just a quick note to let you know about a few shows we have coming up:

friday april 19 – new brookland tavern – columbia sc w/sea wolf mutiny, mechanical river, heyrocco (fb event)

saturday april 20 – earth day at furman university – all day event w/ same people above plus danielle howle & others FREE (fb event)

both should be GREAT opportunities for line dancing and tree hugging.  we’ll probably go on sometime in the late afternoon at the furman thing but really you should just make a day of it.

also we just wanted to do a recap post where we put the links to all the new music we put out last fall, cause there was a lot and you might have missed something.  hey it’s cool!  i’m not criticizing you.  i was supposed to be keynote speaker at tito jackson’s funeral in november and i just completely blanked.  holidays, amirite?  wait what?  tito’s alive?  phew, i feel so much better about myself!

i always thought i’d make you happy (SINGLE):  itunes  amazon  google play

xxx (SINGLE):  itunes  amazon  google play

fight songs (SINGLE):  itunes  amazon  google play

no disassemble rerelease w/b-sides, remixes, covers:  bandcamp

this was (mostly) recorded on a shitty dell pc in boring, suburban west ashley in 2004.  we had no idea what we were doing.  some of it sounds pretty good, some of it doesn’t.  we were just trying to make a record that would sound different than everything else that was going on in charleston at the time.  we had no idea it would take us anywhere;  at the time it felt like hopeless sad-bastard rebellion.  but it was fun to make.  i always tend to love bands’ first records because you can hear the lack of expectations and the willingness to explore and experiment.  once they get established then they’re creating new music that will coexist with old music and the map of their artistic perspective slowly gets filled in.  making the first record, the map is blank.  for all its wince-inducing faults, i love this record because it reminds me of what that felt like.

aside from the full record in its entirety, there are b-sides, remixes, and covers by some dear friends.  thank you so much bill carson, villain lightning, run dan run, foxfur, mr jenkins, and grown-up noise for contributing to this project.  we’ve been really lucky to have crossed paths with such inspiring comrades and to a song i prefer their versions over the originals.

enjoy.

mef

i don’t generally write songs that make any attempt to uplift or inspire anybody. it’s just not in my wheelhouse. which is ironic because i’m a relatively positive person, i just like my music mopey and wistful. like a cardigan accidentally left on the porch during an epic rain. so anyway this song is a bit out of character for us but it was a heartfelt expression of hope and encouragement that i’m too clumsy to articulate in real life and maybe not 100% of our songs need to be fatalistic dirges i guess.  so enjoy the dirge reprieve and if it makes you want to push back against whatever forces are pushing down on you, that’s even better.  if i start collaborating with tony robbins on a self actualization song-cycle that will empower you and triple your income in six months, you have my permission to hit me with something heavy.

buy it!  support unbridled optimism!     amazon     google

also don’t forget we have a show coming up this saturday night in charleston.  here’s the link for tickets just in case you really want to make our day.

thanks friends.

click here to buy tickets.  lots of friends joining in, maybe a few bangin christmas sweaters on display, could be a pantheon-level night of unbridled awesome.

another month, another new release from your favorite underachievers.  this one’s a song called ‘xxx’ that i wrote a few years ago.  we’ve always loved it but it never seemed to fit on any of our records so we just kept holding it for our inevitable country record that never materialized.  long before they were shovels & rope, cary ann hearst and michael trent were just two of our uber-talented friends playing in their own bands and making great art.  one rainy sunday morning they came over to my apartment (now the site of hello telescope) to record this vocal.  if memory serves cary ann had had a long night and was a little hoarse and dare-i-say-it hungover.  but she sang one of the most heartbreaking, intimate vocal takes i think i’ve ever heard.  michael jumped in on the ‘ooooh’s at the end too.  it was a cool moment and a reminder of how awesome it is to live in charleston with so many talented and inspiring people.  anyway cut to 2012, we basically gutted the whole song except for those ooohs and cary ann’s vocal and started over.  if you like it i’m going to write a series of songs with similarly controversial titles.  potential candidates:  ’full frontal’, ‘soft-core’, and, of course, ‘logjammin’ (featuring former autobahn singer karl hungus).

thanks for listening–

mef

buy the single!  support us dammit!  itunes amazon google

1– we’re releasing some singles this fall– one a month starting TODAY (september 18)!

