Hello from Close To Home land everyone!

As a lot of you guys know, we have had a lot of ups and downs as a band. We are going to share EVERYTHIGN with you in this blog. As a band that believes in honesty, morals, and faith, we really want to explain EVERYTHING over the course of the past few years with you, as we've gotten thousands of Myspace messages about it this year..

Around 3 and a half years ago we went on our first large national tour. All our hard work we put in as a band was finally starting to show. During that tour everything was going amazing. We were closer than ever as a band, playing in front of amazing fans every night, and being able to travel all over the country. It was an absolute blessing that we were all thankful for.

However... halfway through the tour our bassist Bradley Andress was brought into a hospital for what we thought was a simple cold. It turned out to be an extremely bad type of cancer. We immediatly dropped the tour, went back home, and supported Brad. We supported him all the way to his death almost three years ago.

After Brads death we didn't know where we stood as a band. Close To Home is not just a band to us, It's a way of life, and a passion we all share. We are more than just members to each other... We are family and best friends. We all knew Bradleys family as Bradley knew each and every one of ours. To this day it has been the toughest thing for each and eveyone of us. We still consider and will ALWAYS consider Bradley a part of this band, part of our family, and our friend.

After Bradleys death things slowed down for us. We were not doing much touring or writing much new music. Things were really just on hold as our lives were hectic at the moment. It was around that time a manager from LA called us and told us he thought our music was great. He said that we need to get back on the national level, get back to touring, get back to writing brand new music, and so on. He was saying all the perfect things. We talked as a band and agreed to continue and push as hard as possible. After all, it was what Brad would of wanted.

The manager flew out, stayed with us, built relationships with us, and even made promises to us. Not going to get into details, but he told us of a lot of accomplishments hes had and guaranteed quick results and the only pay he expected was to be treated as a sixth member of our band, which we found completely fair. We got a endorsement from a huge and great company shortly after this, other great endorsements, tour dates, and things were looking bright again.

Since he was the "sixth member" of our band and acting as manager, he controlled our bank account, finances, expenses, touring, myspace page, and so on. All he asked of us was to sit back and write the best music we possibly could and things were going to be in great shape. He said to trust him in the marketing and promotional things he was doing and the results will show. It wasnt one or two months after that our finances ended up getting in bad shape, tour dates were getting canceled, our myspace plays were exploding, our profile views were bigger than Kanye West's, etc. Things got out of control so fast it was overwhelming. He kept telling us this is what all bands go through during the growth of their careers and we'll be in fine shape. He told us if we're going to have the sales and money of a big band, we have to have the stats of a big band! He told us our CD sales numbers on the new CD we released ourselves were HUGE, showed us the amount we made in our bank acount, and that we were taking over as a DIY band. We even turned down quite a few label offers because of all this.

After a few months we were realizing that we werent personally getting ANY money from the account thousands was going into. We asked about this and he explained since our Myspace page was exploding he had so much going on so we had thousands of money coming in, thousands going back out to promote, order CD's, etc. We consistently every few weeks brought this up to him to see where things were and if they were figured out. It was ALWAYS an excuse.

What we did was have a meeting as a band to discuss the mess we were in. We just got over a death of a band member, and we were stuck in a completely lost situation with a manager that had every piece of account, endorsement, sponsorship, or any other type of band info. We had nothing except the KNOWING the guy running the show was ruining our image. Understand we all have our beliefs in this band and honesty, morals, and just basically being a good person is something we really care about. This was such a bad thing to have happen to us, and such a mess. What we ended up doing after that meeting was deciding to start looking into EVERYTHING as a band and keeping a close eye on the manager.

After we looked into everything, we found out the most shady things anyone could imagine. We decided to cut our losses and fire him. We lost thousands and thousands of dollars over this decision, but we feel we did the best thing we can as people. It was the right thing to do and we can live with that. This ex-manager is now in prison by the way. How anyone could take a band that just lost a member tragically and basically use them, lie to them, and do things that could tarnish their reputation is a sad, sad person.

So again we were at a all time low and not knowing what to do. We were so close to just giving up due to the fact everything terrible was just hammered down on us as a band. What we did was talk as a band about the next thing we should do. Again the first priority was honesty, morals, and faith... and to base our decision on that. What we decided was to talk to a manager who works for a large management company now in Washington DC that we all grew up with. He has known us since the beginning of our band (even before he was involved in music at all), and has been some of ours best friend for awhile. We are now managed by him.

We reset our profile views and asked Myspace to reset our play count to 0. Although we have 120,000+ of you myspace friends and the most amazing fans in the world, we are resetting everything so we can gain respect again. Anything you see CTH related will be honest and something we pride on from here on out.

We have some of the biggest things of our career coming up. We have a new CD that is due out in November that we are super pumped on! It is by far the best music we've ever done. We also have some HUGE news we cannot wait to share with you.

Remember this: Friendships can get you through the worst of times & family sticks around FOREVER. We are living proof of that.


- Nick, Josh, JJ, Travis, and Dan.