Saturday, August 8th, we have two gigs. First, in the morning from 11:30 to 12:30, we’re opening up Maine Pagan Pride Day at Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church, on 524 Allen Avenue in Portland.

Then, we play another set at around 5pm at The Alliance Festival at the Barnyard in Livermore. This is something of a warmup gig for the Woodstock show the next day.

On Sunday, August 9th, we’ll play a set at the Heroes of Woodstock Festival at the same venue.

The Barnyard is at the intersection of Rt 108 and River Road in Livermore.

NOTE: We’ll have a new run of Freakwitch T-shirts available, as well as an opportunity to preorder our album, Sway, which will be sent to you as soon as it’s ready.
We hope to see you there, come one come all!

We are definitely looking forward to playing this show, as it will mean playing for a lot of people who may not have heard us before. Cool!

These are the “basic tracks” of the album, in other words these recordings are the 5 of us playing live, with no overdubs or studio trickery of any kind. Of course, the final album will have plenty of overdubs (mostly guitars and vocals), and will sound a bit different, but we feel these relatively stripped-down files do a good job of capturing the energy of the 5 of us playing music.

The song excerpts are from Seems Like, Tip Of My Tongue, Too Bad For You, Breathe, Cackle, Sway, Long Way To Go, Make It Through, and Unglued.

Enjoy!

Despite the lack of updates here, we’ve been hard at work, writing some new stuff, tweaking some older stuff, prepping a great album for release soon. Having Alfred as a co-creator/co-conspirator has greatly expanded our rhythmic vocabulary. And getting Jon to record us means we won’t have to worry about good-sounding tracks.

Once the basic tracks are in the bag, we want to knock out the rest of the album as soon as we can, and still do justice to the material. We’re talking about gearing up for summer gigs so that you can hear this new incarnation of Freakwitch. It’s exciting!

As we move into the dark time of year, we are pleased to be turning inward with Alfred Lund on drums. Having a drummer of his ability, power, and sensibility changes everything, and is quite simply a joy to experience and co-create.

We will be heading into the studio over the winter for a new album, and we are presently gathering our creative energies in preparation for such, writing new material and tightening arrangements of existing songs.  Over the recordings we’ve done so far, we’ve consciously saved some of our best songs for a full album, one where we aren’t limited to producing it over part-time work in one month. Though the RPM challenge was a lot of fun, this new album will be fully realized, something we have not yet been able to accomplish in our recordings for a variety of reasons.

Also, for the first time, we will be turning to a producer/engineer outside the band, which is almost always a very good thing for a band to do. More details anon.

We’ll be playing Harvest Fest in Starks, which is the weekend of Oct. 2 – 5. We have 2 sets over the weekend:

• Thursday, Oct 2, 6:45-7:45pm. If I’m not mistaken, this should be our first set in the dark in Starks. Michael Heat will be sitting in on drums.
• Saturday, Oct 4, 12:00noon – 1pm. Again, Michael Heat will be sitting in on drums.

Then, two weeks later, we’ll also be playing Harmony Harvest Fest I at their new location in Harmony, Maine. We just have 1 set for this festival:

• Saturday, Oct 18, 4:30-5:30pm. Alfred Lund will be playing with is for this show.

So come on out, for a good cause, and enjoy the harvest, beautiful people, and great music all weekend long.

If you want to help us out, please go to the voting page and enter some votes for Freakwitch, My Own Way. It’s a forum, so you’ll have to register for the forum.

Please and Thank You.

Fri June 20
5:15 – 6:15
Maine Vocals Freedom Fest
Starks, ME (exact location to be determined)

Sat Aug 2
afternoon – evening
Lammas Bash
Hollis, ME (our private bash, contact us if you want to come)

Thurs Aug 14
5:15 – 6:15
Fri Aug 15
11am – noon
Maine Vocals Hempstock
Starks, ME (exact location to be determined)

Sat Aug 16
1 pm – 2 pm
Maine Pagan Pride Day
Portland, ME

Fri Sept 5
evening
Awen Camp
Harrison, ME

Solar Sun Festival
(time and location to be determined)

Sat Sept 20
Lizzyoos Bog Bash
Belgrade, ME (another private party, contact us if interested)

Thurs Oct 2
5:30 – 6:30
Sat Oct 4
noon – 1 pm
Maine Vocals Harvest Fest
Starks, ME (exact location to be determined)

Our new album, Interconnected, is now available. You can download it directly from us, but please save bandwidth and listen/download from our myspace page or our RPM challenge page instead if you can (they will be posted there shortly as I write this).

We are not charging to download it, but please support us if you like it either by buying some merchandise, buying a copy of the CD (they will be available soon), or just simply donating to our cause.

Lyrics are posted below for your perusal. Thanks to everyone for contributing to this album and for putting up with us while we made it.

Everything is interconnected, I’m just not sure why

We’ll get mp3s up here soon, but first we want to finish artwork etc for the album.

It’s called Interconnected, by the way….

Watch this space. Looks like we’ll (finally!) have some new music up here this time next week!

Not much else of an update, we aren’t gigging right now, but as you know we have a few lined up. We also are on board for this year’s Maine Pagan Pride Day, which is always fun. Last year there were dancers, and I believe that will be the case this year again as well.

This is the challenge: record an album in 29 days, just because you can.
That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo.org) where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days, or the great folks over at February Album Writing Month (fawm.org), who encourage artists to write 14 new songs in February. Maybe they don’t have “Grapes of Wrath” or “Abbey Road” at the end of the month, or maybe they do—but that’s not the point. The point is they get busy and stop waiting around for the muse to appear. Get the gears moving. Do something.

We’re going to give this a go. You can visit our user page to get more info or follow up on our progress.