2– in december we’re rereleasing our debut record ‘no disassemble’ with added covers, remixes, and b-sides

3– we’re playing a special show december 1 at the circular church in charleston sc.

4– lieutenant kendrick ordered the code red because colonel nathan jessup ordered him to do so.

so what the hell have we been doing?  lots of stuff.  random projects– kaler employing his studio wizardry for a variety of folks while i’ve been combining my two great loves– music and videogames– in scoring some games and animated shorts.  the other main thing i’ve been working on is raising a fresh little baby.  babies twist your emotions in knots cause they practically dare you to throw them out the window with their audacious selfishness and inability to care for themselves while simultaneously being so ridiculously cute you can’t help but keep feeding them and lovingly parading them around.  but they take up a lot of time and attention which is different but also nice  (one can only spin in the whirlpool of self absorption for so long).  unfortunately one not so nice thing is my kid was born with cranial issues that necessitate a surgery in october.  she’ll eventually be fine (we’re told), but between that and the birth in late may touring has been impossible, despite us desperately missing all of you and your wonderful cities and countries.  it’ll probably be 2013 before any more of that happens.  such is life.

luckily there’s more to being us than recklessly careening around the world in a magical van.  we have new music coming out!  the next proper slow runner album is still a ways off, but we’ve gone through the archives and chosen a few songs that for one reason or another didn’t make it onto our records.  i hesitate to call them b-sides cause that makes them sound like bench-warmers; they’re more like oddities.  victims of circumstance.  you’ll see.  they don’t fit on a sr record or even a collection of their own.  so we’re recording them fresh and releasing them as singles, one per month this fall.  the first comes out september 18 and is called ‘i always thought i would make you happy’ and it’s available on all the usual sites where you can pay money and listen to music.  that’ll be followed by another in october and another in november.  we might do more of them next year depending on the reaction.

album art for the new single by the ever-brilliant oliveargyle.

our debut record ‘no disassemble’ is unavailable in most markets and i’m guessing half of our fans don’t even know about it (thanks, sonybmg corporation!).  well f that s.  we’re rereleasing it this december with the full album and a second collection of remixes and covers by some dear and talented friends of ours.  if you’ve never heard it, this was our first attempt at making a record ourselves so calling it lo-fi is being charitable to the sound quality in some places.  we had no idea what we were doing.  but the sr songs and aesthetics that you’ve come to love/hate are all in there.  it’s always felt weird to have it unavailable and we’re excited to rectify that.  in some ways it’s still my favorite thing we’ve ever done.

finally, to cap off the year we’ll be playing a special show in the circular church in downtown charleston on saturday december 1.  more details on that coming soon but just fyi i’m looking into the logistics of wearing a cupcake bra that shoots out sparkles– it’s going to be a special night.  please come.

and that wraps up this update.  don’t you appreciate how we wait to tell you a bunch of things at once instead of flooding you with separate announcements for each specific thing?  we’re thoughtful.  it’s just who we are.  now if you’ll excuse me, i need to go make a 3-month-old crack up by singing to her in my david-sedaris-channeling-billie-holliday voice.  if i fail to amuse her she’ll yell at me.  this is my sweet, dangerous, boring, fascinating life.

thanks for listening.  –mef and jk

We’re two weeks into the euro tour and it’s going pretty well. Sleeping on a bus isn’t too cool. Otherwise no complaints. Through luck or merit, we are adding 4 shows to the tour. I was wondering if we could add them to the tour dates and do a little news item letting folks know dates have been added. They are:

December 5: Dusseldorf, Germany
December 8: Paris, France
December 15: Erlangen, Germany
December 21: Berlin, Germany

There you have it. European Slow Runner fans, buy your tickets now. And check out the complete list of upcoming tour dates over here on the official tour page. Tell all your friends!

Official video for ‘Strange Days’ from Slow Runner’s ‘Damage Points’ album. Directed by Chris March.