coming off a week of being debilitated by a nasty nasty ass ear infection, which hurt like a motherfucker that my doctor prescribed me some lovely vicodins, and as a result my phone was smashed and run over by a car in my drugged spaciness...

this all came down to writing and recording pretty little ditty entitled "Inappropriate", which is dedicated to my bestest friend ever, Ernst Bruening the Super Abstract Photographer (who recently had his first public solo photography show in SF! woot woot!)

i've posted the song, recorded roughly in a day on garage band, featuring guitar work by isul, shitty programmed drums by Isul Jr, even shittier programmed bass by Isul the Third, and vox by miss isul kim of soon to famous rock band song of the siren.

xoxo,isul

ENJOY! here are the lyrics:

It was inappropriate

when you said those 3 loaded words

after a week of hardly knowing me

but it was incredible

the way that you took all in stride

when i said nothing

oh and you cried inside

i know you swallowed your pride

hoping you'd be my guy

hoping that i would be your bride

but i was a little girl

i only knew what was wrong

i let all those bad boys and dirty men

cloud my view

and then you ruined it

blinded me with stark sunlight

and i could see everything

oh and i cried inside

i never knew of such heights

will you be with me tonight

will you forgive my tainted life

don't ever pretend

there's nothing to defend

with nothing to fight for

and no one to die for

our love is broken

and this is for you

no one else will do

when i'm inappropriate

you make the most of it

there's no time to cry

we've got to fly in time

we've got the rest of our lives

we've got the rest of our whole lives 

it's decided.

during the holidays, i will be on the road with my best friend EVER Ernst Bruening, a very talented, upcoming abstract photographer (who also documented Song of the Siren's 2008 Northwest mini-tour).

Ernst and I will be driving from San Francisco to New York City, my birthplace and hometown and where all my family still lives. it will be insane, full of reflection and great.

we'll have photos, video and music to document it all. i'll let you know when we put it all together for you early next year...

biggest ball of rubber bands, here we come!!

Happy Holidays all my beautiful crazy ones!

xoxo
isul

so in attempt to avoid being on the computer all the damn time, i'm trying to streamline all my cyber communications via my band's MySpace page -- we're called Song of the Siren, it's my baby, and I'm on that page daily and it has contact info, etc for booking and other fun goodies.

Come connect with me!

myspace.com/songofthesirenband

This page (www.myspace.com/isulkim) will still be fairly active, with new song postings, etc -- but because I'm not on here daily it's not the best way to reach me for urgent, time-sensitive biz-ness...

thanks for understandin'!

xoxo
isul

i just gotta say. peanut butter and jelly ROCKS. i just had this craving for SOMETHING, couldn't figure it out. i saw a jar of peanut butter in my fridge and some kickass blackberry-pomegranate fruit jelly (i know i know...fancy schmancy? NO, trader joe's biatch!). I didn't have bread - damnit! well i did, but i usually put leftover bread in the freezer and i just couldn't wait for it to thaw and toast.

SO i took a big ol's spoon, got a big ol' scoop oh creamy peanut butter, and then slopped on the kickass jelly and just shoved it in my mouth and i am in just absolfuckinglutely indescribably heaven. it brings back SO many childhood memoires, like so many of us i'm sure from the US of A. screw my german sweetheart who balks at the thought of peanut butter and goes on about how nutella is far superior. true, nutella may be superior, but there's nothing like good ol' PB & J, even without the bread it rocks my fucking sockz!!!!

made me think back to other flavors of my childhood, and one sticks out the most...SPAM. YES, you heard me, SPAM, biatches. that shit ROCKS. i grew up on it -- my family didn't have a lot money when i was much younger, so i spent a many a meal eating SPAM. it's SOOO good, with korean sticky white rice that you put in cold water (trust me, it's good...like a cold rice porridge) -- you put the cold rice "porridge" in your mouth, then a piece of spam, straight from the unmistakable blue can with a picture of the white and pink "meat" just in case you forget what it looks like, then followed by a crisp spicy pungent piece of Kimchi (a absolute staple in Korean food -- pickled spicy cabbage), and then sometimes...when we were lucky and scored a few more bucks that week... some fried egg to go with it.

flavors bring me back to the days when my immigrant family really had nothing, and spam was a luxury to us. i'll never forget where i came from, and i will always yield to my spam and pb & j cravings.

because, how so very amazing that in a matter of seconds, and with a rush to my taste senses -- i can be transported back to who i was and who i am.

