Awesome show last night. It was one of those once-in-a-great-while gigs where everything was awesome. The place was packed with people, who were getting really into the bands, all of which played beautifully. Thanks very much to all who came out, thanks of course to Meat Puppets and Squidboy, who in my mind rank at or neat the top of Iowa’s veteran punk/postpunk bands still regularly active today, and always put on a ferocious set, making it always a treat to see them. Their only close contender would have to be House Of Large Sizes, who these days don’t gig quite as often. I don’t have to tell you Meat Puppets rocked the hell out of the house.

We’ve got a ton of songs to lay on you that you haven’t heard yet — when exactly we’ll be doing that I have no idea, except that I think we’ll be playing “Christmas Is Ruined” in our show with Ely Falls next month. I divide them into the new-new songs and the new-old songs, and my classification of some of them may be arguable, but I count six new-new songs (two of them borderline, having been recorded during the These Things Are Ours sessions but unreleased, only one of those we play live with any regularity) and an impressive nine new-old songs, plus maybe one or two more on a to-do list. Maybe we’ll do a double album. I think it might be fun to release mp3s of demos of some of them, like one at a time maybe every couple weeks or so, through this website. Comment here and let us know what you think of that idea, plus that will also let me know if anybody’s actually been reading our web site.

Saturday November 21 is Why Make Clocks’ first Waterloo show in a few years and my return to my hometown to show old friends what I’ve been up to lately. We’re playing with two of the best bands in town (Teddy Boys and Give Away The Plot) plus a band from Iowa City that I don’t know much about (Dead Larry) at The Reverb Rock Garden, otherwise known as “the stage in the back corner of Spicoli’s.” Hope to see a lot of familiar faces there.

Well, we finally got us a Waterloo/Cedar Falls gig put together at the venerable Spicoli’s/The Reverb on the 21st of this month. It’s a heck of a bill, with two of that area’s best bands, The Teddy Boys and Give Away The Plot, and Iowa City’s Dead Larry. We’re playing third of four, just before The Teddy Boys headline. I highly recommend staying to check them out, if by some freak chance you haven’t seen them yet. If you have, you already know you’ll be staying for their set.

We’ve been working on new songs like crazy — some completely new stuff, others resurrections of old Why Make Clocks tunes you maybe haven’t heard in a while. I’m really liking the way some of the old songs are sounding with this lineup, especially slow songs with the big sounds of the gear we’re playing on. It’s one of the things I really like about this band right now, that the songwriting has this introspective thing that’s usually given more of a folky treatment, but we also love the power of electric guitar and a bigass drum. It makes for a really great combination of muscle and heart. Also, I love loud and slow, and Will does slow better than any drummer I’ve played with before. Playing slow is harder than you’d think. The new-new tunes are a bit more rock oriented, with some Sonic Youth like qualities. Smack in the middle of the holiday season we’ve got a show coming up, at the Mews with Ely Falls, where we plan to unveil one of the new-old tunes, an epic soul-crusher called “Christmas Is Ruined.” Some earlier WMC lineups have demoed it, and played it live occasionally in some of those test-the-audience moments, so you might have heard it before.

And don’t forget, we’ve got a super awesome gig this weekend (Sunday evening, in particular) at the Mews with The Meat Puppets and Squidboy. It’s going to be nuts. If you don’t come, you’ll wish you had.