Well, we’re doing it again! The tour’s all booked up, we’ve all packed a couple shirts and pairs of socks, got the frisbee and the road atlas and we’re making our way out west. This will be the longest tour we’ve been on so far… and the busiest. With 26 gigs in 30 days, we’ve got a lot of work on our hands. The further we get from home, the more the reality is sinking in… this is the new life, for now. We’ll probably start to get really weird in another week or so. I guess our friends back home will be the gauge of that upon our return. As we’re seeing new areas of the country and meeting new people, we’re also forging memories together. But in the end… isn’t that all we’re ever doing? For what else do we really have, in the end, to prove that we even existed?

Yay! We’re so excited to be hitting the road in a couple weeks, you have no idea. Just about all the dates are locked down and up to date on this very site. It’s been an arduous process, but, you know, that’s what it’s all about with the DIY ethic and all… It’s a labor of love… or lust… or the desire to party in every city in America. Next year, we’re setting our sights on Europe. We hear there’s some pretty good parties there. Anyway, we’ll be hittin’ the road in no time, playing our hearts out in various basements, art spaces, dive bars, concert halls, record shops and thrift stores around the country. It’s sure to be an interesting time… can’t wait!

We’re very excited and relieved to finally have our debut album pressed in vinyl! It’s been a long time coming, but we’re all very pleased with the outcome. You can buy one, as well as our other releases, from our webstore.

We’re working on a couple new songs for a new 7″ and starting to compose new material for our next album, all while finishing booking our month long Summer tour, which is just tickling our ankles, now. We’ll be traveling pretty much the whole country for the entire month of July. Details to come. Can’t wait!

Cheers!

Well, we’re back home now and have had a good day to recuperate.  The road was good to us, overall, and we’re generally pleased with how things went down.  We played almost all of the shows with our new band-friends, A City Safe From Sea.  They’re spread out between Boston and Philly, so it was great to see them come together and throw down the jams.  We met our goals and are invigorated with new ideas for the future, already at work planning our month-long summer tour and collecting our thoughts on recording some new songs.  We had the help of our good friend Scott from Leroy St. Records (who’s putting our You Are You on vinyl!!), this time around, and are trying to convince him to be our tour manager.  Seeing as how we had nearly infinite pizza and no shortage of laughter while on the road, we’re hoping this won’t be too difficult a task.

We received considerable hospitality from various people, which is so crucial to the independent music community.  I’ll give a quick shout to those who helped us along the way…

Moby from Incommunicado in Pittsburgh showed us a great time, set up a killer show at 222 Ormsby, let us crash out and play Wii til 4:30 in the morning…

Our dear friend Greg from Best Friends! and all the Trinity Haus crew in Philadelphia set up an excellent house show AND put up with us for not one but TWO nights.  Also, we had plenty of free fruit for the rest of tour thanks to these kind and humble folks.  This enabled me to demonstrate to everyone that eating apple cores is really not that bad…

We had the pleasure of playing with Ancient Sky once again at a cool show at The Charleston in Brooklyn, where we had a free cheese pizza for every beer.  Needless to say, we drank and ate a TON and this is where things went all wrong for our digestive systems… Brandon from Ghastly City Sleep was so kind this night as to let us cram in his place and chat away with him about music and life AND let us walk with some rare Ghastly and City of Catepillar LPs from his personal collection (!!!!)…

We were overjoyed to play the next night with Ghastly City Sleep at Union Pool in Brooklyn (do yourself a favor and check out Ghastly right now… they rule).  We got to be tourists in Times Square that day and our friend, Bill, from The Nain Rouge et. al put us up that night where our need to wake up early and split for Richmond was challenged by our desire to party til the wee morning hours with our awesome host…

We made new friends in Richmond, VA and got to check out the Sound of Music Studios among several other places in this excellent city.  I, for one, was impressed with Richmond and all it has to offer.  Tons of parks, music and arts… really wonderful to see…

