Did everyone make it through the annual festivities in one piece?

Yeah?

Good. Let's proceed.

It's January 1st, 2016 as I type this, but dawn #1 of this new year isn't hitting me quite as hard as prior inaugural installments have in their early hours, so maybe I'm learning a thing or two about the oft-discussed, previously-deemed mythological method of enjoying one's vices in "moderation"….or did I just run out of beer before I could do my health any real disservice as the ball dropped in Times Square? OR, did Jenny McCarthy's facial contortions sober me up?

I don't know, but this coffee is warm and I ate Sushi for breakfast, so i'm already liking where this next 365 is headed.

Speaking of where things are headed, The Great Affairs will be hitting the road off & on throughout January, headed North, East, and South. Here are the particulars.

Saturday, January 16th   Fat Moe's                  Paducah, KY
Thursday, January 21st  Preservation Pub    Knoxville, TN
Friday, January 22nd       O'Mainnin's Pub    Bristol, TN
Friday, January 29th        The Loft                      Columbus, GA
Saturday, January 30th   The Alamo                 Newnan, GA

Before we get into the business of logging those miles though, it's time to start cutting a few demos here at the Pastry Park Audio Confectionery, as we begin the long, debate-riddled process of sorting out just which tunes might make up the running order of our next LP. Initially, I'd had it in my mind that we would take a bit of a detour from the layered, more "produced" sound we went for with 'Dream In Stereo', instead shooting to take the kind of left turn KISS did post-'Destroyer', when they handed in the considerably less slick 'Rock n' Roll Over'. Like that offering, I had imagined us crafting a more straightforward, guitar-heavy outing this time around….but something got in the way….the new songs.

Granted, it's early in the making, and there are plenty of numbers yet to be written, but this first batch of a dozen or so that have come together in the last couple of months certainly doesn't fit the bill previously envisioned. Kenny brought one in that seems like it could fill those shoes, but honestly nothing I've conjured up seems likely to pass muster if we're aiming for a riff-fest. In fact, this might be the oddest batch of material I've spit out in a long, long time. I'm scratching my OWN head at some of it.

So, as much as I'd hoped to avoid doing them this time around, it looks like I'll be hunkering down here at home for a few weeks, and tracking proper demos of this stuff, so that I might be able to see past the weird, and hopefully bond some of them together enough that it makes sense to my ears. If that doesn't work, I'll save the oddballs for that damn "solo record" I've been threatening to do all these years, and go back to the drawing board until I come up with a few other things that might sit more comfortably alongside the contributions Patrick & Kenny have brewing.

It's a damn mess, I tell ya….but I'll get it sorted out.

I'm probably gonna need more coffee.

-Denny

p.s. If you'd like to hear us get a little drunk and talk about driving school buses while judging various craft beers on their overall quality, check out our recent appearance on the DRUNKEN LULLABIES podcast right HERE. It's a real hoot, as somebody's grandma probably used to say.