Month: June 2012

Categories
Ass-kicking Gigs Rocking Uncategorized World Domination

GIG: Friday July 27th at Bellefonte Cafe with Todd Chappelle!

You might remember that on a magical evening in April, musical history was made at Extreme Pizza in downtown Wilmington. Todd Chappelle and Hot Breakfast! joined forces and created a musical mushroom cloud of epic face-melting holycrapitude that is still raining its fiery ash upon our fair city.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are hoping to recapture some of that magic on the night of Friday, July 27th. In strict compliance with DNREC’s directive, we are having this concert in Bellefonte, because the city of Wilmington can’t afford any more musical eruptions. We understand, and are happy to do our part.

If you missed the Extreme Pizza show, then you might be curious about this Todd Chappelle character. We’re happy to fill you in. Todd is a singer/songwriter/comedian from Chadds Ford, PA. His songs are very funny– comedy is his main bag. But here’s the thing: So many guitar-playing comics are either great guitar players with crappy jokes, or good comedians who can’t play their dang instrument… either way, tragic. Not Todd. Todd plays the crap out of his axe, has a fabulous voice, and really funny material. Even after a bunch of listens (yep, we’ve got all his CDs!), they’re still hilarious. He also works almost entirely clean, so if you bring your parents to the show you won’t be crawling underneath the table in embarrassment. We can’t say enough great things about Todd– we have a musical crush on him pretty hard-core.

You also might know him as the “I’m From Delaware” guy.

GIG DEETS:

WHEN: Friday, July 27th, 2012, 7-9pm, or until they ask us to stop playing. We’ll be trading off sets loosey-goosey.
WHERE: Bellefonte Cafe: 804 Brandywine Blvd, Wilmington, DE 19809
COVER CHARGE: No cover charge! But you should probably eat or drink something (You’re too skinny! Just look at you wasting away!) because that’s the good thing to do (we recommend the black bean soup and the guacamole). The musicians get paid via tips and merch sales, so we’d naturally appreciate a little somethin’-somethin’ in the ol’ tip jar. If cash is tight though, don’t stay home. Order some coffee and give us a high-five instead.
PARKING: Street only.
FOOD:: They’ve got dinner, snacks, coffee, and adult beverages. We highly recommend the black-bean soup and the guacamole. Service is slow because everything is made to order from scratch by one woman: Donna. So relax, ok?

If you’re a Facebook kind of person, here’s a link to the Facebook event.

We know we’ve got a lot of gigs in July. If you can only come to one, come to this one.

Your pal,

Ji11

Categories
Ass-kicking Gigs Awesome-sauce Rocking Uncategorized

GIG: Thursday July 12, Comedy Night at Mojo Main – 7pm

Mojo 13’s little brother on Main Street in Newark, DE is called Mojo Main, and it’s where the old East End used to be. It has everything you liked about The East End, but nothing you didn’t… and much better food. This pleases me greatly.

They host a Comedy Night there every so often, and after seeing us ROCK at The Kennett Flash, Mr. Matthew Morgan (the host) asked us if we wanted to play a set at their event. We said “Oh, mais oui!” or something similarly METAL.

The night will be a combination of stand-up comedians and musicians trading off sets. We hope we go on late so we appear funnier as the audience gets mo’ drunker.

DEETS:
WHEN: Thursday, July 12 2012. The evening begins at 7pm, though I’m not sure what time we go on. Have a seat!
WHERE: Mojo Main. 270 East Main St, Newark, DE 19711
COVER: $5 if you’re over 21; $10 if you’re under 21.
PARKING: Private lot. Park in it.
FOOD: They have food. I don’t know what kind. I’m sure they have a menu, though.

We are hoping people don’t throw rotten vegetables at us. If they do, we will throw angry badgers at them. SO THERE.

See you there!

Your pal,

Ji11

Categories
Ass-kicking Gigs Awesoming Rocking Uncategorized

GIG: Sunday July 8, 12-12:30pm. A quick set at the newly-resurrected Rockwood Ice Cream Festival

I have a confession to make. I’ve lived in Delaware since 1999 and I have never been to the Rockwood Ice Cream Festival. I had friends and cow-orkers who went absolutely mental for the Ice Cream Festival every year, and every year it rolled around something came up and I didn’t attend.

