Whoa whoa whoa....five seconds ago while I was selecting "Music" from the little blog category selector box thingy, I noticed a previously unforeseen category, a little something called "Goals, Plans, Hopes". What kind of happy horseshit category is that? Goals.....Plans.........Hopes? How about "Fairy Dust, Moonbeams, Unicorns" while we're at it? Let me tell you something. If you're online posting a blog under the "Goals, Plans, Hopes" category, it better go something like: "My goal is to not be hungry in the near future, I plan on getting a burrito, I hope my check card doesn't get declined", because if it's anything much more serious than that you're walking at a pretty fast clip down loser lane. For real. I wanna throw my computer across the room right now that's how worked up I'm getting thinking of how preposterous that category is. The type of people I imagine picking that category write things like "My dream is to save the whales....to ride one one day......that's what I would really like...to pet a dolphin and then give happiness and love to everyone and hugs and..."  FUCK YOU. They also probably have little smiley faces and colored text and sound effects somehow in there too. There should be a blog category called "ASSHOLES" and those people should be limited to that category. If you are spending time writing about your hopes and plans and goals and dreams and candyland gobbly goop bullshit on myspace you should probably be re-evaluating the "plan" section of that equation.

Now that that's out of my system, check this....iiiiiiiif you are a girl or a particular tiny dude, you're in luck because we have girls/youth medium shirts leftover from the 82588 design we ran off a few months ago. There's only about 20 of 'em, so go to the front page and check one out if that's your size and you want to be adorned in the fabric of gods. By the way, the fabric of gods looks a little something like this:



Lets see....as far as other limited shirts are concerned, the Sick On Sunday design is coming up next(we only have Sick On Sunday, Mouth Of Ghosts, Lurch, Nong Eye Gong, and When Acting As A Wave left in the series), we'll get it out in a week or so, we're just tweaking some design specifics. For any questions about merch, like where's your order, how long it'll take, blah blah blah, go to our messageboard here and click on the thread that's called "The Official Dillinger Merch Thread". Every question is answered, every concern eased, etc. We're doing this whole operation as DIY as possible to eliminate the impersonality of having to get this super cool shit from some mall bullshit or online store that also sells super lame shit like "I'm not a freak I'm just different than you" shirts or glow in the dark spiked collars or whatever the flying fuck. So yeah, order with confidence, and if you have questions about your order go to the thread and fire away. A primer to save you the trip: 82588 shirts have all been mailed, so if you don't have them you'll get them soon(I'm talking about you overseas people), and Party Smasher and Dead As History shirts are being pressed as we speak and will be going out promptly.

So CHECK THIS SHIT OUT. Ben, figuring that humans shouldn't be the only species representing the rock and fucking roll, has come up with the ingenious idea to make metal/punk/rock shirts influenced by bands and records....for dogs. This is like something that people that are high come up with that rules but that never really happens. "Dude, imagine if your dog walked into the room right now with a Master Of Puppets shirt on, except instead of Master Of Puppets, it said Master Of Puppies...". Except Ben isn't high, and he actually made them. Ben Weinman is like the hardcore Einstein. He never comes out and just holes up inside, except instead of being surrounded by test tubes and rulers and algebra and what not he's surrounded by obnoxious riffs and time signatures and usually ice cream sundaes and now shirts for dogs. Trust me when I say that nothing makes you smile or laugh every fucking time no matter how shitty your day is than seeing your dog walk into the room with a shirt on that says Black Shag or Master Of Puppies or Black Labbath or Def Sheppard. It's called Garmutt, go over to the site he made for it and check it out if you have a dog and want that mother father to represent the power of the riff. For some reason now after seeing his dog shirts, whenever I hear Alice In Chains' "Them Bones" I think about how much I really wish Alice In Chains would have made dog biscuits called "Them Bones", I would have been so stoked to give them to my now dead beagle when I was in my grungey adolescence.


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Add Garmutt or the terrorist win!

Barack? Yeah? Good job man. Moving acceptance speech. Did you see Oprah hanging on that poor dude's arm in the front row like it was a giant cheeseburger someone was trying to take away from her? I hope that guy writes a horror bestseller about how petrified he was by the fear that Oprah was gonna eat his arm right the fuck off during those few hours. But yeah.....Obama.....regardless of party or whatever....way to kick major ass. Everyone's proud. You are the walking personification of the American dream. Now don't fuck up or most of us are gonna feel like total idiots. Oh by the way, when we went all political on everyone for a minute with the whole Rock The Vote thing, we could go on their site and track how many people were registering from our link, and it was a fucking lot of you. So yeah! Be proud whether your guy won or lost. Now onto a more pressing matter....something that has been the topic of discussion over the last week or so among some of us.....the Axl Rose solo record I mean GNR record I mean whatever.

