Shows like this past Thursday at Rancho Relaxo are why we play live music. All the bands sounded great, the crowd seemed to enjoy themselves as much as we did, we didn’t have any technical difficulties AND the sound was amazing. We should probably retire now.

Something clicked earlier in the evening when we decided to start the set with “Tortoise”. We usually ease in to that one, so it definitely signaled a “show them that 2 people can rock pretty damn hard” approach to the set that was a lot of fun. We also brought out the ukulele again for a few songs, which seemed to go over well (especially during “Laura’s Song”).

The whole shebang was put together by the good folks at The Indie Machine, so we definitely recommend checking them out for future shows.

If you’re looking for a less biased recap of the show with some great pictures (not unlike the one above by our pal R.Mirsky) check out the writeup at Buyingshotsforbands.com. If nothing else that review reveals the scary fact that some people are actually listening to the nonsense that Paul says between songs. Scary indeed.

Check out this awesome “moving still image” of Lake of Bays, Ontario by our friend and local artist, Joey Bruni.

We’re pretty flattered that he chose our song “The Way It Goes” as the soundtrack to this serene and wondrous landscape.

She’s a real beaut and I don’t actually have a standalone tremolo these days, so she’ll fill that niche very nicely. Check out the demo below if you want to hear me ramble…

• When: Jan. 7, 2012
• Where: Broadview Espresso, Toronto ON
• Who with: Anna Atkinson

Set List:
• Dusty Bones
• She Said
• People w/Anna Atkinson
• Young Enough (Ukulele)*
• Till the End of the Day (Kinks cover)
• Southern Ontario (Ukulele)*
• Alligator Song
• Raise Your Dead (Ukulele)*
• Laura’s Song (Ukulele)*
• *First time

This recap has been a long time coming. I held off a bit to get our favourite albums of 2011 and gallery of pedals I built last year posted first before we were too deep into 2012!

When this poster went up around our neighbourhood people thought Laura was leaving the band*. I suppose we should have clarified that it was her farewell to Broadview Espresso (we live across the street though, so take “farewell” very loosely…). Suffice to say she sold her soul to Dog Is Blue a looooong time ago…

Speaking of posters, I always try to save the ones we tape to the counter at the coffee shop, as after a few weeks they look wonderfully grizzled and abused by all the drips and spills. Sadly, I’ve only actually been able to rescue one of them, but a vigilant friend took the photo above before it got tossed.

As for the show itself, what more can you say about Anna Atkinson than she’s awesome? This time around she had accompaniment in the form of stand-up bass and vocals, which only made the experience more ethereal and charming in the intimate setting.

We kept the atmosphere light by debuting 4 songs newly arranged for the concert ukulele (we’re working on recording these for fun, so stay tuned). Speaking of which, Laura completely one-upped me by running the uke through one of my fuzz pedals during “Laura’s Song” —I can jealously admit that the sonic destruction was magnificent!

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Dog Is Blue show if the audio/video equipment didn’t malfunction. We were set to record the whole shebang through multiple mics, but somehow only ended up with Anna’s set. The nerdy A/V gods are still mad at us apparently. We’ll sacrifice a VCR for them before the next show.

I know it’s getting a bit late to do 2011 year end lists, but it was another great year for music, so I wanted to quickly make a note of the albums we enjoyed most.

Here they are in no particular order (except that Sandro Perri really was #1 …so good):

Check them all out if you get the chance and support the bands making such amazing music! We’ve got lots on the go for 2012, so expect some new tunes from us as the year chugs along.

I’ve started gigging with this bad boy and it works very well with my BYOC 250 (the first pedal I built) to create some great lead sounds.

Not only that, but our song is in amazingly zany company, as our good friends The Burning Hell have combined “Summer of ’69″ with “Deck the Halls” and Nick Zubeck’s blend of “Sunglasses At Night” and “Silent Night” is amazing.

In case it’s not obvious, the mandate for this year’s charity collection (Zunior does a holiday compilation every year to benefit the Daily Bread Food Bank) was to take a revered Canadian song and overlay the lyrics of a Christmas classic. Our interpretation of those two things was a bit more loose than some, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the most fun we’ve had in the studio in a long time. On paper it’s definitely the weirdest thing we’ve ever recorded, but I’d like to think we added our own strange holiday flare to the whole thing.

Check out the compilation at Zunior.com for only $8.88 and get some crazy original music for the holidays along with the warm & fuzzies of supporting a great charity.

Years from now it won’t matter what songs we played at the 100 Days of Batman show last weekend, or even how hampered we were by technical difficulties for the first half of the set (check your cables, kids), because the above photo* will still exist in the ether of the internet as proof that we actually performed in full Batman & Robin costumes.

In fact, there was apparently some higher power at work (the spirit of Batman, maybe?) making sure that there was no further evidence, as BOTH video cameras we brought mysteriously didn’t capture a single shot and our audio recorder was never even turned on.

All told it was a fun, if sloppy, change of pace and we figured out the technical difficulties just in time to crank up the distortion for a rendition of The Kinks’ “Till the End of the Day” (using the latest of my Saturn electric guitars live for the first time…and promptly breaking a guitar cable at the end). Pulling out some Batman related tunes was also a hoot (we’ll probably record the three new songs listed to the left for a fun EP).

Henry Adam Svec and WL Altman put on a great opening set, as expected. I can never get enough of the subtle humour and great songwriting in Henry’s projects.