical standpoint, the 00's (the 'aughts', I think you say) have meant a long period of learning, mining, getting crushed, picking up, digging deeper, seeking after the asylum like minds. My music career began right around 9/11 and it's been a hard time to break through: a depressed populace has to get truly tired of the grimey atmosphere of authoritarian bleakness before they revel in spite of it. It's worked out, I suppose, and it's really all been one big assimilation period for me musically. There are many morals of this story to be ascertained, many ghosts to be entertained. And it's high time we got back in touch with our sense of REVELRY. Look it up. Look up JUBILEE too. These two words might help to make your holidays and the new year brighter.

My ruminations are trying your patience, I'm sure. So, with all this in mind, happy holidays to everybody--or merry christmas for those of you who need to hear that in particular, as some so vociferously clamour.

We've already started the party. All we're really waiting for is for YOU to come along.

XO,

Dre'

So nobody ever got around to this... No River City slugged it out on the road for most of May and June. All over the Western US. It was hard, it was lovely, there were good things involved and many difficulties. We played a lot of music and most nights, we were pretty on.

I'm just the guy who winds up writing these kind of things, so let me say that, from where I'm sitting, Eric, Mark and Nathan are the best friends a fella could ask for. I can't believe what they put up with from me and how much heart and soul they put into music. I heard those guys say some things about playing music that changed my whole angle. Someday, when I'm long in the ground or retired to some sheep farm or monastery, they'll be, variously, playing at the Met, Lincoln Center, The Greek Theater and the Coliseum. And I got them muthafuckas high!

Wolves and Fishes is doing well. MilesofMusic.com is selling it like chocolate ice cream on the boardwalk in August. Please continue to buy it online, in stores and to request songs on the radio. Look us up on the internet. It helps. Link to us. Tell your friends. Send us messages of encouragement. I know I don't do too well without it.

Now some thank-you's are in order. I hope I don't forget anyone.

Thanks to the crowd at Off Broadway in St. Louis, who turned a Wednesday night into a wild, libertine bacchanalia. We were deeply flattered by those who removed their shirts.
Thanks to the lanky (and I think toasted) sound engineer in Tulsa who encouraged us to keep playing our last song even though the owner wanted to pull the plug. People wanted to hear that shit, man.
Thanks to the kind houseful of friends in Lawrence who made such a great little scene for us.
Thanks to Brian and everyone at the Common Ground in McCall, ID for a great time in such a lovely setting.
The Mom-n-Pop gas station guy in that little burg in Western OK who let us have gas for cheap.
Kirsten in Denver--my friend, it's always good to see you, and you know you like it when NRC brings the trouble around.
All the folks at Muddy Waters in Arcata--hell, the whole town--we love yall and have sung the praises of your kind, open hearts.
Miguel Z and The Dying Californian--thanks for all the great music and good times.
Thank you Liz for hosting us in Koreatown. LA was a little weird. I'm still processing it all. I cried in the bathroom at the movie studio. We chilled well, I think.
Dan Ryan, you saved my life that night. You are a madman.
To the great crowd at Pappy & Harriet's out in Pioneertown--yall stay cool out there.
To all the park rangers we dodged while seeking subsidized lodging in tents, in mostly deserted campgrounds, you know we deserved it.
My dear Ivy, thank you for visiting us in Portland. It was a great change-up to throw into the mix and the dinner/Vans Am smoke-down and walk about in the spring air on Belmont was a treat.
Thanks to Music Millennium in NW Portland for being a kick-ass store with an awesome stage and being very supportive of music. A shame that such a great record store had to close.
The very adventurous staff and crowd at Eddie's Trackside in Monroe, WA treated us so well. Thank you.
Thanks to everyone that made the Cactus Records sidewalk show a serious rubbernecking event one afternoon in downtown Bozeman, MT.
Thanks to Alyssa and Kelly for putting us up and showing us a damned good time in Bozeman.
Chris from Machine Records for bringing great live music into Lake Geneva. Most people can't handle my outbursts, yall.
Jesse, and all of our friends in Madison--we had a grand old time. Still my favorite town after all these years. Ballgames, brats, beer, lost keys, boob-toob, tattoos... I could go on...
Trevor, et al in Iowa City, thanks for a crazy night by the inflatable tiki pool. We got into some freaky shit just before the sun came up, as I recall.
Aaron, and the staff at Busted Lift and that kick-ass restaurant upstairs--thanks for the good treatment. It was a good way to end the tour. Made a vanload of bums feel like human beans.

