Sent out a new subscriber email yesterday announcing all our new stuff. Now we’ve got an official webstore on the site that doubles as a brief discography. Figured it was high time we sold our own CDs here. We’re also offering the promotional poster for the new album. Of course, somebody had already ordered one when I checked this morning. We weren’t asking enough money to cover the shipping and postage, unfortunately. I don’t want to make any money on the poster, I just don’t want to lose money on it. Anyway. What else?

Oh yeah, so we finally have tracklistings for our CDs, which was totally missing before. Also created an mp3 page at long last, where you can download a few tracks directly from us, rather than going to MySpace or wherever. Hopefully our bandwidth can take it! Lots of little tweaks here and there, but that’s the main gist of it. It’s funny how much time and thought it can take to get something just right. I’m sure half the people that visit won’t really notice the changes, but Ryan and I sure do. Anyway, props to Ryan for the great webstore!

Apple iTunes is now offering Free & Easy for purchase. The sound files sound really good and the artwork looks great. The only bummer is that they listed it as a “partial album” and aren’t offering a whole CD download price. WTF? This album is 30 seconds longer than the last one, and they didn’t list that as a “partial album.” Could it be because its only 9 tracks? Windblown Kiss had 10; maybe that’s the minimum? I dunno… Perhaps I should just contact someone and see if we can alter that in the entry. We can’t be the only folks in the world making 9 song albums. They are 9 rather long songs, after all.

Man, finally someone with some sense responded to my email at Amazon! After several weeks of frustration, we’ve gotten through to their customer service the fact that we do, in fact, have an account with them, and we do, in fact, have an active title listed on their site, and they have not, in fact, placed an order for copies. The release date is next week, so it would be nice if they actually had some stock on hand to fulfill orders. Other sites are already linking to the Amazon.com page for Free and Easy, like Live365 and AMG, I think, so it would be great if folks could actually place the order, rather than just read about the CD. Ugh. I guess this is the really fun part of starting a label, huh?

Just wanted to say thank you to all the folks who have already ordered our new CD over the past week. It’s so cool to actually see who is buying it, and to recognize so many of the names from past experiences with people, whether it be from our shows, buddy lists, customer reviews, or wherever! It feels nice to show personal attention to everyone by autographing the CDs and packaging them up ourselves, too. Of course, it’s always nice to sell CDs in stores and through Amazon or iTunes, but this one on one sale is kinda special. So thanks to all your early birds!

I didn’t want to change our main news article, so I figured I’d just announce this on the Blog… We just uploaded a special 15 minute interview feature about the creation of “Free & Easy,” including audio clips from every song on the album. It’s available on our Podcast page, in case you haven’t already subscribed to the Chillin’ with Lovespirals podcast feed. We originally recorded it for use by media types but figured that our fans would probably enjoy it as well, if not more than, them, so here it is!

Lovespirals’ brand new album, Free & Easy, has an official
release date of November 1st, but you can buy it online right now. The band will personally autograph all copies sold through their own webstore, and are offering a free promo copy of previous album, Windblown Kiss, with the purchase of 2 or more copies of Free & Easy. The CD is also on sale at Projekt’s Darkwave distribution, CD Baby, and will soon be available through Amazon.
Other online sources will offer it in the near future. Metropolis will be distributing the album in the US, so be sure to ask for the album in your local record stores!

Got an email from DJ Rafe Gomez today saying he’s diggin’ the album and will be adding “Free & Easy” and “Hand in Hand” into the mix on his show soon. Cool! Actually, his words were “Thx for hipping me to your ultra kewl sounds.” Positive feedback rocks. Makes all the sweat and tears worth it.

It’s been a busy week, and we’ve got a lot of cool stuff in the works. Next week we’ll be launching more site updates. We’re going to start doing the podcast weekly, too, unless things get too crazy. But right now there’s plenty to talk about, so why wait 2 weeks? We’ll be sending out the first email newsletter since our random Santa Monica show. I just don’t think about sending out emails what with the blog, news feed, and podcast, but I guess folks are expecting to get emails when the sign the list, and they do sign the list often…

Hmm… Just noticed that our latest podcast (episode 6) hasn’t shown up on iTunes yet. That is really weird. We’ll have to figure out what went wrong with that. Meanwhile, though, you can hear it directly from our site, or on MySpace or Garageband. I wonder if Odeo got it yet? Man, too much stuff to keep track of. Where’s that gnome of ours at?

We started changing the site around a bit to reflect the imminent release of “Free & Easy,” starting with a new home page image, featuring a brand new band photo. We also added some splashes of color here and there, which really perks things up, it seems to me. Orange is so full of life. Kinda matches the whole Indian Summer thing going on out here in So Cal. Boy has it been hot! Oh yeah, we’ve also had some new band photos sprinkled throughout the pages. We’ll update the photo album eventually, as well. What else is new? Oh, new lyrics, of course. Got the rest of the album lyrics up this weekend. I think we’ll get some banner ads together soon so folks can link to the site off theirs, if they like. New audio will go up soon. Who knows what else? Keep checking back…

Man, I was pretty exhausted when we recorded the podcast yesterday. After starting over from the top a few times, we got kinda cranky and almost didn’t do one, then we suddenly got really silly, instead. We were like, “How are we going to make a 10 minute show about how we’re about to announce news, but aren’t quite there yet?” Then I forgot to mention that we had just done a new photo shoot yesterday. We’ve had bad luck arranging a shoot for the past year, with different photographers. Like 4 different people… Isn’t that kind of weird? But we finally did a quickie yesterday so hopefully something good will come of it. If so, you’ll be seeing it soon, I expect.

Now that the end is in sight for our CD release, we are just running around like chickens with our heads cut off! Last night we took some time to actually play music, which was a refreshing change of pace. We played through our set using just electric guitar and a mic through amps, which was a first. The rawness sounded kind of interesting, actually. I could see us maybe doing a quick ‘n dirty show like that sometime. I’ve been talking with a cool LA space about hosting a launch party show, so hopefully we can set up a good time for that. Doing it around the holidays might be a little stressful, but hopefully not overly so. I will be pretty surprised if we’re able to set up some Mexico shows this winter, as we hoped, but you never know. Things can fall together beautifully at the last minute sometimes.