Starting 2010 off right

2010 is turning out very nicely for the four of us in Smiley with a Knife so far.

Let's get to the important news first:
Live shows. March Madness.
We'll be heading to SXSW again this year to play some unofficial showcases, and the INCREDIBLE lineups that we'll be included on are starting to pour in. The bands that we'll be playing with on our trip out to Austin and San Antonio include:
Cast Spells
Tera Melos
Native
La Dispute
Look Mexico
Bad Rabbits
We the Granada

Before we head out to SXSW, we'll be playing a very important show here at home as well. We'll be opening for the world-traveled instrumental indie rock titans Caspian with their support Arms and Sleepers. Volpi and I got a chance to see Caspian last year at SXSW, and it was bone-crushingly amazing. Guitars were flying everywhere, and I'll exaggerate even farther to say that it seems like all of the gentlemen in that band are 7ft. tall.

So that's right... we're comin' to getcha! We'll be swimming with some serious acts this Spring, and it all starts this weekend at home with Caddywhompus.
We'll be hitting up the Spanish Moon in Baton Rouge with them on Friday. Together, we'll be opening up for Man Plus Building. Fantastic.
The next night, we'll skip on over to One Eyed Jack's in the Quarter and spend some time with the BLACKbELT Band. Oh, ooh baby!

This will be our first major show in New Orleans in quite some time and our first Baton Rouge show since the Summer. We've played some small rooms in the area over the past several months and blew our friend Samantha's fundraiser out of the water, but we'll be bringing the heat this weekend.

Beyond that, we'll have 3 more shows with Caddywhompus:
- Friday, January 29th at Artmosphere in Lafayette, LA
- Friday, February 5th at the Alabama Music Box in Mobile, AL
- Saturday, February 6th at Magic City Wholesale in Birmingham, AL
Here is a video flyer for all 5 of the shows that we have with them.

Also fun to note is that after our Lafayette show, we'll be meeting up with Big Rock Candy Mountain to help them close their tour out Saturday, January 30th, in Houston. That show will be at Mango's, and we'll have a video flyer episode ready for that early next week.

So it looks like we started this year off right on the booking end, huh?
We're movin' on up in this game and it's all thanks to your support!

Beyond that, we started the year off right by topping off our 60-second video series with an hour's worth of content. As always, you can track our progress as a group every other day here and via our every-other-daily video blog aptly titled "60 seconds with Smiley with a Knife every other day." . We're not exactly namesmiths - we save our creativity for writing music and editing video.

Among other great things this new year, our recording process is moving along swimmingly. We're continuing work on that in the next several weeks. If you check out episodes #51, #52, #53, and #58 you can gain a little bit of insight into some of the work that we've put into the new record so far. Sure, it's only 5 minutes of insight, but it's pretty insightful insight. You can see some of the shenanigans that we got into with our producer and our engineer who both work with me on a daily basis at the Music Shed studio in New Orleans. You can also watch us play with a light theramin, turning into 12-year-olds laughing at fart sounds all the while.

The main grunt work of our recording behind us, though, and it's time that we all start having personal, intimate moments together again. By that, I mean we're about to start playing live shows again and you guys should totally be there. But if you were excited in strange ways you've never felt before, keep in mind that Pat Bailey is single and loves video games, ladies. Me-ow!

We'll see you guys again starting this weekend!

- Jared / drums