Allo Luvs! So it is Thursday and we just finished our gig in Leeds with Ballboy and the Manhattan Love Suicides I thought I would take this time to update you all on our adventures so far. So Colin and Dana arrived a week ago and played a Let’s Whisper gig in London. They were celebrating the release of their new EP on Wee Pop Records. They played with Allo Darlin and they had a blast. The next night they headed to Oxford for a solo gig that Colin had. Colin said the gig was fun even though the sound guy kicked over his whiskey.
Holly and I arrived on Saturday. We all met up in Leeds for some practice sessions. Later that night we made dinner and then we went to a local pub for our first tastes of English beer. It is better here. Our first gig was on Monday night in Sheffield. The Pete Green set up the gig. We played with the Parallelograms and the Seven Inches. Both bands were great and super sweet. After the gig we headed back to Leeds and Dana, Holly and I attempted (unsuccessfully) to watch Project Runway on the internet.
On Tuesday we headed to Birmingham (pronounced BUR-ming-GUMM, rather than Birming-HAM.) Our new friend Duncan from the Autumn Store set up a fantastic line up of international music. He and Debbie were super great hosts--they even cooked us pasta and brought it to the club! The Zebras and our label mates Red Pony Clock both shared the stage with us. After the gig a crazy guy told Max and I that Americans were “Doo Doo” then called me “Grandchild”. He was nice I think.
We woke up in Birmingham and headed to Glasgow. We drove through the Lake District which was breathtakingly beautiful. We arrived in Glasgow around four pm. Colin got his first fish and chips of the tour and I had veggie haggis. I am not going to lie to you, the gig that night was pretty amazing. Music Is My Girlfriend set up a fantastic night of music. The Just Joans opened and they are a charming little sextet that make Colin cry. Zoey Van Goey were really really impressive. If you get a chance to see them don’t wear socks, because they will knock them off. Then we crashed in Glasgow. Oh Oh Oh! On the way home we stopped in Appleby and had our first pub lunch. I got the ploughman’s lunch.
So we just played with Ballboy and the Manhattan Love Suicides and the gig was great. It's was Max's friend Neil's birthday and the show felt like a party. We have three more gigs with Ballboy. We are truly lucky.
Here are some pics from the first leg of the tour.
We have a new video for our song Gumdrops! The lovely Eva Sollberger shot and edited our video. Thanks Eva, we love it! Thanks goes out to Esse Luna who plays the librarian and did an amazing job. Goma started as the Maltese Falcon and was a superstar. This video was shot at Lawrence Barnes School and the kids that participated were amazing. Thanks Lawrence Barnes! Tonight The Smittens are celebrating our new album "The Coolest Thing About Love" with a listening party at 7pm sharp at Parima and we will be debuting the new video as well as having a slideshow of Smittens artwork and photos. Live music will follow the listening portion of the evening with Missy Bly, The 500's and The Specific Heats. Come on down to Parmia for a fun night of music!
The Coolest Thing About Love – Our new album comes out at the end of the month!!!!!! Sometimes it feels like all we can think about, and yet there is a lot of other stuff going on for us this month, too! Places to go, people to see and songs to sing! Hopefully we can share some of our summer with you!
Thank you so much to all of you who came out last month for our split 7” release shows with Tullycraft! It was a wonderful double shot for us as we had our dynamic pals the 500s show up from Portland, Maine to play a few songs with us at the Monkey House and then we got to be rocked by Pants Yell in Somerville the following night! We were so glad the East Coast kids came with their dancing shoes!
July seems to be a month that keeps on getting awesomer and awesomer – we have so much going on that it’s hard to know where to begin – how’s about we start with our Battery Park show next week? Well, we are playing on Thursday, July 10th at Battery park – it’s a free show sponsored by Burlington City Arts and local radio station The Point – bring a blanket and a snack and enjoy the lovely outdoors and some fun tunes – we should be playing around 6:30 and after us there’s a band called Need to Breathe that will be kicking it souther rock style! Should be fun!
After that we are having an official listening party for our brand-new album, The Coolest Thing About Love on Sunday, July 13th at Parima Thai restaurant – come for cocktails and wrap your ears around our latest and best album in a comfortable setting with a sweet sound system! Stick around afterwards and we have some friends coming to celebrate with us – Missy Bly, The 500s and The Specific Heats will all be playing to help us celebrate our new album – and it’s David’s birthday-eve that night, too, so it will definitely be a super fun party!
After that, we’re heading off on our craziest summer trip ever – The Smittens are touring the UK! We are so excited to be able to play for the kids in Sheffield, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds (twice), Manchester, Cardiff, Bristol, London and Nottingham – and to be spending a couple days at an amazing festival called Indietracks! (www.indietracks.co.uk). If you want to live vicariously, well, let us recommend the brand new indietracks sampler comp from our new friends at make do and mend records (www.makedoandmendrecords.co.uk) – it just came out on Monday!