Can we talk about that record for a minute? No? Tough shit. I like it. There, I said it. I didn't like it at first but hear me out. It's not as good as Appetite, but as a whole I think it's better than Use Your Illusion...although the best songs on Chinese Democracy aren't as good as the best songs on Illusions. It's still, as far as mainstream rock releases go, about as good as you can ask for nowadays. It smokes Velvet Revolver and Godsmack and Hinder and whatever eles people have been into in the mainstream rock world lately, and unless Freddie Mercury rises from the grave or Chris Cornell shows up at Kim Thayil's house I'm not holding out hope for much better. That's not saying a whole lot I guess, but seriously some of the arrangements and songs and solos and vocals and whatever else are pretty good. Some of it sucks though. Figure that stuff out Axl. Maybe you can figure it out by calling 1-800-GETSLASHANDDUFFANDIZZYANDSTEVENFUCKINGADLERBACKANDWRITEAREALGUNSRECORDBEFOREONEOFYOUDIESANDITSTOOLATE.

I know with all my 80's Metallica pole smoking you wanna know what I think about their new thing too. Again, not as good as the old records, but better than the last 15 years from them and there's some pretty nostalgic riffs lurking about on there. Some of the riffs are total Justice era riffs. A friend of mine told me that they went back and pulled all the Justice session notes, called Flemming Rasmussen, and got every piece of gear and tone settings and everything from the Justice record and basically tried as hard as they could to recreate that sound/feel. Admirable. Our old tour manager is tour managing that band "The Sword", who happens to be on tour with Metallica, so if you're at The Forum on the 17th I'll be the guy on the side of the stage playing nonstop air guitar. Shit Yeah indeed.

Back to DEP related news and notes to keep you as close to the inner circle as possible. We're writing, we've loosely set aside June and July 2009 for recording with Steve Evetts, and we're looking forward to/getting ready to absolutely rip in the new year. We've got Australia booked for late Feb/early March, and we'll more than likely be doing some stateside stuff as well around that time, maybe some US shows before we go down under, we'll see.

The self titled Spylacopa EP with myself, John LaMacchia from Candiria, as well as Julie Christmas from Made Out Of Babies/Battle Of Mice and Jeff Caxide from Isis, is out now. Go over to the Spylacopa myspace page(www.myspace.com/spylacopa) to check it out and find out how to pick it up without STEALING IT ONLINE SOMEWHERE. Which brings me to the next issue.