And then they canceled it.

And my opportunity to take a shuttle bus to a place full of screaming kids and flatulating lactose intolerant adults was gone.

UNTIL NOW.

It’s 2012, and they figure this is the year to have a final creamy hurrah before the world ends. And thanks to the spiffy people at Gable Music Ventures, there will be a bunch of great live bands playing all day on the main stage, as well as emerging artists on the smaller stage too. We are especially excited to share a bill with Angela Sheik and New Sweden. (We’re not just saying that to kiss ass. We really like these people and they’re really wonderful musicians.)

I’m also excited to be stuffing my face full of Paciugo Gelato (and Lactaid pills) because WOOOOT I love that stuff… I got hooked on Paciugo while I was in DC last month.

OK, so here’s the deal. There will be a bunch of bands playing all day, each taking mostly 30-minute sets. We’re told that we’re going to be keeping to a really strict schedule, and since we’re on earlier in the day the chances are much better of them running on time when we’re playing. In other words, don’t be late, yo.

DEETS:
WHEN: We play on Sunday, July 8th from 12 Noon to 12:30pm.
WHERE: Old Fashioned Ice Cream Festival at Rockwood Park.
Details about COVER, PARKING, and FOOD can be found on the event’s website, which is here: The Old Fashioned Ice Cream Festival

If you’re the kind of person who likes Facebook, here’s a link to the Facebook event for the entire Ice Cream Festival itself, and a second link that goes to our show at the festival. Feel free to pass them along to your Facebook pals.

See you there!

Your pal,

Ji11

Categories
Ass-kicking Gigs Rocking Uncategorized World Domination

Gig: Saturday July 7 at 1984, opening for D-not-D!

Last month, we christened the brandy-new stage at 1984 as we opened for a Pat Benatar tribute band. And on July 7th, we’re opening for a band that plays the songs of The Minutemen. The name of this tribute band: D-not-D, which also happens to be the acronym for The Minutemen’s killer double-album Double Nickels on the Dime, which D-not-D will cover in its entirety that night.

HOW FREAKIN’ COOL IS THAT?

We think it’s really cool! Super-cool! WAY COOL!

We are really excited that they asked us to open for them. We hope you’ll come out to see us, but to also check these guys out. They’re nuts. D Not D includes Greg Merk on schpiel (that’s vocals, yo), Keith Crawford on skins (drums…duh), Joe Testa on twang (geeetar), and Pete Ludwig on thud staff (bass!). Matt knows these guys, and has even been in a few bands with Joe Testa before. Ji11 has also shared a stage with Testa a buncha times when we all did our live performances of The Wall. Anyway, Joe plays like a motherfucker, and we’re fans of whatever project he’s working on. So come out and see it.

DEETS:
WHEN: Saturday, July 7 2012. We don’t know what time it’s all goin’ down yet, but I imagine we’ll go on sometime between 8:30 and 9:30 We start at 10pm, and we’ll play for about 30-45 minutes.
WHERE: 1984. 2511 W. 4th St., Wilmington, DE 19805. (between Union & Greenhill)
WHAT: Hot Breakfast! (Delaware’s premier acoustic dork-rock power duo) opening up for D-not-D (a Minutemen tribute band, playing Double Nickels on the Dime in its entirety!)
COVER: Not sure. It was $5 the last time, so it’ll be something like that. Don’t be mad if it’s $7.
PARKING: They have parking in their little lot there, but there aren’t a zillion spots. They also have street parking. Handle it; you’re smart.
FOOD: They only have beer/cider there and candy there; no kitchen. (What more do you need?) However, it’s totally cool (and even encouraged) for you to order Chinese takeout/delivery from the place next door (they’re good) or have a pizza delivered. Go nuts!

If you’re the kind of person who uses Facebook, here’s a link to the Facebook event page: DnotD and Hot Breakfast! at 1984.

See you there!