As I stated above, I hope I've not left anyone out, but just for good measure, thank you so kindly to every sound engineer, every kind individual, barista, bartender, friend or new friend who took us in and put us on couches or floors and even beds, people who hollered extra loud after songs and begged for encores, everyone who bought our records, people who actually got into the music and enjoyed the experience of being together with a random assortment of humans listening to music brought from thousands of miles away.

Always tip your server. Keep dancing and take notes,

Dre'

Yall, we've done it all... or if not all of it, we've at least camped out in a rad thunderstorm/tornado in southern Kansas, rocked so hard in St. Louie that people tore their shirts off and danced, hiked Glenwood Canyon, cut a wide swathe in Denver, drove all night across Nevada and watched the sunrise over the sagebrush, played a marvelous show in a kick-ass new club in Tulsa with Snowden, camped by the Pacific last night, burned a lot of wood in campgrounds... and we are some crusty dudes. Pretty sketchy looking, if you're a convenience store clerk. It's a great movie... Wolves and fishes is doing well on radio. Call your local college radio station and request your favorite song...

Keep dancing and take notes...

Dre'

...screwed up the last blog. never showed up. who knows? at least the words are out there somewhere as electrons, shooting around--or something like that. anyway, a brief recap:

feb tour was crazy, well-executed, a big mess, very snowy and only attended by some very lucky people. if you missed the "Pitbullz n 8 Ballz" tour, you just really missed some great shit. it was a 11 or 12 day journey that pushed the envelope of human existence. that's all i'll say about that.

we got the record mastered. should be available before the end of the month if you're just dying for one. otherwise, release party at Redlight Cafe on April 20th.

life's a wreck, a lovely mess--sort of a "raft of the medusa" reality. too poetic and lovely to get too broke up about the horrible circumstances of it all. blessed and broken is a good way to be,  i suppose. come see us. we'll be playing a lot soon.

dre'

So Del Reeves died. He was an old Grand Old Opry performer. I remember him because he too wrote a song about a hot chick on a billboard. Pace.

D

well, we've done it all this year. (you can take that to mean whatever you think it should, short of strangling hookers and driving over the speed limit.) chri-mah carols are molesting our ears, money's looking tight and gifts must be bought, made or re-gifted. the days are short, the sky makes purty colors and most mornings are cold.

i'd like to take this opportunity to thank our friends and fans and families and shit. it's been a good year for no river city. we've covered a lot of new miles in our kick-ass van. we've played some kick ass shows. we stayed up all night in new york. we played baseball in iowa city. we traveled 2 miles in 3 hours behind a jacknifed semi in ken-tu-ky. chach dove into lake monona late one night as we sat on the shore. i thought i ran over a spaceman in the middle of ohio in the middle of the night. we drove all the way home from minneapolis in the rain after the gig. we kinda made two records.

yeah--more on those records in 2007. we've got lots of touring plans and records to release. and a video coming...

i would really like to thank the guys in the band for sticking with me on the barricades of this Paris Commune, on the ramparts we watch so gallantly streaming, on this Ship of Fools, on this possibly-doomed mission to Mars. Chach, Mark, Nathan and Chris have been the biggest green light I've ever had in music--thanks fellas.

i also want to thank my good friend Thomas Kay for coaxing out some great music and supporting me way more than i realized.

Teddy Morgan has helped us make a great album. Ben Holst is helping us finish it.

to all of the clubs, talent buyers, cooks, bar-keeps, servers, sound engineers, journalists, bloggers, ostlers, and other musicians (you all know who you are), thanks for keeping us alive and taken-care-of.

to our fans and friends: thanks for the floors, beds, couches, chairs, water, showers, grub, good times and faith in humanity. thanks for buying cds. thanks for telling friends about us.

it's been about 365 days and that's a lot of time. thanks to everyone who's done what they could to make each of them brighter.

happy holidays.

