Thursday, December 30, 2010

'One Tongue' CD Release!



BIRDLIPS
ONE TONGUE
CD RELEASE PARTY

FRIDAY JANUARY 7th:
Olivia Mancini & the Mates
Birdlips
(Celebrating the release of our new CD, 'One Tongue')
Greenland
Diamond's Ahead
at THE BLACK CAT (UPSTAIRS)
1811 14th St NW Washington, DC (202) 667-7960
9pm, $10 in advance,
BUY TICKETS HERE




The fourth installment of our DRIFT project, One Tongue, was written and recorded along the beautiful white sand beaches of Destin, FL in October. We've been on tour since then and are finally getting to release it! It will be a magical sensory experience with light and sound.

This will be our last show in the area for a while, as we're headed west to Las Vegas in mid-January to record our next album...and who knows when we will be back! Hopefully not 'til it gets warm again.

Joining us for this lovely evening are:
Olivia Mancini and the Mates: http://www.oliviamancini.com/bio.html
Greenland: http://www.myspace.com/greenland
and Diamond's Ahead

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Nov-Dec East Coast Tour Dates


11/10-Chattnooga, TN - Discoteca
11/11-Charlottesville, VA-Tea Bazaar(w/Matt Hemerlein, Frau Eva)
11/12-Philadelphia, PA-Greenline (w/Cinnamon Band, Lux Perpetua)
11/15-Cambridge, MA - ZUZU (w/Invisible Hand)
11/17-Providence, RI - the 201
11/19-Albany, NY - Jack’s Place
11/20-Brooklyn, NY - Rock Shop (w/La Strada)
11/21-Burlington, VT- the Radio Bean (early show! 7pm!)
12/1-Richmond, VA - the Camel
12/2-Roanoke, VA - the Bazaar (w/the Situationist)
12/3-Lynchburg, VA -Speakertree Records (w/Naked Hearts)
12/7-Winston Salem, NC - the Garage
12/9-Athens, GA - Rye Bar
12/10-Charleston, SC - Tin Roof
12/11-Tampa, FL-New World Brewery(w/GreatDeceivers, SleepyVs)
12/12-Orlando, FL- Will’s Pub (w/Great Deceivers, Sleepy Vikings)
12/16- Birmingham, AL- the Nick
12/18-Knoxville,TN - the Birdhouse

more dates coming soon...

Friday, September 24, 2010

Metaphorical Acid + other new EPs!

New 3 song EP: Metaphorical Acid
recorded summer of 2009 by Thomas Orgren

<a href="http://birdlips.bandcamp.com/album/metaphorical-acid">Metaphorical Acid by Birdlips</a>


***


<a href="http://birdlips.bandcamp.com/album/emanations">Emanations by Birdlips</a>

Emanations
recorded in Anne K.'s apartment in Los Angeles July 2010


***

<a href="http://birdlips.bandcamp.com/album/powerlines">Powerlines by Birdlips</a>

Powerlines
recorded in the Mission District in San Francisco, April 2010


Writing from a coffee shop in Woodbridge, VA. Lindsay and I have holed up for a few weeks to book an East Coast tour for November and December. We're going to spend the month of October in Pensacola, FL recording some more new songs for our DRIFT project you can read about here.

But first we are playing a show in Lovingston, VA at Rapunzels tomorrow night with Wes Swing!



THIS SAT. SEPT. 25:
Wes Swing + Birdlips
at Rapunzel's in Lovingston, VA
8PM - $5 - ALL AGES
Rapunzel's is 30 miles south of Charlottesville, down 29
924 Front St, Lovingston, VA 22949


We may not be using our college degrees but at least our Alma mater did write an article about us, yay! Read it here on the University of Virginia Magazine's website.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Back on the east coast for a hot second

Come to our show this Saturday in DC!


And boy is it hot. The humidity here makes it FEEL hotter than the Arizona desert! I can't stand the humidity. I step outside and I'm instantly drenched in sweat.







We're crashing in the DC area right now recuperating from our harrowing trip across the country. After the we got a new (rebuilt) transmission put in the van and got out of Arizona we had to book it to make it to our show in Columbus, Ohio. Along the way, we ran out of gas in between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. We hit this terrible traffic and were sitting in stop and go nonsense for hours when we noticed we were out of fuel and the nearest gas station was 10 miles up the highway! It was also over 100 degrees and we were out of water, but luckily a car in front of us got a flat tire and then broke their jack trying to change the tire so I jumped out and used our jack to get the car back up and help them change it and then they gave us a few bottles of water to tide us over.

A few hours later we ran into another fellow who'd run out of gas but was filling his tank with some spare canisters. He told us about a gas station on the other side of the highway and gave us an empty gas canister. I was able to hop the median and cross several lanes of traffic to walk to this gas station and fill the canister and then we finally made it out of there. When we pulled into the next station 10 miles down the road I was the ecstatic. Absolutely the happiest I'd ever been pulling into a gas station.

