Hello Dearest friends, we wanted to let you know that if you head over to our website (www.therunmusic.com) and sign up to be a website member (which just means entering your name and email address) you can download 10 free unreleased songs. It our way of saying thank you for your patience while we work on making sure this next album is as good as it can possibly be. The songs are:

1) Setting Fire Free
2) Nothing Personal
3) Sunlight
4) Sell out to Save the System
5) A Field of Fireflies
6) Remind me to Forget Your Name
7) Wonderwall Acoustic
8) Stepping Stones
9) Time Spent Driving (Electroacoustic version)
10) What if the New Road has my Old Fear

Happy Downloading!

And while you're there be sure to check out our cover of "Never Say Never" by The Fray featuring Jeff Langlois on keys. It is on the sitewide player and should play as soon as you get to to our site. Happy holidays from all of us!

-Mike, Adam, and Jared

I can still remember driving to see my grandparents on Sunday afternoons. I am not the same person I was then, but it is still a part of me. At a moments notice I can snap back into what I was like, but it can never last. I have always adhered to the view that if you like who you are now, then it is hard to regret anything you've done in the past, but I've hurt a lot of people in recent years. I'm not proud of it. Everyone seems to be jaded now, and no one wants to give all of themselves away. You can only truly fall in love once, and then after that its a cost/benefit analysis. It only takes one experience of feeling completely foolish and taken advantage to make you want to keep parts of yourself hidden from view. And you can't fall in love without a frame of reference, so its quite the paradox. Does true love exist? I'll leave that up to someone else to decide, but I know that I can never be the kid in the backseat who can't wait to see Grandma and play a game of pool with Dad in the basement. She passed away and Dad can barely walk these days. It has been a rough year, and its hard to be up this late, my mind wanders. Its hard to stay the same in a world where people die and love isn't an obligation, but sometimes reality allows us to grow, and love harder than ever. It makes you appreciate the people who actually care, and helps you forget about the people who stop calling when you don't hit up the bars anymore. Superficial will always be superficial, and intimacy will always be intimacy. And the former can never take the place of the latter.

It has been a nice, long, restful weekend.  The show on Thursday was outstanding.  Maybe our best turnout ever at the carpet.  We played some a new cover ("Use Somebody") and that might have been my favorite song of the whole night.  Its a really different rendition than the original but its cool in its own way.  Just so everyone knows, if you ever have cover suggestions we are more than willing to listen, I'm not saying we will play them for sure but we will listen.  Happy times.  Our buds West of Aldine (myspace.com/westofaldine) rocked the house as usual.  If you get a chance to check them out go listen to "Find Me" on their page and tell them we sent you.  We actually got to keep Jesse (their drummer from their band) from Thursday night until Saturday night as he was so comfortable in Adam and I's one bedroom penthouse that he just couldn't leave.  Goals for this week are to learn "Shadow of the Day" by Linkin Park (I love that song) and to relearn an original song our guitar player Rick wrote a while back called "I've seen your every disguise."  Other goals are to eat as many buffalo chicken subs as I can this week and to start recording a new tune for your listening pleasure.  Hope everyone had a great weekend!

-Mike and The Run*

One would think that fourteen hours in the car with three other dudes and no radio would be unpleasant.  Bu it was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my summer.  Most of the conversations we had and the freestyle raps we made could never repeated but I haven't laughed so hard in a long time.  The 45 minute show at Truman State took a backseat to how little we have grown up despite the fact that we are in our early 20s.  We ended up staying at a Frat house again this time but it was a much different situation.  The house was well maintained and there was actually a guy named Thomas from Minnesota there.  He kept trying to pour us drinks but he was so far gone that most of his efforts ended up spilling on his hands.  Nicest guys ever though, as opposed to the last place where they screamed at us at 5 am and the place smelled like piss.  We're going to do it all again next weekend.  Maybe we'll bring a video camera.

