Hello Madeira friends!
We sincerely hope you're having a great summer! It's been a fun one for us - and things are about to really speed up over the next six weeks!
First of all, "Tribal Fires" has been out for almost five months now, and is doing great! We've received half a dozen excellent reviews so far, and we expect a few more to come. We've also gotten many truly nice words about the CD from you, and we are both grateful and very happy to hear them. Double Crown tells us that they are very pleased with the sales so far, so thank you for that as well!
Second, we've been getting out and about over the past few months: We had a great weekend in early May in North Carolina, playing the AWESOME Instro Summit in Chapel Hill, where we got to meet one of the newest of our favorite people, Cousin Crispy, and shared the stage with many great bands such as the Mystery Men?, Kill, Baby...Kill!, and in particular the amazing Aqualads, who we were privileged to play with twice that weekend! We were also very lucky that we got to play twice in mid-June with the simply awesome Exotics, both on their home turf of Milwaukee, WI and in the Chicago burbs! Both weekends were a real blast - thanks to all the people that made these shows happen, we really hope we get to do it again soon!
Finally, we're about to commence a super-busy period (at least by our standards!) - nine shows in four different states in six weeks! We start our five-show California tour in just ten days, followed shortly after returning from CA with back-to-back shows in Indy and Champaign, IL, and then Chicago and Oxford, OH just a couple of weeks after that. The five California shows should be quite epic - playing two gigs around San Francisco with two completely different setlists (one highly energetic, one completely mellow), then San Diego followed by the world-famous Surf Guitar 101 Convention in Los Alamitos, then finishing up at the Huntington Beach pier, four years almost to the day since our last time there! And we get to play with so many of our good friends and some of the best surf bands in the world today: Jon & the Nightriders, El Ray, the TomorrowMen, the Exotics, the Secret Samurai, the Cocktail Preachers, and many, many more! (For full details on all these shows, please check out our Shows page.
Lots of good stuff ahead! We very much hope to see some of you at some of these shows. And if not, well, we're already working on setting up some Fall gigs, so stay tuned!
Enjoy the rest of the summer - and we highly recommend you make Tribal Fires its official soundtrack! :)
--The Madeira