After many years under the D.W. Holiday monicker, we have decided to put the band into hibernation and become The New Slave.

We've decided to name the band after our first full-length album which is currently being mixed and produced by Jace Lasek of The Besnard Lakes.

Speaking of the new album - we are in the final stages and should have it done by February of '09.  In the meantime, we will be releasing an EP via digital outlets in January.  You can preview the new material at www.myspace.com/thenewslave

Until then, keep an eye out for friend requests by The New Slave.

Take Care,
D.W. Holiday

The spaceship is PREPARED and ready to take off! All persons with proper stamp given at the door will be allowed to board for a one set trip around the atmosphere TONIGHT Wednesday July 2! (Psychedelics not required but recommended)..

at

Hemlock Tavern
1131 Polk Street
San Francisco
Doors at 9:30pm, we go on at 10pm sharp!
$6 / 21+
with Aim Low Kid and the Jet Age!

See you there!

A new member of the family was born today!!! Her name is Iris Marie Norcia-Crowell. She was born in San Francisco @ 12:45 today and is 9 lb 2 oz and 20 inches long!! Its funny all of our last babies have been born with the same stats!!. MUST BE THE WAVE!!!Congrates to our best friend Dan and his lovely wife Lori!! We are all so happy!!

Love and Peace Everyone,

Craig and Troy

Track 2 from Technical Difficulties, Under The Influence... (2004 Three Ring)

Ahh, Cowpoke.  The thorn in our side.

Cowpoke was originally recorded in 1992 in Bethel, Connecticut.  At the time of conception, D.W. Holiday was a three-piece band.  Craig based the song on a Western Wear store in Loomis, California called Cowpoke.  He used to drive by the store and, thinking it was actually a bar, imagined what type of people would be there late at night drinking their lives away.

At the time that Cowpoke was updated and recorded again, D.W. Holiday was a five-piece band: Craig Clarke on Guitar / Vocals, Dan Crowell on Bass / Keys / Vocals, Caleb Corry on Drums, Belta Fleischman on Guitar, and Chris Mayfield on Guitar.  Notice a trend with this?  That's right - a LOT of guitars.

While this is now one of our least favorite songs, we have to give Cowpoke credit for being the song that hooked many of our listeners.  References to Wire are mainly aimed at Cowpoke.

The basic tracks for Cowpoke were recorded in Chris Mayfield's garage in Aptos, California.  David Curtner helped out with some of the initial mixing on Cowpoke and he predicted at the time that Cowpoke would be the first single on the album.  David was correct, though it was not an intentional move on our part (DJs just picked up on this song and ran with it).

The lyric "why can't we ride off into the sunset like every western story that I've read" is a reference to Craig's favorite author growing up (Louis L'Amore).

Lyrics:

Take a little ride down to the trains
Take a little walk down sister sidewalk
I know what you are
You're my little country-fried girl

Take a little walk to down to the wonder streets
Take a little walk down (I don't want this)
I know what your gonna get
You're my little hog-tied girl

How come we can't ride off into the sunset
Like every western story that I've read?
Here's one, I bought this for you

Take a little ride down to your mother's house
I watched her come out and take your hide off
We spent the night too late
Drinking, dancing, and singing at the Cowpoke

Watch her ride past Rocklin
Watch her pass up Lincoln

Track 1 from Technical Difficulties, Under The Influence... (2004 Three Ring)

For the most part, Technical Difficulties, Under The Influence was the start of D.W. Holiday's journey into the psychedelic realm.  Though there are a couple songs from this album that are still occasionally included in our live set, some of this may not be a good representation of what the band sounds like today (though we still embrace our evolution).

For the nerds: The basic tracks for No Diving were recorded at Woodside Studios.  We recorded the drums and guitar (Gretsch Duo Jet through a Marshall JCM800 Half Stack) simultaneously in the same room which gives the listener a feeling of "being in the room" with us (since some of the guitar was picked up in the overhead drum mics).  Vocals, Bass (Guild '73 JSII) and the keyboard lead (Casio CZ-101) were done in San Francisco at Dan's apartment.

This song was inspired by The Thirteenth Year.  Look it up on IMDB and you'll understand.  Drums were inspired by Desperation (Lennon).

Coincidently, this song was the inspiration for our current concept project titled The New Slave, which is being mixed and produced by Jace Lasek.

Craig fought for this song to be the first track on the album.

Lyrics:

Stay out of the water
The mermaid will take you
She sings and she swims
In and out of your dreams

In your dreams you can breath underwater
We'll call a specialist
But until then, stay out of the water

Hey there fans, old and new!

We've decided to do something different here at DWH headquarters.  Beginning today, we will be offering some random songs off of all our releases for free via Myspace.  A little bit about how this will work:

We will offer one download at a time.  Each song will be available to download for a limited time.

In addition, we will offer 5 other songs in line as streaming music within the player.  As we remove one song from download, we will move another song up for download.

But that's not all!

Along with each available song, we will offer juicy tidbits describing how each song was written, recorded, and what each song means (maybe!).

We hope that you enjoy our stories as well as our music.

Take care,

DWH

The time to do that thing you have always wanted to do is NOW. Don't hesitate DO IT!! 5 years from now I promise you that you will be looking back and thinking how great it was....WHEN???  (NOW)!!

So HUG that person or group of persons, TELL someone you love that you truly love them, FINALIZE that trip, MAKE that phone call, SAY those words, ACCOMPLISH that goal, HAVE that dinner party, WRITE those verses, PLAY those chords, EXERCISE your free will, dream of WINNING the lottery, SHOOT that gun, LAUGH at that joke, TOUCH that spot, READ that book, LOVE that forever someone and for God's sake THANK those special people in your lives that make you  feel  like you!!