You do realize that when you do that, steal music from bands like us, you basically take a big fat unlubed extra ribbed strap on and fuck us all in the ass with it don't you? I used to be way into the whole free downloading thing, because at first it was like yeah awesome free shit we've been paying too much for too long fuck the man blah blah! But now cd prices are reasonable and if it boils down to you not wanting a physical thing because you're only gonna listen on your computer or ipod anyway, at least go over to Itunes and pick the stuff up if you want to own it, it's a dollar per song over there for christ's sake. Intellectual property is still property you know? Think of it like this, if you had a restaurant(you can tell I'm hungry...all this talk of burritos, food, etc), and you sold food that was awesome and that you made yourself and spent shit tons of time on, and people were just pouring in and looting your place and taking everything out of it for free, just stealing everything, would you keep making it? Would it somehow be your fault? What's the solution...to make better food? To somehow give people an incentive to pay for it? Fuck that. You would kill them, or at least beat them, or at the very least criminally charge them. Imagine if you came to our show and came up to our merch table and tried to run off with a cd or shirt. I or our merch guy would run you down and brain you. But nobody would ever do that. People only steal music because it's not a physical thing. It's becoming a tragedy thats making it very hard to be an adult making real music in this day and age, and honestly I'd like to think that if I met each and every one of you in person and shook your hand and talked to you, you would know that I wouldn't steal something from you, and I would like to think that you wouldn't steal from me. I don't give a shit about Britney Spears' new single or Miley Cyrus' new album, because I'm sure they view their fans like a target audience, they are products of their record companies just like the products they are trying to sell, nothing more than a marketing face for a single that's as memorable as it is long. They would never hang with the commoners so to speak, and kick it with their fans, at least not without secretly having to swallow their own vomit from having to waste their time talking with them. We keep it as real as it fucking gets in everything that we do, and try to break down every possible wall in between us and you without all living on Awesome Island together. I see the counts from torrent sites and shit, and it's depressing, and I hope hope hope to god that it's the people on the fringe stealing the music we make, whether its Dillinger or other projects, and that its not the people that write to us on here, and talk to us after shows, people who I've looked in the eye from the stage and shared a moment of mutual respect with, or given a hug after the show, or sang along with in a sweaty hell hole somewhere. I know for a fact that if you saw me stealing from you you would be pretty fucking disappointed. Do your part and don't be that guy, unless you can honestly say that you would walk into my place with no remorse and steal shit from me and wouldn't care if I did the same. If you can say that then fuck it go ahead and download it. Just know that when you take that shit online, especially from bands that are our size who are trying to do something genuine, you aren't sticking it to "the man" anymore. It went beyond that a long time ago. The whole industry is collapsing from the inside out, this shit is like a cancer that is rotting it out from the core, and it is gonna start having huge repercussions on the quality and lifespan of bands. It only contributes to the empty attention deficit culture that we work so hard to fight, to the music culture of here today/gone tomorrow bullshit music. The record companies see that there is no value in investing in bands like us when compared to bands or singers they can manipulate as products/images to get their singles and advertising placements out of, and the people downloading for free generally give way less time to the music they download before they move on to something else, because they didn't make any investment in it. So what does that lead to? People are conditioning themselves to only have the mental capacity to enjoy simple sugary bullshit that wears off after a couple of listens, and they're conditioning the industry to give that to them. Do you think that it's a coincidence that the quality of mainstream music has fell off of a cliff compared to any other time in history? Remember when there were bands that were big that were actually genuinely awesome? A lot of them? Bands and artists that in the retrospect of music history are both massively popular and massively "good"? There's a direct corrolation between downloading and the lack of quality in the larger musical landscape. People in our scene are afraid to say this shit because they think that some kid is gonna say that they aren't "punk rock" anymore. That whole "stealing is punk rock" thing is a huge crock of shit that people hide behind to try to wash their hands and absolve themselves of their responsibility for aiding in the eventual destruction of the artists they claim to love. I'm just letting you know the reality of the situation, from someone who still gives a shit about music as an artform not just a commodity, sitting in the middle of this industry watching it happen. I'm giving it to you as real as it gets without being worried about looking punk rock at all, because I've taken guitars to the fucking face and have fake teeth in my mouth to show for it and i've held broken bones together with duct tape until they healed because of not having medical insurance and I've lived in places that made the fight club house look like a Beverly Hills mansion, in total poverty for a large part of my adult life, all to do my part to keep The Dillinger Escape Plan and music that we believe in rolling because we have true belief in what we are doing, so I don't give two shits about whether someone thinks I'm not punk rock because I don't want my shit stolen. Ben, who has more time and releases under his belt than me and whose body in an MRI looks like it was mashed in a trash compactor all because of this lifestyle too, just said something to me that's very true, that when people download our shit for free its like if they walked into a mom and pop store that had one of a kind shit, and there were no employees there and no security, and it was all self checkout lines, and instead of paying they just walked out with everything they wanted. Would those people then complain when the store closed and say it was the man's fault? Probably.


Oh, yeah, just out of curiosity...what's everyone's favorite Dillinger song? Is there a song you wish we would play live that we don't ever seem to? I'm curious...we've got a lot of different shit out now and it's interesting to hear what you have to say about it all. You guys hear a lot of our opinions about everything under the sun but we don't get to hear yours too much....we're trying to make this whole blogging process a bit more interactive, because we actually DO give a shit and feel a kinship with our fans and don't just think of you guys/gals as soundscans or ticket sales like I was saying before, so with that in mind I am envisioning these blogs kinda turning into little mini message boards in the comments, a roundtable so to speak, so if you say something relevant pertaining to our blog posts, check back on here later, we may comment on your comment.

Talk to you all soon....we love you guys, etc....and it takes a lot for us to say that because it makes us feel all sensitiiiiiiive and shit inside.

PS.....I had every intention of putting this blog in "Goals, Plans, Hopes" but just couldn't bring myself to do it.

OH YEAH!!  Jeff Tuttle just texted me and alerted me to the fact that today a year ago was the first show he ever played with us....so today is his Dillinger anniversary so to speak! Happy Anniversary Jeff!!! Remember when we posted his phone number on here as an initiation? God that was rich. HAHAHA WHAT A KNEE SLAPPER. His rookie season is over. Good job Jeff. You're a certifiable ass kicker.