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.