I have spent my whole life looking toward the future for a better time and only now am I realizing that that time is NOW!!!! I understand now and now I understand!

Love and Peace,

Craig (is it that obvious)

So we went down to the studio this weekend in the city to finish up overdubs for the new album. We had a GREAT time!! It's so funny because we were expecting to take some time getting things just right for the song Universal Fight, but instead everyone nailed their overdubs on first take. This in turn left us with some time to do a couple of other songs and to just hang out a bit. Saturday night was amazing. When we got back to Dan's house we sort of camped out in his back yard for the night. At one point it felt like we were actually camping. We had a fire going and Troy brought some nice fat cigars with him. Then Dan pulled out a 30 year bottle of port he was saving for such an occasion. Not to much just a little to taste as we enjoyed our cigars which we all rarely partake. It was nice. 3 friends on a starry night enjoying each others company, talking, laughing and oh ya we just NAILED one of the greatest songs we have done to this point. All is good in DWH land!!

Love and Peace,

Craig

So… iTunes…

We have been on all of the major internet selling sites for some time now. We consider it a real badge of honor. But you know how on MySpace you get hoards of Indie bands spamming you and telling you buy, buy, buy!!! Almost like little children who try so desperately to get their parents attention, even though they've done the same trick a million times in a row. Ya, we have seen it before so what else you got junior? Well, we are truly trying hard to avoid doing that or being like that. Money is really tight these days for most of us. I mean, look... for the same 99 cents you would be spending on a song, if you're hungry, you could buy yourself one of those sodium filled double cheeseburgers. Hey we've all been there, you know, hungry and counting the change (even the pennies) in our cars and then the "oh crap, I forgot about the tax" moments at the drive thru's. So yes we get it.

What we would like to ask you, though, is this: Do you think it would be possible if you went to a site like iTunes and checked us out? You know, you can preview each song for like 20 seconds and get a good idea if you like it or not. Calm down, we are not demanding you to buy anything but only if you would just check it out and if you have, by some chance, any of our material then it would be swell if you could write a review or whatnot.

Lets get serious here folks. We recognize that unless like a really enormous amount of people jumped onto iTunes and bought our songs, we are not going to really make any profit due to this polite request. Yet as I am typing this I am beginning to ask myself "what really are we, D.W. Holiday, trying to achieve here?"

"Well, to be ROCK GODS!! Standing on the shoulders of the meek and weak, humbling them into submission with our angelic if not overly emotional music!!"

That is, of course, the obvious final answer but really in all honesty only a select few of us humble humans in Rock history have been blessed with that crown (oh that glorious crown.....) Ok, enough of the day dreaming.  I think I speak for everyone in the band when I say, what we really are trying to accomplish here is JUSTIFICATION.

What is justification?? Well, for one thing, it has NOTHING to do with Justin Timberlake. Justification to me is all about making some sort of headway in this music business. It's about being able to stop working at our everyday monkey jobs or at least supplementing ourselves in even the smallest way in order to keep writing and playing in a band. We are all monkeys. We do monkey jobs, we have monkey bosses and we get all the rewards of being a monkey.  BUT hold on now, not too much reward, because heaven forbid we should break free of our cages and start making our own decisions on what or how we would like to spend our days left on this earth. That's why the band means so much to us. If by any chance we were to become more successful then we can get out of these 60 hours a week dead end jobs. Ya we know, even if we were to become rock legends then we would still have to be ordered around by even bigger monkey bosses but hey that's ok if we can wipe our asses with $100 bills and break expensive shit right??

So this is where you come in. Do us a huge favor and check us out risk free. If you do then please write a review we would love to know what you think!!

Peace and Love,

Craig

WOW!! We had a great time on our little tour LOTS of driving, talking and listening to music in between shows. The band really got closer with the experience and we are now even more inspired by the music we listened to (some of it forced onto each other) plus all the bands we played with. I would say that the most awesome thing to come out of the whole experience was the song Universal Fight which is a track off the up and coming album. The song keeps getting better and better as we play it. That has forced us to actually rerecord it. The original version I am sure will be on the B-side as we are probably going to use it as a third single off the album. So far we know that the song Waiting will be the first single, which by the way has been retooled by our producer and sounds amazing, maybe even a dance hit!! LOL D.W. Holiday and dancing!! FUNNY!

So anyways did I tell you we broke down on the Hoover Dam? Ok so thirty minutes outside of Las Vegas and we are pumped to get to our hotel, check in, and maybe hit the hot tub or see the strip. We didn't have to play the show at The Beauty Bar until late so why not hit the city and have some fun!! No No NO we broke down and had to wait for almost 2 hours for a tow truck to tow us to Henderson, which is about 10 minutes outside of Vegas. With the van broke down and NO ONE would give us a ride, we decided to call the booker and cancel the show. The booker whose name is James (awesome guy) REFUSED to let us give up. He picked us up in a Volkswagen Golf. The car was sooo tiny. We somehow squeezed into this car with all our equipment. It was so tight I felt like my leg was going to snap off. It was so tight it hurt to laugh (the car was full of nervous gigling). Well we got through the show and it felt good. So now its back to finishing up the new album. This album is 2 years in the making. Its our Black Celebration/ Dark Side of the Moon album. I cant wait until it comes out!! Till then I am sure we will be blogging our spring and summer activities. Dan and his wife Lori are having a baby in May!! YA we are so excited to have another little one coming into our humble DWH family!! We will keep you posted and hey write us or comment us. This band is beyond just about music and its actually more about friends and family.

Love and Peace,

Craig