While we’re in the UK singing and dancing and running about we will be out of out heads happy to know that our new and long-awaited and third album is finally released! Yes, that’s right! According to the fine folks at our Athens, Georgia label, Happy Happy Birthday to Me (www.hhbtm.com) – The Coolest Thing About Love comes out on July 29th! I guess all the awesome albums come out on Tuesdays, but soon you will be able to pre-order the album direct from the label and you may even get some goodies for showing your support so early!
Things are starting to happen incredibly fast here, so we’ll try to update again soon with more details! Our tour dates are up on our Myspace page as well, and we'll keep them updated with the latest info!
After we get back from Europe, we are going to have an album release show in our hometown (location tbd) and we’re also heading back down to Athens for the HHBTM Popfest 2008 – playing an official Athens release on Saturday, August 16 at the famous 40 Watt club as part of that fantastic fest! We’re also gonna pop in and play a show in Atlanta on Thursday, the 14th – with our pals One Happy Island!
Hope to see many of you very soon! Have a fabulous summer!
Hey Kids! We've been meaning to post for sometime about our interview and photo shoot with amazing new local online magazine Phoebe. The magazine is part of the University of Vermont. We were delighted when Connor Boals the editorial director contacted us to set up an interview. Phoebe magazine covers the life, culture and arts of Burlington, VT. Katherine Robinson did an excellent job with the interview and made it fun and easy. Our photo shoot took place later at Battery Street Jeans where we got dressed in their vintage clothes and pose for photographer Jason Gold. Our lovely stylist was Magdalena Jensen who was fun and comfortable to work with. When the final issue came out online we were so impressed with the slickness and scope of the interviews this first issue was able to capture. Interviews included our friends at Tick, Tick, our favorite sandwich deli Four Corners of the Earth Deli and many more cool people, places and events. David and I stopped by the launch party for Phoebe Magazine at Halverson's Upstreet Cafe where the party took place in their amazing back patio. The party consisted of appetizers, an open bar, live music and deejays. Party goers also got to see the magazine projected on large screens for their viewing pleasure. It was a great party! Check out the party pictures online, that is after you check out our interview on page 28 and 29. Thanks Phoebe Magazine! We love you and look forward to the next issue!
Hey Kids! We have a new title for our new and long-awaited and still forthcoming in the summer third album!
It's going to be called: The Coolest Thing About Love
We are so happy to be listening to the finished master of our album and should be shipping it off to our label soon and then Happy Happy Birthday to Me (www.hhbtm.com) will be announcing our release date sometime after that - most likely sometime in late July! That should give all of you plenty of summer sunshine listening time!
In other Smittens news, we are going crazy with excitement about some of our other big summer touring plans - this year we are going across the ocean to play some European shows!
The first confirmed show is at a fantastic indiepop festival called Indie Tracks (www.indietracks.co.uk) which is a 3-day festival at an old steam train railway station in Ripley, Derbyshire! Bands announced to date are The Wedding Present, The Wave Pictures, Darren Hayman, Comet Gain, Airport Girl, Manhattan Love Suicides, Roadside Poppies, Amida, Ballboy, Dirty Fingernails, The Just Joans, Little Things, The Kabeedies, Kategoes, Lardpony, The Mai 68s, The Middle Ones, Milky Wimpshake, The Occasional Flickers, Pocketbooks, Slow Down Tallahassee, The Smittens, Strawberry Story, The Bobby McGees, Tortoise Shout, Brontosaurus Chorus and Voluntary Butler Scheme. Tickets went on sale on the 1st of this month and weekend tickets are £45 and available now! The Midland Railway, which is set deep in the heart of the Derbyshire countryside, houses a whole range of lovingly restored steam diesels and locomotives. Festival goers are allowed to have unlimited rides on the steam railway over the weekend and full access to other railway attractions. How cool is that?
In addition to this awesome festival, we are also going to be playing a decent handful of other UK gigs and may even try to play in Sweden or Iceland! Wowee! If any of you overseas folks would like to see us play near you, please drop us a line and let us know where you would like to see us play and we'll see what we can do! We have shows in the works in London, Glasgow, Nottingham, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Leeds, in addition to Indie Tracks. We'll update our shows listings as we get some more things confirmed, but for now a lot of our plans are in the early stages.
In other news - our split 7" with Tullycraft has been sent off to the manufacturing plant and should be available in the next month or so! We will let you know when we get our copies - we will have a small number of them available at our shows until we run out!
We have a couple fun shows in Burlington this month - one on Friday, March 14th at Parima Thai Restaurant with one of our favorite bands and friends - Missy Bly! It's free to get in and bound to be a blast and a half! The following week we are playing a Rock for Choice benefit in the Davis Center at UVM on Thursday, 3/20! It will be the first day of spring and what better way to kick off the new season than with us and a handful of other fine bands!
Anyhow, we should have a bunch more good news soon - we are going to do a short tour in mid-to-late April and will be announcing the dates in the next few weeks!
Hope to see some of you soon and some more of you a little bit later than that!
