Greetings from the magical land known to most as Dayton, Ohio!
I'm home here for a couple more weeks getting caught up on real life and working on a lot of new music. I can't believe we are already almost through May of this year already. It's flown by!
I just finished up the Stripped Down to the Bone acoustic tour with Hawthorne Heights. This was our second year doing the tour, and once again was a lot of fun to play the songs in these sort of re-imagined arrangements.
As a player, the tour is a lot more challenging for me and really rewarding. I don't get to perform acoustic as much as I would like. I really enjoyed playing outside of my normal comfort zone at these shows and pushing myself to be a better player.
I bought a lot of great records while out this time. Shopping for vinyl has become one of my favorite things to do while on the road. This tour overlapped with Record Store Day, but I was very happy that scheduling worked out with us crossing though Cincinnati that day. Matt and I got to stop in at one of my favorite shops, Shake It Records, and pick up a few of the limited releases that came out.
Continuing the acoustic theme while home, I'm playing a live The Story Changes acoustic webstream on Wednesday, May 30, at 8 p.m. I plan on playing a good mix of songs from all of our releases as well as a surprise or two. It's a "pay as little as you want" donation to view and all of the profit goes toward recording a new album later this year.
For more info, go to the event page here or visit the stream page directly right here.
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We've played a few extremely fun The Story Changes shows over the last month and debuted a couple of new songs live. We are just about finished with demoing the new album. I'm really excited to release these new songs later this year. These riffs are so fun to play! As much fun as I have getting to travel and tour, it feels really good to dive in to these new songs and be creative.
Looking ahead, I leave on June 1 for the Summer of Hope tour with Hawthorne Heights that has us hitting everywhere in the U.S. for six weeks of shows. Immediately following that, we leave for my first ever trip to Japan for a few shows and a couple of days of site seeing. I'm beyond excited and will be sure to check back in here with a lot of pics!
Also! if you didn't catch it, check out a video lesson I did with Guitar World showing you how to play the song "Night's Collide" off our This is Your Moment EP right here.
See you on the road,
Mark