We found a motel, slept for 4 hours and then got up to keep driving. Three days of this... driving nonstop, hitting terrible traffic at some point in the day, sleeping for a few hours in some crummy motel, then waking up to do it all over again, just so we could make it to this show in Ohio where we played for like, 6 people. But we met a nice guy who let us crash at his mom's place and demonstrated his newly rebuilt Fender Twin with tremolo at 3am on a weeknight.

"Aren't we going to wake up your mom?"
"Naw, she LOVES it!"



It was a rough stretch, for sure but we survived and our shows up in New England ended up being pretty sweet.

We played in Providence at the 201 with a great bunch of guys and gals called The Loom.



Outside the 201 in Providence

Then we got a slice of late night pizza and got back in the car that night and drove to my family reunion in the Berkshires. Slapping my face the whole way until our arrival at 5am. Sleep for a few hours then BAM! Meet the Ushers.

But after that we had really awesome shows in Boston/Cambridge and Brooklyn, NY.

Whoa! this band we played with in Brooklyn was totally mind blowing!

no link :(

They were called Pocketknife but recently got a cease and desist from the lawyer of a DJ who also calls himself Pocketknife so they will be changing their name. BUT they are recording a new album with Chris Keup near Charlottesville so I'm sure you will be hearing about them soon.

We also played with our friends This Frontier Needs Heroes and had fun hanging out with them after the show, where we met and stayed with Noah from Naked Hearts.


Then we raced back home to hand make 100 limited edition copies of our new Emanations / Powerlines double EP and then to Charlottesville to play at the Southern with two fantastic bands, Red Rattles from Charlottesville and Eternal Summers from Roanoke.


All in all, good times. And after a string of depressing setbacks and exhausting drives we have now had a few days to sleep and get ready for a killer show this Saturday at the Gibson Guitar Showroom in Chinatown with Matt Hemerlein. (Flier at top) See ya there!

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Big sky break down in Arizona











Our van broke down on top of a mountain in beautiful Jerome, AZ. We were able to coast it into the town of Cottonwood where we had someone look at it to tell us the transmission is shot. We're having someone tow the van back to Phoenix to get it fixed and hopefully we'll be back on the road in a few days.

Unfortunately, it looks like we're going to miss a string of dates on this tour. Sorry to anyone that was hoping to make a show in Boulder, CO, Lincoln, NE or Madison, WI. There's a chance we could still make it to the Madison show but it looks unlikely.

We're making the best of it by kicking it AZ style. We were extremely lucky to meet some of the nicest people ever here near Jerome. A publisher we just met in Phoenix introduced us to a prolific songwriter out here named Steve Easterling of Easterling and Gildersleeve. His neighbor and sometimes co-writer is this dude Olen who owns a fudge shop on top of the mountain and has been letting us crash with him. He and his buds even took us off-roading way out into the Arizona desert. It was like being on the surface of another planet. Totally breathtaking. The sky is incredible out here, like nothing I've seen anywhere else. I think partly because you can see so far into the distance.

Despite the major setback in terms of time, lost shows and money for car repairs, we are getting to experience a side of the country we might never have found otherwise, and it's really been a joy being welcomed into someone else's town, home, and life. I feel like we've really tapped in to part of the soul of America here. It's kinda what this DRIFT project is all about. We're only a few weeks in and it's already been a really wild ride but we are learning a lot, going with the flow and soaking up some good stories and experience to use for inspiration.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Show tonight in L.A. at Echo Curio



Birdlips is currently wandering the USA for our project, DRIFT, where we travel around the country writing, recording, shooting videos and playing shows. We are recording a new EP right now in Los Angeles and we'll be playing just this one show while we're here.


an LA RECORDS 100 show

Tues, July 13th
BIG TREE + THE SHADE + C-HORSE + BIRDLIPS
At Echo Curio
1519 W Sunset Blvd


Show starts at 9PM. I think there is a $5 cover and Birdlips plays last around 11:30PM!

New videos from San Francisco

Birdlips - High On Yourself shot by Elena Coyle.


Birdlips - Closer (Marin Headlands) shot by Elena Coyle


Birdlips - Powerlines (Marin Headlands) shot by Elena Coyle

Our friend Elena was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule studying for the bar exam and shoot these three videos in the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco last month. We wanted to find the highest, windiest place around for our song High On Yourself. We happened upon this great spot on a cliff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge amidst dilapidated World War II bunkers and we ended up shooting two "take-away" style videos as well. Closer and Powerlines are live, semi-acoustic performances. We used a battery-powered practice amp for the beats and a battery powered Casiotone keyboard. Even though it was warm in the city below, it was really, really windy on the top of that cliff and we ended up getting chilled to the bone. At one point I dropped my guitar pick because my fingers had gone numb.


==================

The song High On Yourself was recorded and mixed by Thomas Orgren in the summer of 2009 in Vienna, VA.

