New tour blog here - Scorpio Californio Tour 2009

http://blueskiesforblackhearts.blogspot.com/

Mike has been keeping the Blue Skies for Black Hearts Facebook a buzz with lots of information.  You can become a "fan" at this link here.

http://www.facebook.com/blueskiesforblackhearts#/pages/Blue-Skies-For-Black-Hearts/50378820907?ref=nf

I just added Twitter to our growing list of social networking sites so you should go to www.twitter.com/BS4BH and start to follow our day to day, hour to hour thoughts of the moment.

K.

Managed to bring Portland weather with me, apparently. To highlight, the newest buzz in the Williamsburg scene:

Jean-Michel Arseneaux from 39forks on Vimeo.

Michael and Blue Skies

Meagan from Reviewer Magazine interviewed us after our show at Dante's last Wednesday night April 22nd with Transfer and Holy Rolling Empire. 

Anyway, here it is;

Blue Skies For Black Hearts

by Megan Trihey

Patrick Kearns arrived out of breath five minutes before 9:30, a guitar case in one hand and his girlfriend’s hand entwined with his other. He just finished playing an acoustic set down the street at Backspace. Ten minutes later, Kearns and the rest of Blue Skies for Black Hearts were on the red-lit stage and playing with no introduction.

The band was playing at Dante’s, a popular Portland, Oregon venue whose interior design reflects its name. The only lights in the dark brick building came from the stage or small candles flickering on the black tabletops. Though the Underworld-esq adornment remained throughout the show, as soon as Blue Skies for Black Hearts begun playing their upbeat classic pop rhythms, it was easy to forget I was in hell.

The music is charming. It’s clearly influenced by everyone’s favorite oldies, a nice contrast to the Emo music that, based on the name of the band, I thought I was going to encounter. But the band does what its name claims and incorporates a duality – the feel-good feeling you get when listening to Blue Skies for Black Hearts and the somewhat gloomy lyrics that are utterly relatable.

“There’s something to be said about saying things in a way that’s easier for people to take but also connects with them,” said lead guitarist Michael Lewis.

The band attributes its easy-going melodies to its dark sense of humor.

“So many people do this Emo thing and it’s like, ‘poor me, and blah, blah, blah,’” said Kearns. “I’m depressed all the time anyway, so it’s kind of like, that’s the dark sense of humor thing, I like to laugh at it and have fun with it and I think that’s the beauty with a lot of the 60’s music that people didn’t get. It wasn’t all happy hippy yay, yay, yay back then either, but they would take stuff that was sort of sad and turn it around put a happy melody under it.”

Kearns, Lewis, bassist Kelly Simmons, and drummer Paul Noel seem to enjoy putting on a show almost as much as the audience loves being the audience. The guys were smiling, laughing, and appeared to exchange inside jokes with mere glances throughout the set, but their energy climaxed during “Siouxsie Please Come Home.”

The tune is about a guy writing to his soldier girl, woefully waiting for her to come home from war.

“I wanted a twist of the sexes,” said Kearns, who wrote the song. “Back in the 60’s when people would write these songs, or this type of song, it was always like ‘soldier boy,’ or this kind of thing so I wanted the soldier to be the girl … it’s something that couldn’t have happened back then and so I wanted to twist it.”

The song is also indicative of the turbulent times in which we live.

“I think in the last decade it’s a little difficult to separate the reality of now and history,” said Lewis. “It’s a recognition of the times we live in.”

“It’s more personal though,” added Simmons, “because it’s between the person writing the letter and the person receiving the letter.”

Kearns admits more was at play when he wrote the song. His girlfriend, Susan, was away from home on a trip, and he wanted her to come home. In addition to his loneliness, he explained he had a strange daydream in which Burt Baccarat was dating Jessica Lynch, the first POW rescued during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

“I had this weird thing in my head,” said Kearns. “If he [Baccarat] was dating Jessica Lynch, what kind of song would he write? So I kind of tried to write that song.”

The collection of thoughts tumbled into “Siouxsie Please Come Home,” which appeared to be an audience favorite and the most-listened to song on the band’s Myspace page. But that’s how Kearns says most of the songs are composed.

“We get pretty interested, I think, in relationships of people in books as well as people we know and that sort of talking and books that we’re reading now, just sort of what’s going on, it starts to filter into the songs in weird ways,” he said.

Blue Skies For Black Hearts’ latest album, Serenades and Hand Grenades, can be purchased on iTunes.

blueskiesforblackhearts.com

-MKT

We'll still be posting blogs here on My Space but Pat just set up a more constant stream of conscience for Blue Skies here: http://blueskiesforblackhearts.blogspot.com/

 

Here you will get the more day to day random inside our heads type stuff and hopefully new stuff all the time.  Check it often.

K.

