Hope everyone had a fun and spooky Halloween. It was quite cold and rainy here so not as many kids out as usual, but i suspect Malloween was pretty well attended due to that fact. It's actually a pretty good idea for the smaller kids and their parents - bus them to a mall and have them trick or treat around to all the stores that give out candy and perhaps a promotional flyer too! Fun for the whole family.

So I spent my Halloween downloading a selection of live material that my buddy Todd over in Budapest had assembled for our friend Jamie, guitarist extraordinaire, when he made the move for Budapest back to England. Todd, Jamie, Mike and myself had a sweet little band called the Tea Thieves during my time in Budapest, and we actually became quite proficient with the recordings, putting out 2 studio demos and a selection of live stuff during my time there. The live tracks brought back some great memories of weekly gigs at the Fregatt pub, an ex-pat bar where you could be guaranteed a decent crowd of english-speaking friends and patrons. These guys were some of the best singer/songwriter/players that i have had the pleasure of jamming with and it was definitely one of the many highlights of my stay. Downloading the songs reminded me that i had posted our first demo from back in December '01 online for my friends back home to download when i was over there, so i will post the link here for any interested souls looking to check out some new music. With 3 songwriters in the band the material spanned a wide range of styles, from folk to blues to white-boy reggae to pop rock and some funky jams. The demo online comes up the middle as far as our material went. Nothing too heavy, but you can hear the 3 distinct songwriting styles over the first 3 tracks. Todd doubles up and gets the fourth track as well as the first. The demo can be downloaded online here. It was recorded and mixed over a short period of 2 days, so it has a certain "cleanliness" to it that you sometimes lose in a pile of overdubs and effects when locked in the studio for months. No overdubs except for backing vocals and a maximum of 2 takes on any track. Right click and save as, and change the extension to .mp3. I don't remember why this had to be done, but it did.

My plan is to have an extended musical section of my site when it expands, where i will be posting a selection of musical nuggets from a variety of bands i've played with, spanning back to 1994. But for now, this will have to do!