Drew

We have just been befriended by Rick Nolan. There are a handful of his old songs on the myspace. Just some old cat from Ohio who wrote some good old country songs and recorded them almost fifty years ago. Every now and then, amidst at the self-important nonsense, crappy young bands and snow-jobs about how great a talent some jackass is, you get something like this. It's just plain, sincere, unpretentious music that a guy has put out just because he wanted to. He says he doesn't care if he makes any money off of it because he's got "$5 dollers and a beer". Check him out.

www.myspace.com/herronrecords

Just how dumbass can you get? For starters, what in god's name does "live, love, learn" have to do with fucking people or dating or whatever you're supposed to be doing with their dumb service? Live, love, learn. Just consider that. A dating service that offers more than just a lot of what they refer to as "sexy singles"? Or is it just really bad ad copy--as bad as their models are uber-plain Janes?
I mean, not to pick on those cuties. Lord knows they're pretty girls, but what any fool can see is that somebody didn't spend any cash on getting really hot models. That says something to me that arrests my crap detector. They're trying to sell me a bill of goods. i almost get the feeling that these girls volunteer for this gig. And there's nothing i hate more than unprofessional, un- or under-paid entertainers or artisans. But seriously... I mean, why watch some dumbfuck on reality tv do his thing when you can watch a real actor use some actual skill to evoke and illuminate? Same thing here--why have some boring, normal shmoe represent your "sexy" "true" "love" et cetera...hurl... barfff...? All in badly written, meaningless language. listen to me hurl.

Live Love Learn. Nice. Real nice. Then there's "it's nice to be naughty." Okay, that's brilliant. i mean like interstellar flight brilliant. What 8-year-old wrote that? Nice?! Naughty?! This is like Santa Claus shit. What does it have to do with "sexy singles"? I'm sorry. i do not get that at all. Again, it sounds like somebody skimped on hiring some real talent. Would any copy writer worth their salt compose this garbage? i don't think so. You know who wrote this? Some "executive" or "entrepreneur" who, in a couple of exuberant years, from under his fraternity baseball cap, will tell the story of how his lame-o business started out small but fooled everyone and is now worth a zillion dollars, on some professional conference televised on C-Span, late at night. And the reason we're subjected to his crap is that he was too cheap to hire somebody good to write for him. Or her, for all i know. It's nice to be naughty. Consider it. And they'll sit there and make enough cash to reinvest in their heinous ad campaigns and harass us with more of their crap and they'll be successful, while the rest of us sit here, brow-beaten by wickedly awful abuse of language.

It's just so offensive and imbecillic. I think we all need to live for real, throwing rocks and jabbing sticks at the manipulations of advertising that makes us want stupid crap. We all need to love for real, finding someone who's not sexy and not trying to appear sexy in spite of their non sexiness, on camera for an ad. Find love in defiance of some dating service and in spite of the phony industry that takes your money to hook you up what you should be able to deal with yourself. If you'd consider using their service for love, perhaps you should just consider loving yourself. We should be learning not to trust some jackass with a chunk of money and a no-good copy writer--not to trust the great manipulators, from the sexy singles peddlers to the idiot president we suffer under. Live, love, learn indeed. These flashy ads are, in a way, everything that's wrong with our culture.

 

I just smashed my hand under a big fucking rock. I was tearing apart and rebuilding a stone wall in my backyard. Pulling up carpets of tangled, ancient monkey grass that was probably planted in 1952, digging out the tenacious rhizomes of stray blackberry bushes, uprooting wild roses and yam vines. Accidentally killed a snake--maybe this was karma. Hazel, one of my laying hens, was hanging around and found another snake and was all over it before I could do anything. I got her to drop it for a second, but before I knew it, she's snatched it up again. What most people don't know about the humble (some would say dumb) chicken is that they are predatory insectivores, but will eat small reptiles too. Watching one hunt and peck (pardon the pun as I type this out), you can imagine their ancestors, the Tyrannisaurus rex, whose DNA they inherited more than any other living creature. Just think of it--the useless arms, the three-toed feet, the amazing, lightning-fast pecking action, the acute vision. These things are really bad-ass.

Anyway, we angered the snake people. Here I was, tearing apart their hangout so I could expand my garden. Perhaps they arranged it to sting my conscience. I was lifting out a heavy, probably 35-lb chunk of granite and was about to set it down when Hazel walked in the way, I tried to move her, tried to redirect the stone, she moved right in front of it. I almost dropped it on her, put out my other hand to try and catch it, and wham! It went right down on my paw. Fuck. Man that shit hurts. I didn't break anything, but it's anyone's guess how well I'll play guitar until the soft tissue heals. Why doesn't somebody come help me?

On another note, I love working with stone. It's easier than songwriting.


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