PB & J has humbled me, and i am all the better for it....

grab a spoonful...

isul

3 AM again. the witching hour. something darkly romantic, eerie, hopelessly abysmal, and stagnant. here i am at 3am again. used to stay up this late to do nerdy necessary stuff like homework. sometimes it was raves in NYC. sometimes it was on the phone with troubled minds across the country, which ended up in nothing but tragedy and a lifelong loss of a friend and soulmate. 3 AM never bears good news or good tidings. i wonder if i sit here typing long enough that i might be able to stay up a couple more hours till 5 AM which is far more optimistic and hopeful than 3 AM.



i'm coming down. falling hard. coming down from a high. a week of high-ness, high-ety. Height. spent an AMAZING week in a old school analog studio called Tiny Telephone in SF. a cozy space, light bulbs dimmed by japanese parasols, old carpets, ps2, minifridge, and fucking awesome couch. and an incredible engineer by the name of Justin phelps. the days in the studio were packed. i'd start my day at around 9 AM, make phone calls, emails, check in with the band boys make sure they were okay getting into the studio later htat day. go pick up lunch for the whole crew. pick up our producer Garry Ventura at his hotel. drive over the studio. track. boys take a break, i track more myself. work work work. ate so many granola bars, my insides are crunchy and radical. loved ones and visitors would stop by. i recorded vocals with the main lights off and a lone lava lamp on in the corner. these days and nights were incredible. topped off with communal swigs of 10 year single malt Talisker.



i'm coming down. falling hard. day after we leave the studio, producer and i are running around town, not sure what to do with ourselves. we check him into the rockstar hotel the Phoenix for a night. later that night, what was supposed to be a last business meeting with one of our engineers turns into drunken madness, blackouts, waking up in someone else's pad. it's one of the few times i haven't made it home in the past couple of years. my lifestyle and transformation these days have been causing the possible makings of a broken relationship at precisely the wrongest time possible. seven years ago, i was on the verge of losing it after losing someone over the verge, and i needed something, someone to ground me. i've found that for sure. but now that i have it, the stability and the ground under my feet, music and rock and roll is bringing me back to the relentless call of adolescence. no, not adolescence. just that need to break out, and go crazy. part of me at age 15, 16, 17 is all coming back to me. i was rebelling HARD back then. and now i'm feeling it again.



i'm coming down. had a great roof party on top of my cheap ass apt building. we're not allowed up there, but i couldnt' care less -- my best friend in the whoel world, see, it was his birthday and we needed to celebrate. nice a ghetto, just like the old days in NYC, cheap 40s, smokes, bad music in a 8 D-battery operated boombox. freezing our asses off, drinking hard liquor straight from bottles. someone put up glo-sticks to help bring some light to the roof, and i was instantly transported back to NYC. 15, 16, 17 years old. with a cigarette in my hand, a tecate in the other, and the urge to go absofuckinlutely crazy.



another night up till 4 AM. i'm coming down hard. i need the beautiful girls and good boys around me. i need the music and the smell of beer and liquor and nicotine around me. and i'm stuck agai here at 3 AM, wishing i could fall asleep or have someone here to talk to and let me ramble until i can't speak anymore. 3 AM is hitting rockbottom after a very potent high. i did that for that lost soul 7 years ago...stayed up on the other end of teh phone, letting him ramble and ramble just so i would know that he was alive and well. wish someone could do the same for me right now, not that i'm about to lose it to the extreme but it sucks to come down alone. fuck 3 AM for making me feel falsely destitute lonely abandoned. i'm just coming down from a natural high. that's all. 3 AM, go home why don't you.