Call me crazy, but I'll never understand the relationship between crimes and the sentences handed out for them.  Donte Stallworth drives drunk and kills a pedestrian, he is now in training camp with the Browns a few months later and will play the whole season.  Plaxico Burress shoots himself in the leg at a nightclub and he'll be serving two years in prison.  How does that make any sense?  Circumstances only go so far in my mind.  A person is dead because of Stallworth, Burress only hurt himself.  I have always thought that crimes should have universal sentencing, and I've never understood the insanity plea.  I don't care if you experienced insanity when you shot 3 people in a shopping mall.  Either way you should never see the light of day again.  If you are prone to having moments where you are capable of something like that, how should that lessen your sentence?  

I'm getting sick of all these ESPN analysts saying that the signing of Brett Favre implies that the Vikings have no integrity or credibility.  This is a quarterback that holds NFL records in virtually every meaningful statistical category there is.  I don't care if he wants to sign with us in the middle of a fourth quarter drive, you take him when you can get him.  And who cares if he goes back and forth with regards to playing or staying retired.  The guy just loves the game.  He can't live without the game.  He knows that he should be retired, but he can't stay away.  I think that's something that should be admired rather than made fun of.  This guy threw four touchdown passes the week of his father's death.  With people genuinely cheating by taking performance enhancing drugs, I think its still refreshing to watch a 39 year old man play the game with the enthusiasm of a kid throwing his first touchdown pass. And if it wasn't for reporters constantly breathing down athlete's necks all the time maybe they wouldn't have to rush into decisions they're unsure of.

I just bought my textbooks...And I feel completely violated.  Its a lot like walking around Disney land all day long and knowing that your going to eventually have to buy one of the $16 waters.  The worst part is editions that came out a year or two before the current edition cost like 15 times less.  Are you telling me that much has changed in a year?  Pretty sure that there hasn't been a new form of Math invented that the older books just left out.  College and Health care industries know that they have become a necessity so they've taken that power to drive their prices sky high.  Why should the cost of school increase at like a jillion times higher rate than inflation?  Don't ask me because I still don't have anti gravity boots and filet mignon waiting for me at every session.  But I feel like I've paid for it....

It is a very dreary day here in St. Cloud, which normally would be unfortunate, but it is a welcome break from the past two days which have been 90+ degrees.  The twins are losing, mostly because Jason Kubel isn't in the lineup, and Gardy never listens to me.  But on a more serious note, I was up until 7 am last night designing a brand new website for the band.  I was pretty tired when I finished up but I remember thinking it was pretty sweet.  Feel free to stop over and check it out:  www.therunmusic.com.  Be the first person to sign our guestbook and take a look around.  There is also a store where you can pick up songs, CDs, or a t-shirt.  Where would America be without t-shirts?

Hey everybody, I hope that you are enjoying the new acoustic release "Rum and Coke."  When Jared and I sat down to write it I wanted to capture the feeling of someone who has recently left a relationship, and is currently reflecting back on all the good times that took place before the downfall.  It is an odd phenomenon that things can go from so good to so bad, what changes?  There is always a longing to go back to when times were the best and just stay in those moments.  Here are the lyrics:

Slow down, mixtures made of Rum and Coke
We're wasting time along the river, we pretend its the coast
Getting lost watching the sand run between your toes
intertwined we hide the wine underneath the clothes

But this is just temporary
Years from now we'll be falling apart

Why can't I just stay here, another summer
Why can't I just say I wanted you back
Why can't I just stay here, under the covers
We drew the line and felt it tear
You're the light I want to lose
Until you come around

Why do we always say always
When we are so quickly undone

Slow down mixtures made of Rum and Coke
We're wasting time along the river we pretend its the coast
Crazy how the times goes


Hope you guys enjoy it, and can relate!

-Mike

I have a thought that drives me crazy.  It is a question of whether everything we do is predestined.  For example, if I was born in Jeffrey Dahmer's body and raised exactly like him, would I have resorted to killing and eating my fellow human beings.  Of course in my head I would like to think that I wouldn't, but who knows.   And along those lines I consider myself to be a religious person, but how can we all be judged on an equal playing field when some of us have had to go through way more stuff than others.  I can't imagine believing in a God if I didn't have the ability to walk or see.  That would be rough....   There is just so much I'll never know, and it eats me up like a waffle cone.