Cinema 2: The Cat Empire. Now showing. One night only. No free list. Adults at children's prices. The front few rows have been ripped out, as nobody really wants to sit there anyway, so feel free to treat that as standing room.

Seriously, though: the venue used to be a cinema. Cinemas don't customarily have backstage areas, so our band room was the projection booth. Yes, the one that's right up the back, behind all the rows of seats. Not the ideal place for a band room, unless you're Ozomatli (they usually start their gigs at the back of the room with percussion instruments, and gradually make their way through the crowd to the stage), but it was a great vantage point from which to watch Jon and Roy's set. And there was a whole wall back there covered in Frankenstein switches. Dangerous, but pretty rad.

From the stage, you could see everyone in the crowd, especially the people in their seats up the back. An old show-biz saying tells us that this means they could also see us. I guess that's one of the benefits of playing at an old cinema: the room is designed so everybody can see the stage. This is also the first gig we've ever done where every seat has a cup holder. I didn't see much popcorn out there though.

Next: Thunder Bay.

Okay. This is quite easily the best idea I have ever had on tour. Strap yourself in. In the past, we have had house music CDs: a CD of tracks that we put on before and/or after our set. Jumps has put together a few in the past, and we have gotten to know them well. Almost too well. One of them included a song that was ripped from vinyl, and the guy who recorded it (in Windows, as you will see in a minute) recorded everything his computer was doing audio-wise, rather than just the inputs the record player was plugged into. And so after a dozen or so gigs we all knew when the Windows error "blong!" sound was about to come up in the track. Jumps has been wanting to get some of the other guys to put a new CD together for a while, and on this tour that led to the one-song-each idea.  We would have room for one song each on a CD, assuming that at least one person would pick a fifteen minute song just to be funny. But CD-Rs get scratched, and not all the venues have a CD player at front-of-house. Ricky said on those occasions, he would have to rip our CD onto his computer and put it onto his iPod. That's when I had my idea to cut about five middlemen out of that exercise and just buy the cheapest MP3 player Canadian money can buy.

The runner from the venue drove me to a place called FUTURE SHOP. It's not what you're picturing, if you were picturing the complete opposite of the 1980s café from Back to the Future II. No, it's just a Canadian electronics/etc shop. I found an MP3 player for $19.99. There were a few other better or smaller or cooler-looking ones that cost a bit more, but once you seen one for under $20 it's hard to go back, and it still had 2GB of storage. Not only was there room for each of us to pick at least 100 songs, but if we got really sick of hearing Underneath the Radar (for example) every night, we could just delete it. That would require a whole new CD, back in the olden days. Sure, there's CD-RW, but has anybody ever got one of those to successfully rewrite, let alone actually play in a pre-2000 CD player? It's not worth it. The only downside to our $20 player is that it doesn't recharge: it takes one AAA battery. That seems pretty wasteful, to have to keep throwing out batteries, but the battery life has been pretty good, and we only need to use it for about 60 minutes maximum per night. It also boasted a "color screen", but it's not color in the way you might be expecting. It still only does black text, but you can choose from one of five backlight colours by navigating through a cumbersome menu with the play, stop and skip buttons. But that's okay. All we're going to do is put this thing on shuffle every night.

So we loaded it up for the Saskatoon gig. Everybody put on a track. Except Felix, we're still waiting on his. He's still finding it hard to pick just ONE Billy Idol song. Here's what we came up with:
- The KLF - Stand by the Jams
- The Faces - Stay With Me
- Can - Vitamin C
- Love - My Flash on You
- Shuggie Otis - XL-30
- Black Sabbath - War Pigs
- Easy Star All Stars - Time
I would be VERY impressed if anybody could guess who picked which song. Even if you knew us all really well, you probably wouldn't get it right. Dave (Reyna - monitors engineer for this run) also put Straight Outta Compton on there, and the shuffle gods decided to elect him to be the lucky First Track Played Guy for that night. We just hoped nobody out there was going to be too offended by that. But hey, it's a college gig. I'm sure these kids have heard NWA before. And it went down pretty well. People started cheering when War Pigs started. It's fun for us too: as it's on shuffle, and there's slightly too many songs to be able to hear them all before our set starts, it's up to the shuffle gods to decree whether your song gets played. Kieran wanted to hear his own song more than anybody else, and the shuffle gods did not look kindly on that for some reason, and so we went on stage without hearing Stay With Me. Okay, I'll give away just that one: Kieran picked Stay With Me. But that shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's hung out with him recently. You can't have a five minute conversation with Kieran without him mentioning The Faces.

Next: Winnipeg.

Calgary. According to the locals, it rhymes with "tell harry", rather than "balcony" or "Cadbury". Again, not much to report here other than the gig. At the best of times, I'm pretty bad at getting away from the bus and the venue and doing some exploring. But the cold weather makes it seem even less appetising. We played at McEwan Hall, at the University of Alberta. I pointed out that it was kind of like waking up in a bus in the middle of Monash Clayton -- a joke lost on everyone who isn't from Melbourne. But it was a lot easier to find something to eat than it would be at Monash on a Saturday afternoon. We also found a pub upstairs with a Buck Hunter machine. That's an easy way for two dudes to kill a hundred bucks (geddit?) and four hours.

The initial plan was to leave Whistler at about 3.00pm, poutine in tow, stop at Jasper overnight, then drive the rest of the way to Edmonton the next morning. But the snow had other ideas. With snow covering the road and falling mighty heavily as we drove through the mountains, we were limited to chugging along at 20mph. That's 32km/h for you sane metric folk, though Google insists it's abbreviated to "kph". It makes more sense, but hey, I've lived my whole life with that backslash, it's hard to switch to kph now. So it took us six hours to get to Cache Creek, a journey that (again, according to Google) should take about three hours. We tried to go to a The Keg for dinner, but they had a private function, or the kitchen was closed, or something. Joe stayed there talking to the manager for a long time, and we kept our distance, imagining his conversation:

That first day in LA was pretty relaxing. We got to the hotel some time around 9.00am, and Joe said he didn't need us until 5.00pm. TOMORROW. We could have slept for 29 hours and still had time for lunch and an afternoon nap before soundcheck. Since then, it's been pretty non-stop. In a get-home-really-late-and-get-up-really-early kind of way. Last night was no exception. We got back to the hotel some time around 3.00am, and arranged to meet at 7.00am. A guy called Hendrik was going to drive us to the ferry, and then to the hotel in Vancouver on the other side. With Kieran's lateness tally hanging over our heads, everyone was doublechecking that their alarms were set.

It felt like we had been descending for a long time.

"How was the flight?"

We are very proud to announce the US release of our latest record, So Many Nights, which has just been released in the USA.

The album has already gone platinum in Australia.  We recorded it in Malibu, CA and in Melbourne after our USA tour last fall, and we really think the album marks a high point for the band, both in terms of performance and songwriting.

 

So Many Nights refers to the songs.  They're little vignettes from our travels, stories that got etched out in the back of a tour bus over the years.  We were keen to step beyond our regular party thing and were all ready to make something crafted, more musically solid.  There are still some solid party moments though, so old-school fans won't be disappointed!

Check out the new Empire mediaplayer to preview songs and video clips for "So Many Nights" and "No Longer There".

You can also embed the player in your Facebook or MySpace page to spread the word – click on "Get Your Own" and copy the code. You can also order it through iTunes or on Amazon.com.

 

We'll be following up soon with tour info, ringtones and contests.

 

Thanks for your support!