It is suddenly really nice here in New York, mother nature has been very kind since September rolled around and it’s cool and sunny with a bright blue sky overhead.

We just got back from a short trip back to the motherland, AKA England, and played a really cool show in Dorset at The Grand Hotel..woo hoo!  Now we are back at The Cutting Room recording the last of the vocals – had a challenging time recording ‘Something Might Happen’ today, something was not happening  – and I’m blaming it on the microphone.

So summer is pretty much over but prepare for the best fall of your LIFE, because this album is STUNNING!

We have a new music video up for y’all to enjoy.  So here is the story behind the scenes, underneath all the glitz, glamour and expensive production:

We worked for 6 month full time (ugh) in a casino (ugh) singing cheesy Italian songs while rowing a gondola in Macau (ugh? Yes.) So after finishing our contract with the big, probably evil corporation known as The Venetian, Elie and I decided to hit the road and travel around China and South East Asia  before coming back to the US.

We ended up spending a LOT of time on trains, where we learned, among other things, a.) Chinese people have a very different idea of personal space and b.) If you vomit directly into an overflowing toilet, you WILL get splashed in the face.

We also spent plenty of time looking out windows, especially once we ran out of pirated Sopranos episodes.  So with nothing better to do, I captured some of the scenery on the trip from Hong Kong to Beijing to Lhasa.  My crappy camera does not do justice to some of the breathtaking scenery, but it’s still pretty impressive and the footage complements “Blood and Fire” really well.

We have some performance videos up also, “So Many Things,” “Song to Silence the World,” and “By the Side of the Road,” all recorded for rockmetv.com.

Enjoy:)

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.