In Charlottesville, VA, we played at Random Row Books, a book store that periodically becomes an awesome show space thanks to the hard work and dedication of a few young movers-and-shakers.  This space is awesome and reminds me of so much going on in Detroit right now.  Of course, playing with Gifts From Enola again was incredible – these guys rock, drive an enormous bad-ass bus with a bull’s skull on the grill, and know how to party.  Thanks, dudes, for letting us smash, crash and dash…

Rob from Lunchbox Records in Charlotte, NC is an awesome dude and showed us some cool places in the city while his record store was converted to a show space for the night.  There was a great turnout and we played and excellent last show for the tour before hitting the road for the long and creepy night-drive home through the mountains…

11 hours later, we were home, completely crazed and smelling horrible, though we were happy to see familiar places and faces.  2010 should prove to be a very exciting and busy year for us, so stay tuned for news about future recordings and tours!  Thanks for EVERYONE’S support and keep doin’ what you do…

So we finally had some sense slapped into us and all agreed upon the sheer benefits of free digital music distribution. We now have our debut full-length recorded effort, You Are You, available for free download as 192kHz mp3’s with the album artwork. Check out the link to the right and get your download on.

If you want an actual artifact you can touch and hold and curl up with in bed, you can still order the full-length CD or cassette or the cassette version of Recurring Dream with custom hand-made packaging, which will soon be released on 7″ vinyl by Woodbridge Records. Wait… what?! Oh yeah, we’ll have vinyl soon!!! The Leroy St. Records release of the You Are You LP will be coming out faster than you can say ‘potato sack.’ Stay tuned, boys and girls, and keep loving each other for cryin’ out loud!

So last night’s Cass Collective show at the Cass Cafe was a huge success! So many different people came together for this one to share ideas and collaborate on putting together a great event. We were proud to be a part of such a fantastic lineup, with stellar performances by Detroit’s own Copper Thieves and those warriors of the road, Child Bite. Paradise Arches’ Randy (of Deastro fame) unfortunately fell ill the night before the show and had to cancel, but our dear friend Andrew Beer (of Noman) was able to pull through on short notice to open the night with a heartfelt and powerful solo acoustic performance. As always, DJ Erno the Inferno kept the party going all night with his deep and eclectic music collection.

A unique facet of this month’s show was a sort of “analog discussion board” set up by Amy Kaherl, inviting everyone to write down their thoughts on a series of important questions relating to the problems and promise of Detroit itself. Very unfortunately, the installation piece that was intended to be set up by Adam Davis and Phreddie Wischusen fell off their vehicle en route to the Cass and became a smear of miscellaneous materials on Woodward Ave. They had toiled all week on a sculpture interpreting the story of Orpheus… plans to recreate it for next month’s show are under way.

I personally want to thank everyone sincerely who contributed to the show and to everyone who helped out in any way. I’ve been setting these shows up for almost three years now, for the last year and a half with my good friend Shayne, and there is certainly always a ton of work involved. The idea that so many people out there are excited to pitch in with whatever it takes to convert a space once a month to put on a free music/art/community-oriented event is amazing. I feel that it’s so important that things like this keep going on and providing a forum for independent music and art to be heard and seen by the community. After all, we are all the collective. Most of us will be back at it in about a month!

~Andrew

So we’ve made some changes to our winter tour itinerary. Believe it or not, booking your own tour is quite a considerable challenge… so we’ve decided to change a few cities around to make things a little smoother. The gears are turning, however, and we’re all gearing up with some new equipment, some new jams and a growing thirst for traveling to new places and meeting new people. Most of these dates will be with A City Safe From Sea, which pretty much rules.

Also! a couple weeks ago, we sent copies of our CD, You Are You, to various college and community radio stations around the country. For now, we’ve focused primarily on the cities we’re traveling to next month. If you live or go to school in any of the cities listed below, call up your local independent radio stations and request to hear cuts off You Are You… chances are they’ve got it! See ya’ll on the road!

