This entire post is a response to the article “What Happened To You?” written by Kristen Franklin… who also happens to be my beautiful girlfriend. I started writing it as a comment and then decided I wanted to share it here. Go read her article first if you’d like…
I still pretend and day dream a lot. It’s fun. I know my day dreams aren’t real, and that my life is not all that grand. But I’m happy with my life, so the day dreams are just… entertainment.
I think we all lose a little of that wide-eye’d-ness as we get older. Because we’ve lived through more failures than successes, usually, and we no longer imagine it’ll be different the next time around. We no longer belive we can be an astronaut, or a rock star… or a lion.
[click to read more…]
In high school I’d hit up the local record shop, Crow’s Nest, at least once a week. The vast majority of the money I made at my after school job, and recording bands in their garages, went right back into buying CDs.
Some days I would dig through the imports sections, other days the box sets and singles. A few times I’d even hit up the New Releases wall. I hadn’t heard of most of the garbage on there, but occasionally the album art alone would be enough to get me to spend my hard earned $15 on a band I didn’t know.
This was before YouTube, before Pandora and before iTunes.
I “discovered” a lot of shitty bands by buying on album art alone. But for every ten Nickelbacks, there was one Isle of Q, one diamond in the rough.
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With how much work there is – and how fast it all needs to be done – for DFTBA Records, sometimes it’s hard for me to see the big picture. Being so focused on the daily tasks of packing orders, or designing artwork, or cutting checks to our artists, etc, sometimes it all just blends together.
Alex Day and I talk about future personal projects often when we chat, and pretty much since the beginning of DFTBA’s existence I’ve told him I wanted to release a covers CD, where our artists just cover each other’s songs. It’d be fun, it’d be a celebration of the label, it’d be a good way for fans of one artist to be exposed to the music of another artist… and I just plain love covers (as anyone who owns my album Erase This knows).
But I kept putting it off. [click to read more…]
My debut full-length album,
Erase This, is being released today by DFTBA Records. The artist attribution is “Alan Lastufka & Luke Conard”, which sometimes confuses people, because they don’t hear me singing (though if you listen carefully, you can hear me playing the bass guitar on every track).
Erase This is a wonderfully collaborative project which required the direct time and talent of fourteen different people; Luke and I were simply the ringleaders.
[click to read more…]
