Considering it's almost a year and a half since the last blog post, trying to tell you everything we've been up to since then would probably be futile.

But biting off more than you can chew is what this blog is all about, or was about back when it was getting posted on more regularly.

"C'mon Ryan, 'regular' is not really the right word in this situation. You wouldn't go to the doctor after not going to the toilet for a year and say, 'I haven't been as regular as I'd hoped', would you?" I can hear you saying.

Okay, I'll give you that, but let's get back to the point. It would be ridiculous to tell you everything we've been up to in the last 18 or so months. But I'm going to give it a shot. We finished the So Many Nights tour, the biggest, most ambitious run we've done around Australia, then rounded off the year kind of early at Easter with our set in the sweaty and at once dusty and muddy Crossroads tent at the Blues and Roots Festival in Byron Bay. I lost my shirt, in the most literal way possible: I haven't seen the shirt I wore at that gig since. Jumps laid waste to our trailer after discovering soy milk on the rider. The house we stayed at was broken into. Twice. The TV was taken right off the wall. After that gig, we took some time off. After seven years of almost non-stop work on the band, we parted ways and spent a few months doing all the things we each thought counted as "normal life". Studying. Reading. Spending time with people we know who we aren't in a band with. Travelling on trams. Getting places without being told to go there by a combination of verbal, email, and SMS reminders by a tour manager. Travelling without a double bass case. Playing a lot more music in other musical situations. It was at one of these situations that we all got in the same room again, some time in August. It's funny, it seemed like it had been years, even though it was only a few months. From then we got (kind of - it didn't involve gigging or touring, the backbone of our "work" usually) back to work on assembling Live On Earth. We'd always wanted to do a live album, and had carried, battled with, and misplaced recording gear all over the world to prepare for it. It all came together in the second half of that year, though it was clear Felix had a lot more patience for listening to the hundreds of hours of recorded shows. After about one hour of rehearsal spread out over a handful of days, we somehow decided we were ready for more gigs. As luck (and brilliant management) would have it, we had a killer slot lined up at Falls Festival later that week. What a coincidence! Our first gig back since Easter was shortly after Christmas, in front of thousands of people. It went by quickly, as those festival gigs (shorter than our indoor gigs) often do. Our second gig back was New Year's Eve at Falls Festival in Tasmania. The last couple of hours of 2008, I'm sure, I will never forget. Everybody headed out to the site (somewhere around an hour's drive out of Hobart, where we were staying) except for me. Think about how often in your life you are afflicted by something that requires you to stay within running distance of a toilet. Think about how much time we spend on stage. They're bound to overlap. It's a fact of life, and bizarre subset of life known as touring. So I stayed at the hotel for another hour or so, until the movement at the station was over. Hoss, our vigilant and diligent tour manager, left some car keys at reception. He had also given me specific directions: "Go towards the airport, straight across the roundabout, then you'll hit a T-intersection, etc…" He didn't really trail off like that, but for some reason I thought I knew where to go without really paying attention: we'd done it that many times. I wrongly assumed that

a) Tasmania is, more or less, rectangular

b) Hobart is in the middle of the bottom edge

c) the airport is halfway between Hobart and the bottom-right corner

d) the festival site is some way up the right side edge, and therefore

e) driving past the airport and turning left at the T-intersection would take me DIRECTLY TO WHERE I WANTED TO GO.

See? It's just a bunch of right angles. What could go wrong? I headed towards the airport. I went straight ahead at the roundabout. I turned left at the T-intersection. It wasn't until about 25 minutes later that I realised I hadn't seen any really obvious "FALLS FESTIVAL" signs, of which I remembered there were many every other time we'd played this gig. I pulled over. Did Hoss say to turn left or right at the intersection. I tried to call him, but I was in the middle of nowhere in Tasmania, and my phone politely informed me that if I really had to make a phone call, I'd be better off choosing a middle of nowhere slightly closer to somewhere else.

Okay, it's time for intermission. Or "set break" as we used to call them back when we did gigs with multiple sets. How are you all feeling? Still interested? Trust me, this is all leading somewhere. Let's pick up the action again in Tasmania.

To cut a long story slightly shorter: I drove through the gates to the backstage area as the band before us were playing their final song. Another five minutes in the wrong direction and it would have turned into a New Year's Eve to remember for all the wrong reasons. A few more gigs connected December with March, where we toured Australia again to celebrate the release of Live on Earth, our first proper tour back on the scene after our break, and our first tour ever to include our first gig ever in Frankston. That last bit was by chance really. The venue we planned to play was near Frankston, but some time between booking the gig and playing the gig, the venue somehow vanished into thin air. That was also a first, for us. At the end of June we headed off for our first UK/Europe run in 18 months. It began with a very annoying flying experience. We've seen a lot of those, but this was really something else. The story was told in greater detail (albeit in 140-byte-sized chunks) on Twitter, but basically we flew to Sydney, then straight back to Melbourne, then on to London. We we could have just stayed in Melbourne for ten hours to get the same flight. Oh, and most of our luggage got lost between Melbourne and Sydney. Terrifying. But not as terrifying as the crowds that turned up to our shows on that tour. Yikes. Well, we hadn't been there for so long. That explains most of it. After the tour we regrouped again, realised we really enjoyed the tour, and that we need some new songs. With new songs comes the recording of them in the form of a new album. And with the new album generally comes more touring with an increased focus on the songs written for the album for the tour. But we didn't have any songs. So we booked an unprecedented number of rehearsals and got to work. This is one of those rare occasions where "unprecedented" really is the most appropriate word: we are pretty sure we've never done this many rehearsals EVER, let alone in three months. But luckily this extended rehearsal time is punctuated with some gigs. The first of those was for a birthday party. Most people think we don't play weddings or birthdays anymore, and they would be right most of the time, but there are a few exceptions. We're more likely to do a wedding if you live in a country we would like to tour in the near future and are willing to fly us there. I'm serious about that one: our first US tour was only possible under those exact circumstances. And as for birthdays: it really helps if you are a city. Yep, we played a gig for the 150th birthday of Brisbane itself.

We've got a few video cameras now too. Really small ones that are so easy to use even we aren't having too much trouble. But the audio quality is pretty bad as soon as anything loud happens. So we won't be able to use any of the footage of actual playing-of-music. But look on the bright side: the gigs go for less than two hours. That leaves another twenty-two hours of stuff EVERY DAY that we can record and post online. So here is the first of our what-goes-on-on-tour videos, which we'll be doing pretty regularly over the next few months of writing/rehearsing/gigging/throwing cartons of soy milk. Happy Birthday, Brisbane!

Next: three Thursdays and a Friday in October at the Prince Bandroom.