• Saturday, Jan. 2 – Pittsburgh, PA
• Sunday, Jan. 3 – Philadelphia, PA
• Monday, Jan. 4 – Somewhere in NJ
• Tuesday, Jan. 5 – Brooklyn, NY
• Wednesday, Jan. 6 – Manhattan, NY
• Thursday, Jan. 7 – Richmond, VA
• Friday, Jan. 8 – Charlottesville, VA
• Saturday, Jan. 9 – Charlotte, NC
• Sunday, Jan. 10 – Akron, OH

We’re at it again! Bookings for a little jaunt around the East Coast are underway. Many of these dates will be played with our new band friends, A City Safe From Sea from Boston, Philly, et. al. We’ve got great friends in this region of the country and we’re all really excited to hit the road again. We’ll have an assortment of new material to play which should be keeping us on our toes. Beev’s been holdin’ up strong and we can’t wait to haul ass through some treacherous mountains in the winter. WEEEEE!

Posted below is the itinerary we’re shooting for. Some dates are booked, some are getting lined up as we speak. Hope to see all your beautiful smiling faces out there!

• Saturday, Jan. 2 – Pittsburgh, PA
• Sunday, Jan. 3 – Philadelphia, PA
• Monday, Jan. 4 – Somewhere in NJ
• Tuesday, Jan. 5 – Brooklyn, NY
• Wednesday, Jan. 6 – Manhattan, NY
• Thursday, Jan. 7 – Baltimore, MD
• Friday, Jan. 8 – Charlottesville, VA
• Saturday, Jan. 9 – Charlotte, NC
• Sunday, Jan. 10 – Akron, OH

As of this past Saturday, we have our first van. Its name is Beevok but goes by “Beev” for short. This is no way associated with a slang word for a female body part. With having this exciting addition to the family, we are going on tour this October in support of our new record, “You Are You”. Below are the posted dates. If you have a club, basement, grotto, kitchen, bathroom, garage, yard, whatever, we would love to play in it! We are respectful young men with fair hygiene tactics and a thirst for meeting new friends and playing new places. alas!

• Friday 16th – Grand Rapids, MI
• Saturday 17th – Milwaukee, WI
• Sunday 18th – Madison, WI
• Monday 19th – St Paul/Minneapolis, MN
• Tuesday 20th – Omaha, NS
• Wednesday 21st – Des Moines, IA
• Thursday 22nd – Chicago, IL
• Friday 23rd – St. Louis, MO
• Saturday 24th – Nashville, TN

if you can help set us up with a place to play, we will (and have) generously return the favor if you have a band or a friends band that needs a show in the metro Detroit area. you can contact us through this page or at thesummerpledge@gmail.com

thank you so much for your time and help. see you this fall!!!

Mr. Jeff Milo of local newspaper, Real Detroit Weekly has done a write up of us for the Deep Cutz section. Thanks Jeff! Pick up a paper this week! It looks like this!

Deep Cutz
by Deep Cutz Charlie and EA Sports

After opening the extremely successful quadruple album release show a few months back at The Crofoot dubbed “Mr. Sandman’s Prom,” The Summer Pledge [pictured] have taken off like they have rocket fuel attached to their asses. Not only has the group released You Are You on Woodbridge Records, but they have also been playing more shows than that crazy show hording monstrosity and like-sounded group Deastro (har har … we kid, we kid Randy). Meshing the aforementioned Randolph Chabot’s brand of space-pop with the overt rock tendencies of harder Minus The Bear jams, the group will be playing numerous upcoming shows that are ripe for summertime consumption. Check out The Summer Pledge when they play at The Trumbullplex with The Fordists and labelmates Noman on July 21 and then again on July 31 at Phonotropic’s Wicked Awesome BBQ’D Musical Safari out at The Crofoot in Pontiac. Fans of music that mixes the sonic qualities of the outer limits should be impressed with what they find at myspace.com/thesummerpledge