ROCK AND ROLL – AUGUST 2012

We put out Rock and Roll as a split release between Friends Records and my label, Cold Rhymes Records. Mickey Free and Frank Yaker had equal hands in recording and mixing it. It took two years to make. For the first time, I played most of the instruments myself.

This album has some of my best songs. I see this record as the end of my guitar-based period of songwriting that I had been working on since 2008. This record received more press than any past project of mine. It was noticed by stereogum, rollingstone.com, noisey and other sites like that.

Ways and Means came with these two tight videos for the album…

1978 STYLE – MARCH 2013

Throughout 2011 and 2012, I was working on a concept album. I had long been obsessed with listening to live tapes of the earliest hip-hop shows… Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five at T-Connection ’79, Cold Crush Brothers vs Fantastic Five at Harlem World, etc. I got the idea to do a whole album that recreates one of these tapes with the original breaks, rhyme styles, and low-fi sound. I started working on this project with Dave Barresi, aka Secret Weapon Dave.

With a tour coming up, I decided to wipe the slate clean, and perform nothing but songs from this forthcoming project. I brought Jones with me, and we did an entire set as if we were an MC and a DJ rocking a Zulu Nation park jam in 1978. Performing live like this felt absolutely freeing. I recast myself as a character telling you to rock the spot, instead of telling you about my life and my angst. The dusty, dead parts of my onstage identity just blew away, and I could be whatever I wanted to be… It was more about fantasy and imagination than it was about a portrait of my own reality.

Pretty much every Height supporter stuck with me through this change. It made me feel like I could wipe the slate clean anytime, and that people would stick with it, instead of just wanting to hear certain songs or a certain sound.

AMERICA TOUR – FALL 2012

Dan Deacon invited us to go on tour with the Dan Deacon Ensemble, Chester Gwazda and Alan Resnick. Kevin O’Meara played drums for all our 44 shows of the tour. Jen Rice and Gavin Riley did vocals and guitars for the first leg. Patrick McMinn and Joel Herring did the same for the second.

We got to play almost everywhere we could possibly play in the US and Canada. After twelve years of booking my own tours in the DIY world, this was our first chance to consistently play larger shows. I’ve wanted to do a tour like this since the beginning, and we finally got a chance to make it happen.

VERSUS DYNAMIC SOUNDS – AUGUST 2013

As this new project went from a rough live set to a real album, I kept working with Secret Weapon Dave. He became the backbone of the project, helping me find breaks and come up with blends and transitions. Mickey Free worked long hours with me, emulating echoes, distortions and tape saturation, all to give it that old-school feel.

I wrote all the rhymes for the project, for ten different voices. There were parts where I would record eight different people doing the same part, chasing after the perfect feel. I worked with people that I never worked with before, like Eze Jackson and CX Kidtronik.

The album got some decent press, for a self release. For our release show, I put together a five person lineup with Dave on the decks, Jones on the delays and Eze, Emily and I on the mics. The set worked like a charm, and I felt that my concept was fully realized.

HEIGHT VERSUS DYNAMIC SOUNDS TOUR – SEPTEMBER 2013

I knew I couldn’t bring my five person lineup on the road, and I decided do my next tour as a one man show.. I was rapping, running the beats and the lights, and triggering the delays. It felt great to be in control of everything, and to know that a 100% solo show is something I could have on deck for the future.

In all my years of touring, I had never done a substantial tour all on my own. I almost always perform with other people, and if not, I try to still have someone else come along for the ride. I thought I might be lonely out there, but I had friends in most cities I was playing, and I never really felt alone.

INFINITY BALLROOMS TOUR – NOVEMBER 2013

In November, I toured with my longtime friend and collaborator, Al Lover. This tour was fun, but it was absolutely brutal on our wallets. The first nine shows featured either zero audience or zero dollars. We even had trouble finding floors to crash on.., We each shelled out obscene amounts of money just keep the van rolling and to sleep indoors. Neither of us had ever ate it so hard on a coast-to-coast tour. I had seen my share of financial failure on tour, but frankly I thought I was past this level of struggle

It was largely my fault. I had been touring overly hard in the previous year. I overplayed all my go-to cities, and we ended up playing many places where neither of us had any footing at all. (Cincinati, Columbus, Missoula, etc.) I thought it would be a good experiment to branch out and cover new ground, but the experiment failed in a serious way. I considered putting an end to all DIY touring after this one.

OUT FOR A RIP – DECEMBER 2013

Throughout the fall of 2013, Out For A Rip, the bonus track from Shark Tank’s Fun Youngs album, started to make some minor waves on the internet. The song described small town Canadian life through the eyes of a provincial hoser character. B Rich made a video for it, and the video went through the roof. Over five million people viewed it on youtube, and Canadian media giants like CBC, TSN and Huffington Post Canada all gave it props.

The single / album went on to be certified gold in Canada. It was the first (and so far, the last) time I had ever made any real money off music. (Ironically, I got paid off a song to which I contributed nothing) After years of financial struggle, (and right after a money crushing tour) this felt like a gift from above. Being that this was really a B Rich solo track, B used the momentum to launch a solo career.

OUT FOR A RIP TOUR – FEBRUARY 2014

I signed on as hypeman for B Rich’s Out For A Rip Tour. The tour was filled with wildly successful shows. Due to the song’s rural / hoser references, the song seemed to have mainly caught on in small towns. (like Nanaimo, British Columbia, for example) Headlining sold out shows was strange enough, but doing it in towns with a population of 2,000 was even stranger. We played some of the best shows of our lives in strip clubs and biker-ish bars.

We had a blast, and I felt happy to see a side of Canada that almost no one gets to see.