4:45 AM - Wednesday Feb. 18th, 2009 starts just like any other day: I get up at the crack of dawn for my day job, make the coffee, feed the cats, make my PB&J, and head out the door in order to punch the clock and bring home the soy bacon, but.....tonight we play the "I Saw Them When..." 94.7 show with Dead Confederate and so begins a whole new Blue Skies tour story with which I can amaze my friends.
4:30 PM - Load into Lola's.
5:30 PMish - Dead Confederate arrive and we meet our tour mates for the next couple days. John, the keyboard player, immediately impresses us with his perfectly mancicured and waxed handle bar mustache. The drummers, Dead Confederate's Jason and Blue Skies' Paul, hit it off discussing how big their "cymbals" are. Dead Confederate's lead guitarist, Walker, says to me, "Even though Kelly is a girls name I know guys named Kelly but Walker could be a girls name even though I've never heard of any girl Walkers." Sometimes less is more or stop talking is what I always say. Walker also sports some impressive facial hair. While John is trim and dapper, Walker has the appearance of a real, moonshining, mountain man.
6:30 PMish - We are told the green rooms are stocked with beer. I promptly make my way to the green room, grab a beer, a Red Bull and a muffin. After I take the first bite I'm told this nice big room is Dead Confederate's room, the broom closet next door is ours. I should have guessed. Nevertheless, our broom closet still has an oversized can of Rockstar filled with ice, High Life and Budweiser. This will do.
9:15 PM - I meet Dawson (more on him later).
9:45 PM - Blue Skies starts playing and at first, you can tell by the blank looks on the crowds faces, they have no idea what's hit them. Pat lies and tells them we're from Philly. Slowly the sold out crowd starts to resemble a Frankie Avalon Annette Funacello Beach movie. That's right, people in Portland are dancing!
10:45 PM - After our set, I head to the merch table in order to take over for our way too drunk label guy, Andrew Stern of the infamous Blue Horns and Future Historians. Dead Confederate hits the stage.
11:05 PM - DC's play their major NRK hit, "the Rat", which upon completion prompts a mass exodus from the venue. Apparently some people are only here for one thing. Too bad cause they miss "All the Angels" and the great "Heavy Petting."
11:11 PM - A disgruntled Portland "fan" who seems mad about having to pay for a t-shirt and CD runs by the merch table grabbing two Dead Confederate tees and two CDs. We all look at each other, shrug our shoulders, and decide the guy must not have been a real music fan because all he left was the vinyl copy of their record. Way to go Portland!

I knew it would happen sooner or later. I mean I know that Prince hates all things Warner Brother and Rupert Murdock but I wasn't aware it would happen so fast. I posted Blue Skies for Black Hearts version of Purple Rain on You Tube and within 3 days I received a letter from Prince's publishing company alerting me to the fact that we were infringing on his copyrights and blah, blah, blah. I think their exact words were, "You white boys can't dance." Anyway, it was yanked. To those of you who saw it I'm glad. To those of you who didn't, I'm sorry, you missed out. I still love Prince and think he's a genius.

First of all because Christmas is passed, I have taken our two Christmas offerings, It Never Snows On Christmas and Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), off our My Space page. You can still find them for a free download at, http://www.xopublicity.com/xofortheholidays.html. You can find some great free Christmas song on this comp including the great Master/Slave song which features ex-Blue Skies Matt Morgan or the great Service Group's version of the Slade classic, Merry Christmas Everybody.

In our player I posted a live version of Off Balance from our Sorry Davis, Maybe Next Time Tour 2007 we did with the Parties. It was recorded at the Old Ironsides in Sacramento, CA. Listen and learn.

Awhile back Blue Skies for Black Hearts was part of a 1984 tribute night at the Doug Fir. I got to live out one of my childhood fantasies to play this song. I posted it on YouTube last night. The audio is a little jubbed toward the end but... Watch it here....http://www.youtube.com/watchv=Xbx9eCDQYeo
See you later, Kelly

1955....The official birth of rock and roll....and the height of the American Dream. And, as history says, the beginning of the generation gap....the erosion of family values....and another step closer to The Rapture (no pun intended)....etc, etc, etc.....

I beg to differ.

Case in point: I have a documentary on DVD about the Beatles first trip across the pond to play the Ed Sullivan Show. There's a scene in which the film makers wander into a random New York City apartment building, walk down the hallway until they hear, through the door, an apartment with a television set turned on, and they knock. They ask if the family is watching Ed Sullivan....they are. They ask if they can come in and film the family watching television. They are granted approval and here is what is caught on film: the entire family is watching the The Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan show. Mom, Dad, and their two daughters who are probably around 14 and 10 years old. Maybe they all aren't in love with the band, but the entire family is there, watching it together and then talking about the event. On the night of the first appearance by The Beatles, 74 million people watched. At the time, that was about half the population of the United States. That's a lot of families.

Fast forward to last weekend, a much smaller audience, and my own, relatively unknown band (You're on our blog, so I am going to assume you know what I'm talking about) playing a show with the now breaking Rogue Wave, and I was still witnessing Rock and Roll bringing families together. Zach Rogue, Rogue Waves' lead man, commented during the show that he had family locally and that they were in attendance and that it was important to him to reconnect with them. I also had family in attendance. Family that I didn't know; family that I didn't even know I had until about a month ago when we played the Someday Lounge. I met my second cousin for the first time that night. I met her a second time this past Saturday when she came to our show and we were able to talk and connect a little bit more. But something happened that night that made it just a little more special....Rock and Roll. During Rogue Waves' set, Zach announced they were going to cover Birds by Neil Young. I think he may have asked if someone could sing the harmony vocal in the choruses...or maybe he didn't....the next thing I was aware of was Zach asking my second cousin if she knew the song for sure as he gave her a hand to climb up on the stage. And she really did know the part. She sang the harmony perfectly. It was a moment I will always remember my second cousin by. My Mom was also there to see it....and again, Rock and Roll is still bringing families together, even 53 years after its birth.