Also, if you live on the west coast or somewhere in the middle of this country, well, we may be coming your way this Fall! Our goal at this point is to rock the UK (and potentially a few other European countries) in late July, pop down to Athens for this Summer's Athens popfest (the 3rd weekdn of August), and then we are going to fulfill our long-ago promise to visit the west coast this Fall after The Coolest Thing About Love comes out!
Super yay, the Smittens xoxo
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ps- if you are in the Boston area, please consider yourselves invited to the Great Scott on Saturday March 15th - Dana and Colin with be playing a Let's Whisper show that evening with our friends One Happy Island, Hand and Knees, and The Piddly Kids, along with a few indie pop DJs in between - it will be a full-on indiepop dance party!
The Boston Phoenix interviewed us this week about our upcoming show at Lizard Lounge on Saturday night (more details below).
Here is the article (or go to the direct link here)
Twee time
The warm and fuzzy pop of the Smittens
In the cold climes of maple country, the Smittens are sentimental saps and proud of it. Militant, even. They went so far as to print the phrase “Being nice is a political act” in the liner notes of their two albums, the first of which was called Gentlefication Now! (North of January). In this cruel world, the odds are against the Burlington (Vermont) quintet. But they press on.
“You’re like Frodo climbing up Mount Doom, one little hobbit versus the entire army of all evil,” says guitarist Colin Clary. The rest of the line-up is keyboardist Max Andrucki (currently pursuing a master’s in geography at Leeds College), drummer Holly Chagnon, guitarist/keyboardist Dana Kaplan, and bassist and Newburyport native David Zacharis. But their roles in the band take a back seat to their roles in one another’s lives. “It wasn’t about the music first. It was about forming this group of friends,” says Kaplan. “That’s really what Gentlefication was all about. That’s been our grounding value.”
The Smittens were born in 2002 from, of all things, a driving game. While traveling for hours around New England going to shows, Zacharis and Andrucki would make up band names. When they came up with the Snowpants, they called Clary and told him the name of the band they wanted to form. Then they called back with a new name — the Smittens. Kaplan and Chagnon were soon brought on board. No matter that Chagnon didn’t play drums and Zacharis had never touched a bass. Details, details.
The Smittens formed around a name but also around a desire to fill the twee void in Burlington, that jam-band capital of the North. “We wanted to do the music that we wanted to hear,” says Zacharis. “We were feeling underrepresented.” Their first album came out in March 2004; its follow-up, A Little Revolution (North of January), arrived 18 months later. They remain mysterious about the title and the release date of their third album, but they expect it to come out on the Happy Happy Birthday to Me label in the next few months.
The other members cite Clary as the musical heart of the band, a man nurturing talents both burgeoning and mature. The group’s sound bounces easily between the refinement of wispy Australians the Lucksmiths and the naïveté of Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, an ’80s Boston indie folk-rock favorite. With Kaplan, Andrucki, and Clary all chipping in on vocals and everyone collaborating on songwriting, the result is a charming blend of styles and harmonies, and songs with titles like “Twee Valley High” and “Doomed, Lo-Fi and in Love.” They also revel in mixing things up. Kaplan: “Clary might write a song about a girl that he digs, and I get to sing it and suddenly it’s got a queer connotation to it.”
The Smittens have shared the stage with the likes of the Mountain Goats, Stars, and Kimya Dawson. With everyone in grad school or holding down a full-time job, they end up playing weekend shows out of town more often than they gig in Burlington. And getting out of town, for shows like the one this Saturday at Lizard Lounge, has produced a devoted fan base spread from twee to shining twee. When the band played the Athens Popfest at the 40 Watt in Georgia last year and Kaplan’s microphone failed, the crowd ably sang a chorus.
There’s a warm fuzzy-wuzziness the Smittens bring with them to the stage. And they feel it’s helped fuel that fan base. “I think that there’s something about the way we are together on stage,” says Kaplan. “You can see we’re a good group of friends, and that comes out in our banter and the dynamics we have.” Although they describe their relationships as more like brothers and sisters than friends, there is little sibling rivalry or back-seat bickering to report. Kaplan, who’s getting a master’s in negotiation and conflict resolution, adds that this outfit “hardly gives me any opportunity in practicing my skills.”
That solidarity comes in handy when you’re wholly independent. “You have to be really creative to do everything on your own terms,” says Clary. A big part of that is Zacharis’s colorful flyer designs, which, filled with winsome-faced, bubblegum boys and girls holding hands, give credence to the Smittens’ twee image. Both their songs and their flyers, according to Clary, “tie into the same vision of innocence and warmth and love.” That’s the biggest hook, they say, more than any riff or beat they could hope to pen. “You hear a song that gives you a glimmer of hope about something, that’s inspiring and attractive,” explains Kaplan. “Who doesn’t want it?”
THE SMITTENS + ONE HAPPY ISLAND + THE 500S | Lizard Lounge,1667 Mass Ave, Cambridge | February 9 | 617.547.0759
