Happy New Year to everyone! This year will be a pivotal year for The Whispering Tree, I can feel it.  We are busy doing pre-production for our full length album at the moment.  We will be recording at Plan B, in Philly in March…nine days of recording time!!

Clifton Hyde will be producing and playing guitar on the album and he is hooking us up with the finest musicians.  We are going all out this time with strings, brass, and maybe even a choir.

We plan to record about 19 songs, re-do some of the songs from the EP as well as a bunch of new material and then pick the best tracks.

To give you an idea of how insanely awesome this album is going to be, we recorded our EP in one day for $600, Elie mixed it himself and it wasn’t mastered…and it still sounds pretty good.  This time, however,  we will have plenty of time, a much bigger budget, and a professional mixing and mastering engineer.  I am beyond excited about this album finally being completed.  I can not wait to have these songs heard the way they deserve to be heard and released into the world.

Lets make this the best year yet!

Our Rockmetv.com show was a huge success, the best show we’ve had so far.  It really reinforced for us that this is what we are meant to be doing.  Everyone was so enthusiastic and responsive, my face hurt from all the smiling. Thank you to everyone who came out and made it such an awesome night.

We perfomed for the first time with drummer/percussionist, Chris Schultz, who we were incredibly lucky to find and we look forward to playing and recording with him in the future.

The video of the performance will be up as soon as we can get a hold of it from Rock Me TV.

‘By the Side of the Road’ is one of our newer songs which will be recorded as part of our upcoming album and it is my personal favorite.  It might seem really bleak and depressing to some people but I didn’t write it from a negative place.  One of the reasons why I love this song is that it just came to me out of the blue and pretty much wrote itself…I feel like it came through me rather than from me.  Instead of being a song about death and the futility of life I feel like its a song about how precious and powerful a life can be when it is lived with a sense of urgency.  Instead of looming over us as a source of dread and anxiety, the impermanence and uncertainty of our time here should drive us to do something meaningful with our lives (and I think the only meaningful thing we can do is somehow make the world better for others.)

BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD                  (c)2008

They buried me by the side of the road,
My mind grew distant,
my body got old,
so they dressed me up
in my favorite clothes
and they buried me there
by the side of the road.

They bring me flowers and they lay them at my feet,
they cry their tears
and they say their prayers for me
But I don’t need saving
and anyone can see
that I’m better off now
than I’ve ever been.

I have no eyes
to see the struggle,
I am blind to the ways of the world.
I have no mind
to confuse and complicate me.
My heart lies still,
my body vacant,
an empty vessel
left to sleep beneath the dirt.

They buried me by the side of the road,
these hands you’ve held
are not my own.
I’m just a stranger
you used to know,
a passenger here,
without a home.

Hello again!

I am very excited to announce that we will be interviewed by the incredibly amazing and inspiring London Garcia on her show this Saturday at 5:00pm PST (… that’s 8:00 for you East Coasters) on L.A. Talk Radio.

You can tune in WORLDWIDE (cough cough to those of you in London and Macau) at www.latalkradio.com

For those of you who don’ t know, in the two weeks since London has moved to L.A. Talk Radio her show has become the most listened to show on the station! So tune in!

So here I am writing my first blog.  I personally am not a big blog reader, or a blog reader in any sense. Elie wrote a blog once, it was about his first Halloween in the US and I read that one.  He wrote another about an awesome vegetarian chili recipe which I didn’t read, but I did view the pictures, then he ran out of steam.  I know a lot of people really  enjoy reading these things and many people enjoy writing them.  I don’t know if I will be one of those people but I am going to give it a try.

SO…

Our website v.2 is finally up, complete with an awesome blog in which  I will keep you informed of all of our goings on and maybe even throw in a rant now and again.

Don’t get too comfortable here because it will be changing very shortly as we have decided to finally give in and hire someone to design us a proper website, so version 3 is on it’s way.  Although I think the simplicity of this site is refreshing after navigating through hundreds of music sites with hi-tech flashy time wasting animation.  Don’t worry, version 3 will have none of that.