more adventures, and a new release!

Our car is packed tight.

Ahhh, palm.

Alps at the Order. Awesome venue.

Aleks and the Ramps.

Strong Animal. Castanets set list is written by a fan. Good choices.

We have new release- a split 7" with Castanets. Our song is 'The Sky and the Dirt', Castanets is 'Fight (demo)'. Our song is the first released song from the Paper Birdz sessions. The artwork is below.

The tour begins

On Thursday, we set out on tour in a rental car. People drive on the left down here, and the drivers sit on the right. Mandy and I both got confused while driving at different points and ended up on the wrong side of the road. It's best to leave the driving to the Australians. Mostly.

Our first show was at the Front Gallery in Canberra. It was pretty laid-back. A good first show of tour.

We played a free show at the Exeter in Adelaide. A rowdy bunch.

Alps in Adelaide.

Pony in Melbourne. Very late show. The other bands were good. Flying Scribble is a rad drums and farfisa duo. Sly Hats is rad twee.

Castanets, new pony.

And then there was music . . . .

Chris, our tour manager and promoter, has been playing keys, accordion, and singing in Tiger Saw for the tour. He's also playing his owns sets as Alps of New South Wales.

Tiger Saw and Alps played the 2 am free show at Pony in Melbourne, which turned into a rowdy drunkfest pretty quickly.

Gray, from Flying Scribble, sat in with Ray for a couple of songs. She also lent me her cymbals for both shows in Melbourne since my touring cymbals are crap. Those ladies are rad!

A lamington at a bakery in Bordertown.

Local ginger beer and a lamington at a petrol station.

Castanets in the vines

These are our lovely hosts in Adelaide.

Cute.

At the Exeter Hotel in Adelaide.

We had a 13 hour drive from Canberra to Adelaide.

Castanets had some groupies at our first show in Canberra at the Front Gallery.

Crystal-Fair and her brother, Wolf, came to our show in Canberra. It was so nice to see friendly faces in the audience for our first gig.

Shoab opened for us and let us stay at his place after the show. He and his wife, Kate, were amazingly generous and fed us delicious breakfast at midnight.

Animals

On Tuesday; Mandy, Wolfgang, Jenny, and I took a bus to Newcastle’s Blackbutt Reserve, where we saw a skink, koalas, kangaroos, peacocks, emus, and lots of other birds. It’s a really nice walk, and it was great to be able to get so close to the animals. We took lots of pictures, and caught a train back to Wickham to practice a bit.

This peacock was chasing two other peacocks around. Very aggressive.

Koalas are cute.

Cool dude.

This guy is in a fenced-in area, but there are flocks of cockatoos all over Australia. You see them flying around while you are driving.

Are these vultures? These guys were not fenced-in, and kind of scary.

These kangaroos were in the nature reserve, but when driving across Australia, you see kangaroos all the time. I love these guys.

Australia is a dangerous place.

Wednesday, we went to Newcastle Beach, where we got lots of sun and went in a salt water pool. The ocean’s waves were huge, and there was a fleet of giant tankers on the horizon, apparently taking coal all the way to China. I sunburned my feet.

Next: Tour starts!

(not really) LOST

The flight from Los Angeles to Auckland, NZ was over twelve hours long. The plane was enormous, and I equipped myself with earplugs, an eye mask, and a neck pillow purchased at the Hollywood K-Mart. We took off after midnight, and were served dinner two hours later. I tried to watch various movies on the six-inch screen pasted on the back of the seat a foot from my face. I vaguely remember liking Julie & Julia more than the book, and 500 Days of Summer just made me more tired than I already was. Being crammed in the 747 for so long made me feel dried-out, sore, cranky, tired, stir-crazy, scared, sweaty, and bored. I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t really hear the films’ dialogue in the cheap Qantas Air headphones. Nothing left to do but sit there contemplating the possibility of us ending up on an island in the South Pacific lost in time and space…
Eventually, we landed, and the only time-shift was that we left on a Friday and arrived on a Sunday. Saturday never happened. Oh well. Beats a polar bear attack.
We spent most of Sunday in the Auckland airport, winding through various security checkpoints, only to pass through and find another line, x-ray machine, and pat-down waiting on the other side. Auckland adds drug-sniffing dogs and chemical-trace swab tests of my bags to the mix. They also seem suspicious of how little baggage I am carrying, even though I kept it at a minimum due to the limitations on their cheap-ass budget Jetstar flight.
Chris and Ray meet us at the Sydney airport, and we had some Indian food before getting on a train to Newcastle. I read about the Dirty Projectors in Uncut magazine, and dozed in and out of sleep for the three-hour ride to Chris’.
Chris lives with his wife Jenny and son Wolfgang in little house in an industrial section of a suburb called Wickham. Wolfgang is seven months old and likes to gnaw on our sandals (or thongs, as they say here.)
On Monday, we walked downtown, and went to the market, where I discovered non-refrigerated milk that costs half of what the refrigerated kind costs. We ran through some Tiger Saw songs, and quizzed Chris on the Australian (“Strain”) slang in the appendix of my Australia Insight guide book. (“neck oil” = “beer”, for instance.)

We fell through the clouds to Oz

We experienced time travel for the first time, losing Saturday completely during our 12 hour trans-Pacific flight. After some rigamarole with bags, changing gates, and delays, we finally boarded our Jet Star flight from Auckland to Sydney. It was a pretty uncomfortable flight, but the sky below was a hilly cumulus cloudscape. As we descended into Sydney, we couldn’t see anything as we dropped through these beasts of vaporous mass, and then, suddenly, we broke through, and the Sydney Opera House was just outside my window. There were spotlights of sun breaking through the thick cloud layers, like mother nature saying, “hey, check this out.”

When we got to Sydney, we met Ray and Chris at the airport exit, grabbed some quick Indian food for dinner and headed to the train station via taxi. I watched Chris get into the front seat on the left side and my tired brain was confused momentarily. The 3 hour train ride from Sydney to Wickham seemed endless, but Jenny warmly welcomed us, and we set up beds and got to sleep around midnight.

We spent our first morning in Wickham (a suburb of Newcastle) at Chris and Jenny’s place, eating vegan mango pancakes with jam and drinking delicious espresso, while Dylan quizzed Chris on all of the slang terms in the back glossa

ry of our Australian tour book. Chris, not surprisingly, being native to this land, got all but the most obscure of the terms spot on. We spent the rest of the time playing with their “tin lid,” Wolfie. Ray, Wolfie, and Chris slept in while Jenny, Dylan, and I walked to the market to get some supplies for the next few days before the tour begins. We had a pretty lazy day, hanging with the kiddo, eating, and eventually got to practicing in the afternoon.

Here’s some Aussie slang we learned today:

fair dinkum - the real thing, true blue

crack on - make a pass at, hit on

cark it - die, turn into a carcass

More from L.A.

Bree and Ella entertained us all day on our layover in L.A.

Though Ella looks skeptical, this crepe filled with chestnut spread was amazing!

While inspecting closely to figure out how this tree could look so perfect (it was real, but spray painted green, and the bows were drilled into the trunk to create the look of perfection) we discovered a cool shot.

Ella really liked this little guy.

California

We left the chill and the snow behind. 

The Harry Potter movie we were expecting never showed.

The flight was uncomfortable and seemed long, but tomorrow's flight will be twice as long...

The view from Sean and Bree's guest room. 

We went to the Grove in L.A. and visited Santa.

Mandy, Bree, and Ella at the Farmer's Market.