i’ve been busy. i have a gig. it’s at the troubadour on the night of wednesday 15th of september with laneway and surface paradise.
so busy, in fact, that i went to the trouble of creating a separate poster…so regardless of your style, you can’t help but be hooked!
it should be a great night…and between now and then (two weeks away, yay!) i’ll be sure to work my poor little body into the ground, recording in the studio and rehearsing Cowper and Surface Paradise material. Show your love at the facebook page if you plan to come!
after the gig (literally, the next day), i’m heading off to europe for a 4 week holiday/tour. if you want to know where i’ll be and maybe even have me in to play, then you can see my itinerary here.
it’s only 4 weeks, but i’m secretly hoping i fall in love in a small spanish village, never to return
i thought i’d put out a quick little update. in between sessions to record the new album, i’ve also been working on a few other projects, including filming a new music video with Jaymis for Ben Stewart of Angry Birds fame. the video will be released soon, but we had so much fun making the video, that i thought a small teaser would be in order.
it involves over 400 party poppers, 6 cameras, and 200 frames per second. Oh, and it’s COOL.
the more i read robert pirsig, the more i believe in the rationale of ‘quality’. does the colour red look the same through your eyes as it does through mine? how does chocolate taste to you?
as i sit here in bed listening to music, after a night out listening to music, after a day playing music, i hope you too found a great mood and a tune to bob along to today, be it Muse, Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber. i hope for my sake, and the people within earshot of you, that it is more the former than the later…but i guess that’s kind of my point.
as i drove home from the studio just now, i remembered that when i used to watch or read interviews with musicians and they said something like “oh, this album was 2 years in the making”, i used to scoff.
that was before i tried to make my own. unlike the rather talented sister in the family, i’m no musician, which means that this shit is doubly hard…decision to record album: january 2009. first track (nearly) complete: july 2010. eek!
“oh, but the material is so much more refined now, and there is so much on the cutting room floor…” blah blah blah!
however, all this seems to detract nothing from the fact that getting to this point has been a lot of fun.
a successful night in the studio is certainly a great start to the weekend which is going to be great fun because i’m helping jaymis and his Lady move into their new home. this means lugging heavy stuff, but also means a lot of laughs. and now, for a word from our sleep sponsors!
a second home is a place you long for; somewhere you’ve banked a small piece of your heart for safe keeping because you loved it so. once you do this, you cross a line – you have traded eternal contentment for a higher level of happiness, and subsequently a higher level of yearning. for me it was 8 years ago in a cold swedish lakeside town when i cut my heart and gifted fragments; not to places, but to the people of my kind.
now, at last, it is time to return. not to reclaim, but to visit the fragments and their keepers.
i am so excited.
i’ll be in switzerland, italy, germany, spain and anywhere else possible for 4 weeks from the 16th september. if you’d like a visitor, feel free to say hello.
i’d love it if anyone has a little bar or bookstore (better!) that they’d like me to play in…i promise to smile every minute of the way.
(p.s., the picture is a teaser of more to come…an amazing weekend project with the lovely jen dainer and jasmine whelan – so much fun!)
you may think that the video below is a new cowper music video about the painting of my guitar. you’d be wrong.
it’s actually a cleverly disguised CCTV security system designed to work out who’s been stealing all my m’n'ms.
turns out it was me. video doesn’t lie.
the song the video plays out to is called “i,robot”. it’s not entirely finished, but it’s pretty much confirmed as ending up on the album cutting floor. but that doesn’t preclude it from being freely available for download, and also doesn’t stop me from throwing together a video for it. i hope you enjoy.
day 2? bugger me…feels like day four. yesterday was full steam from 8am when i met jay to midnight when i collapsed onto the couch with a beer and a buzzing skull. they’ve actually posted the sessions from yesterday on the web, like this one here with jaymis in it.
it was so much fun.
today i am getting these albums (one is free for goodness sake), because these guys, HUNZ, rocked my world last night…it the most fun i’ve had running cameras for live visuals in over a year.
more unconvention.
more music.
another gig for us tonight at the free after party.
and then on a slightly less musical note…australia vs germany in the football tomorrow morning at 4am. i plan to still be awake.
this weekend, i am playing at the JOYnt on Montague Rd, West End with Tash Parker at 5pm for the Unconvention afterparty. if you have just clicked here for the first time and you have no idea whether you should go, then the video below is a pretty good indicator! if you do come, please say hello before or afterwards…i don’t bite!
after a whirlwind day trip to sydney, i had planned to crawl into bed and succumb to the weight of the qantas complimentary beverages ebbing through my blood stream. that was until i received this email from jaymis about rehearsal tonight:
i’m sitting here writing with a beer to my right and a pile of minties and fantails to my left, in a vain attempt to calm my racing brain after a coffee fueled day of amazing people and events. these past few weeks have been a rollercoaster – new toys, new gigs, new people. fantastic. today just happens to be a particularly fine example:
5am – on the road down to the coast for my first surf in a month after four consecutive weekends spent either interstate, locked up in a studio, or celebrating winter with friends
10am – kingscliff finally delivers a breakfast they can be proud of, supported by some of the best banter seen so far this year.
11am – the obligatory weekly this american life roadtrip back to brisneyland
12:30pm – power nap.
12:50pm – helter skelter shower and pack before heading to the edge for a few hours of reading up, setting up and playing with my newtoys.
4pm – hit it off to the tune of some great laughs with new found creative friends Jen and Jasmine to kick off a fun new creative project for later this month. VERY exciting, and involves a new physical challenge for rowley, which we do like.
6pm – raced home to HQ for a dinner of home made spicy fishu with Jaymis and Rach. These are the only people I know who hand make an amazing dinner, and then wait until after dinner to decide what they want for dessert, and then head back into the kitchen to make that too. (it was affogato, and sticky date pudding…yum)
9pm – head back out in the car to head to a friend’s birthday party for another round of new and interesting people, including some great kids from the creative fold of map magazine, one of my favourite (and few) regular reads.
and that takes me to 12am, where i’m kicking back with the aforementioned beer and fantails (don’t knock it ’til you try it) and trying to finish the poster for next Sunday’s Unconvention Afterparty Spectacular with Tash Parker at the JOYnt, which EVERYONE should come to seeing as though it’s a Long Weekend and all.
the great thing about knowing really talented people is that they are, um, really freaking talented. take my co-creator Jaymis, for example. the guy never played drums before. then he got realy hooked on guitar hero. and i mean REALLY hooked. as in 6 months later, the guy can now play actual drums. take that, anti-guitar hero music snobs! the cowper family, on the other hand, takes no such stance, as you may have seen before.
i can’t wait for the “exhorbitant record contract” add-on for the game.