Your pal,

Ji11

Categories
Recording Uncategorized

What is the haps?

Howdy, Compadres!

Some of you have asked why we haven’t been playing much in June, and then answer is simple: We’re recording! And dammit, we’ve given ourselves a DEADLINE finally, so it’s balls to the wall recordo-fest.

It’s really interesting to see how this record has morphed since we first started recording last October. It was originally gonna be a teeny sampler EP that we would simply give to venues as part of our press kit, and it was going to have a few originals and a few covers and that’s it. But then we figured we should make them a bit longer so we could sell them at shows, so we needed a new approach. So we scrapped about 95% the work we did in October and started up again in February all fresh and new. And now it’s June, and we’ve written and recorded some new songs since then… to the point where we have to think about which songs to leave off the CD. Not a bad problem to have, I suppose…

We’re also considering the different ways to release the CD. Yes, we want to have physical copies with album artwork because lots of people still like to hold a physical CD and read the lyrics, etc.. But other folks don’t care about the physical disc itself and would much rather just download high-quality .ogg, .flac or simple .mp3s of the songs like you’d do on Amazon or iTunes… but those sites take a big chunk of the revenue (which is reasonable, since they’re doing a good amount of work on our behalf). But it might be more profitable to rig up a system where we sell you a download code which you’d enter on a seekrit page on our website to download the album. The code would only be able to be used a few times (ideally), so we wouldn’t have to worry about people giving the code out to 900 of their friends for free… though really, if 900 people had a copy of our album we wouldn’t be upset, really.

Anyway, this is getting long without me saying a whole lot.

The upshot is: We’ve got some great stuff coming your way, and we’re really excited to get our music out to you. We expect to have CDs available by our gig at the Rockwood Ice Cream Festival on July 8th at 12:00-12:30pm. Depending on how that goes, we’ll probably schedule a CD release party at some point. Not sure when, but we’ll keep you posted.

Here’s a very, very, VERY tentative song listing, and these are NOT in order, and we probably won’t include all of these. We shall see. And who knows… we might write and record more tunes between now and July 8th. 🙂

ORIGINALS: You Were a Spider, Hole in Your Pants, Maybe You Saw It Too, Defender, Gravity, It Only Takes Two to Rock
COVERS: Major Tom (Peter Schilling), Kiss Off (Violent Femmes), Crazy (Gnarls Barkley in the style of the Violent Femmes), Crazy Train (Ozzy Osbourne), Rock of Ages (Def Leppard), Dancing in the Dark (Bruce Springsteen) (We are intentionally not recording Total Eclipse of the Heart.)

And then there’s the whole business of figuring out what the heck to title the thing. Maybe we’ll open it up to a vote…

Stay tuned for more updates!

Your pal,

Ji11

Categories
Cool Little Brothers Recording Rocking Uncategorized

Back in the studio…

One of the nicest things about having a home studio is that we can really take our time with a recording since we’re not freaking out about the spendy engineer1. We can take our time, we can record at 3am if we want… whatever.

Of course, one of the bad things about having a home studio is that we are constantly dicking around with mixes, re-recording things, coming up with alternate versions of songs, adding floor-stomps or whatever, so the recording never feels like it’ll ever be finished. We have no deadline since the studio time is essentially free.

The only thing really pushing us to finish the CD is our desire to keep Brian and the rest of our Cool Little Brothers2 happy.

Anyway, this time around, we’ll be recording our new songs Maybe You Saw It Too, It Only Takes Two to Rock, and re-recording Defender. Speaking if Defender, here’s a video of us singing it in Kyle Cassidy’s living room, just after we put our clothes on.

Stay tuned for more updates from the studio. Our Twitter feed is probably the best place to look, because hey, instant gratification. (We’re also on instagram (we’re “hotbreakfast”), but we don’t use it all that much.)

Catch ya soon.

Your pal,

Ji11


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1 The Spendy Engineer is totally gonna be the name of our new restaurant.
2 For those of you new to Hot Breakfast!, “Cool Little Brothers” is the name of our fan club. Not everyone can be a member. There are initiations.