Clifford John - vocals, guitar, drums, percussion
Lindsay Pitts - vocals, keys
Thomas Orgren - electric guitar, bass, drums



Birdlips - Powerlines (Clarion Alley in the Mission, San Francisco) shot by Karate TV


This last one was shot by our friend Crockett Bodelson aka Karate TV in Clarion Alley (in between Mission and Valencia) in the Mission district of San Francisco, June 2010.

Crockett used a tiny Sony HD Handycam mounted to an elaborate boom constructed from found objects (an easel, a tripod, and a golf bag carrier with wheels). It was kind of hard to control but managed to capture the moment in a pretty cool way. The sound is just from the built in camera microphone, and was not edited so it caught a few rattles and creaks from the boom being wheeled and manipulated.

The Mission District is bursting with beautiful murals everywhere, but Clarion Alley is especially cool. Completely covered with art and constantly changing.

Our friend Crockett Bodelson is an awesome and inspiring visual and recording artist of the collaborative painting duo SCUBA. Definitely check out his art, you will be glad you did:

drawingwhiledriving.com/
myspace.com/karatetv

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Last show in SF this Thursday 6/24


Aghh!!! I can't believe it's almost the end of June. Our sublet here in the Mission runs out in a little over a week. We have to finish planning our x-country tour, sell/get rid of a bunch of stuff, practice some of these new songs we've been writing, figure out how to switch web servers...

Oh yeah, our website may be down for a few days, but we're working on a kick-ass new one.

And, we're playing our last show in SF this Thursday, June 24, with two awesome friends we've made in our short time here:

Lucky Cloud is a three piece producing beautiful, atmospheric pop that sounds like raindrops and sunshine falling through the leaves. Karate TV is the reverb dreched, delay rattling, rump-shaking home recording project of Crockett Bodelson, an amazing visual artist and member of the collaborative painting duo SCUBA. Prepare to have your mind blown.

BlueSix is a sweet little intimate venue that, from what we've heard, might be shutting it's doors in the near future. So come out and experience this SF treat before it's too late!

Start Time:
Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 8:30pm
End Time:
Friday, June 25, 2010 at 12:00am
Location:
Blue Six in the Mission (24th St. @ Treat Ave.)
Street:
3043 24th St.
City/Town:
San Francisco, CA

Friday, June 18, 2010

Change of plans... + new tour!

collage by Lindsay

We've been loving it here in San Francisco, but have realized that we aren't ready to put down roots. So we've concocted a plan for a new project that really has been brewing in our subconscious for quite some time now. The project is called 'drift' and we're going to travel around the USA writing and recording in different places, posting the recordings on our bandcamp page, and writing about the whole process on the blog here.

Ever since we started this blog, we haven't really had a very good idea of what we were doing with it. But now that we have a project in mind, we are going to be posting a lot more frequently and focusing more on what's going on inside our heads in this creative process.

Lindsay and I (me especially) are both über-perfectionists and can easily get overly critical of ourselves. I think that's been one of the things keeping us from putting out more new material over these past few years since we released Cardboard Wings. We've got a few dozen half-finished songs, ideas and incomplete thoughts lying around that we would first be excited about and then abandon thinking "it's not good enough." Recently we were going back through all these song peices on our digital 8-track recorder and were pretty surprised by some of the things we had on there. "Why did we abandon this!?!?" So we have a new determination to finish what we started and also to write a lot more new material without being overly critical. This whole project is going to be an exercise in opening the creative flood gates.

When our lease runs out here in SF, we are headed to LA for a few weeks. One of Lindsay's best friends in an Imagineer for Disney. She has a pretty amazing job designing interactive rides for theme parks and is going to be out of town so we'll have the place to ourselves to do some serious wood shedding.

We've got an EP coming out soon that we recorded with our friend Thomas (from the band the Torches) in my parent's basement in Northern Virginia, and another new EP that we recorded in our bedroom here in San Francisco (Powerlines EP).

After LA we are touring back across the country and down the east coast. Check our MySpace page for the latest tour dates.

Lots of stuff on the horizon...

overwhelmed but excited,
Cliff

Thursday, May 20, 2010

just kids...


"We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone."

-Patti Smith, from her new book Just Kids

Friday, March 5, 2010

We Made It!

This cactus appears to be rocking. Missing a finger, yes, but rocking nonetheless. Hopefully a magical sign of all the rocking that will be happening in San Francisco. YES! It was an exciting journey from Washington DC all the way to California by way of Nashville, Dallas/Fort Worth, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and LA. Thanks to everyone who provided us a place to crash along the way! A brief chronicle in pictures...


Between LA and SF. "No water = no crops"




Phoenix Sunset.








Freak snowstorm in New Mexico. Lots of cars and trucks in the ditch. We drove several hours behind a snowplow going 30 mph.




Almost there!!
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These last three are from our very own Virginia. We'll miss you, VA! You certainly have a place in our hearts and a charm all your own.