i miss my friends even though i saw them only 24 hours ago. can't wait for the sun to come up. hopefully, i wont' feel so crazy with the daylight smiling at me and everyone i love. our team is growing. engineers, producers, masterers, coaches, friends, fans. i can't wait to see them all again, my new family among whom there is no shame. cute geeks building me gadgets and pedals, budding photographers taking our pictures and calling it art, fans already putting a value on the things we touch. may seem superficial, but it's real to me and makes me feel loved and keeps me afloat. and through it all i still get to ramble at 3 AM, knowing that one of the many hands that gently pushes me along will sit by and listen. it's really fucking amazing to me that people can put up with what i do and how i do it and the shit that i talk about. there's no shame in this family and it's simply amazing to me.



rock is hard. beautiful and vicious and hard. and it hasn't even started yet.



come visit me and my boys at: www.myspace.com/songofthesirenband



Song of the Siren is me and the boys. the new band is born. still haven't posted new material, it's still sitting on our 5 reels of 2" tape and our lacie quadra harddrive. more to come...

hey all!

We've got a kickass show:

THIS WED, AUG 22nd @ Rock-It Room in SF.

We're on at 10pm! Come on out because...

...it's our last show in SF until Mid-October, so we've got a few surprises...

1) We'll be UNVEILING our NEW BAND NAME!!! So be the first to hear before we've even announced it elsewhere, and before we've even released a note of the new [insert new band name here] sound from our new upcoming album!!!

2) Studio Send-off!!! Just 2 days after this show, we'll be heading into Tiny Telephone Studios (Death Cab, John Vanderslice, Spoon, Sunday Drivers) to record our first upcoming full-length album -- so we want to celebrate this big next step with all of our SF peepz who have helped us get here so far ;) So come out, have a few drinks, and partay like it's Friday. ;)

xoxo
Isul, Eric + Anthony

The Isul Kim Band has just come back from an intense week of pre-production and demo-ing, with our awesome producer Garry Ventura. It was an intense intense intense, and did we mention, intense bootcamp like experience. We topped a week of song arranging/reoworking and rehearsals with a packed 2-day demo -- we tracked 16 songs in 1.5 days of studio time! Whoa. The demo was mainly to prep us for our real album recording at Tiny Telephone later this month. So, the suspense continues, including a new band name, which we'll unveil with our new album. SUSPENSE!!!!

...meanwhile, come out to our live shows to hear our new sound! ...

Oh and here are some select photos. taken by the very sexy Navoona, from our demo session at Polariy Post studios...(thanks to Ben and Eric our kickass engineers!!!)

THE CONTROL ROOM with our Posse. Hell yeah.


ERIC + ANTHONY HARD AT WORK with our songlist.


ISUL TRACKING MAD GUITAR TONES + FEEDBACK in the hallway


GARRY + BEN AT THE BIG ASS CONSOLE


SETTING UP FOR AN ACOUSTIC RECORDING OF "OUR MYSTERY"


LADIES AND GENTLEMAN....ANTHONY!


AND NOW....ERIC THE ALONZO KING!!


GARRY + ISUL SAVOR THE MOMENT....


THE BAND AFTER IT ALL...WE'RE A LITTLE LOOPY...hahahahahahaha (wtf?)

haha! check this out! fresh from our video/photo gurus at Ohjay Design & Media....

i was explainig this jam section in our song "Dirty Magazine" to our live show videographer, Oskar, on July 20th before our show in Davis, CA at G Street. kind of like a Strongbad overview. you'll get to see side by side comparison of my demonstration and the actual live thing! see what i mean here...



you can also go to YouTube: Isul's One-Woman Jam Demo on YouTube

or go to my MySpace page, and it's posted there too!

xoxo
isul