Tag: Indie

Live

Wild Weekends

I must provide a recap on our recent weekend adventure.

It started over a month ago, when a good friend asked Diwas to host one of the weekly open mic nights she organizes in a newly established Brooklyn music venue called Shindig. We love getting out of town and visiting our friends, so of course he agreed, and we put it on our calendar,   ‘a weekend in Brooklyn in June’.  It was May at the time, so adding something to the next month’s agenda felt like such a ways off. But boy does time fly! The weekend was here before we knew it and ended it up being the perfect time to get out of town.

We hit the road early Saturday morning only to get an unexpected surprise on the way….

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Our first band flat! I had never gotten a flat before, so I kind of thought it was exciting. The next surprise was that Diwas, a guy who I’ve never seen do much car work, got in there and successfully put on the spare like a pro. Definite road trip buddy! We were back on the road in no time 🙂

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We drove for about two hours with the little donut spare, and despite feeling extra nervous in the nyc tunnels, the ride was pretty smooth all the way to Shindig! Our luck returned when we got to the venue in time, found a parking spot right outside, and enjoyed a night of entertaining and diverse open mic performances. Here is some of the crew:

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Live

close but no cigar

‘Front Desk Runaway’ is one of those songs that Diwas and I have been omitting from our set list. For some reason, something about it just didn’t sit well but we couldn’t pin point exactly what was wrong. So, we decided to avoid this song at our live shows, at least until we would have time to plop ourselves down and give it a good working out. As many of you songwriters know, some songs just don’t quite make the cut. We thought Front Desk Runaway would be one of our ‘close but no cigar’ songs.

Anyway, I’m not sure why we added it to our set last month at the Elephants for Autism Festival. We hadn’t changed anything since I first wrote it back in February, but I guess we both just missed it!

Turns out, we had a lot of fun playing it! So much fun that the song even creeped onto another set list, last Sunday’s show. Not to duplicate content, (I already posted the Front Desk Runaway from Elephants for Autism Festival), but here is a live video of the same song from our Chapter House show last Sunday. This neglected song just needs a little TLC!

Any other musicians out there with their own ‘close but no cigar’ songs??? Lets work on these babies!

Live

Boogie Shakedown!

What a fun Memorial Day Weekend! Thanks to some very nice friends, we were able to play at a local outdoor party, an annual Boogie Shakedown. The air was a little chilly for late May, but clear skies let the heat of the sun keep us warm. Our set was a rough one, but a few musical kinks can’t stop us from having a blast while playing live 🙂  It’s just encouragement to keep practicing! Plus, we’re our own worst critics right?

rungs at boogie shakedown

There’s no place better than a sunny outdoor party with friends, food, and fuzzy beverages to enter new musical territory..

 

Live

Milking – Deerhoof cover from our LOT 10 show!

Before watching this video, I must first tell you the story of the drums. It goes all the way back to when I was a confused little highschooler.   My parents temporarily decided to reward my sisters and I for getting good grades and a drum kit arrived after    my one-year-younger-than-me sister got honor roll. Now none of us really knew how to play music, so setting up a drum kit in my sister’s room was a horrible recipe for loud aimless noise.  As some of you might know, drums have this way of hooking you into a trance. Once you sit there and start playing, its like a black hole of time! (Is this just me?)

The drums survived our beatings through high school, and when my sister moved up to live with me, you bet she brought them! With aged hardware and parts missing, they were first used in the attempted formation of my girl band. I met a girl, she wanted to start a band. Then we met another girl, she wanted to play drums. I happened to a have the drum kit, and we took it from there! We didn’t know a thing about setting up or tuning drums, and we shamelessly used random kitchen supplies to make up for missing parts, like the high hat that we concocted from small grilling sheets. Yes this really happened.

The drums now live in my apartment. New and improved with replaced parts, the drums on the premises come in super handy when friends stop by to jam. They’ve also allowed my husband and me to practice at the same skill level. I am a beginner at guitar, and he is a beginner at drums. Our excitement about this resulted in a recent crazy idea, ‘Lets bring them to our show!’

The best part about our band is that anything goes, so bring the drums we did! It was a blast 🙂

 

 

 

Live, Music

That feeling you get when you’re performing..

I really used to think that playing music at home in the privacy of my comfortable room was the best feeling ever.  If you met me just two years ago, I probably wouldn’t even admit that I played music and not ever would I want to do it in front of anybody!  But now we have a show coming up this Sunday at the Chapter House in Ithaca NY,  and a cannot wait to play on stage.  I love hearing our music wildly fill the air  in a large dimly lit room  and I love how fast the songs seem to fly by in front of a crowd.   It makes me so happy when my friends come to support us and I  literally feel butterflies when  I meet new people who enjoy what they hear.

At some point between two years ago and now, I realized my fear of playing live stemmed from self-consciousness about the possibility of making mistakes, or making a fool out of myself in front of others.  One day something hit me on the head and I thought, “Wait a minute, why should I deprive myself of a new experience because of fear of what others might think?!?  That is the dumbest thing ever!” Today I believe sharing songs through live performance is one of the most rewarding facets of  being a musician.

If any new musicians out there who haven’t yet played for an audience read this,  I encourage you to go to an open mic or book a show!   If you’re waiting for the right time or the perfect song or the best crowd,  throw those notions out the window! That feeling you get when you’re performing will be worth it.   🙂

Lyrics

Writing Lyrics: Expressing past memories and emotions

I remember getting out of  elementary school in the early afternoon and bolting out on my bike to ride around the neighborhood with my friends. Our 3 little blocks seemed like an endless world of grasshoppers and lizards and perfectly branched climbing trees. We defined our surroundings by a combination of limited knowledge and our Disney influenced imaginations. A haunted house at the end of a long driveway, a hole in the ground that we tirelessly dug to China, the Creek where pirates had once been who we sent bottled messages to, and the sky fort in my backyard that transformed from a ship on the sea into a castle on an island into an airplane in the sky.

Now I’ve gone back there a few times over the past five years. Walking the entire neighborhood in a short 20 min, I recalled strong emotions of adventure, fear and excitement that were once triggered by childhood fantasies. Have I lost this ability to create new dimensions? Have I acquired enough knowledge to scientifically understand everything in front of me and closed in on the gaps that used to be filled with make-believe? Or could I be suppressing a playfulness that is not a social norm in the workplace adult world? I remember this empowering phenomenon that grew in the company of my childhood friends. When we were in the same wavelength, sharing the same imaginative visions of being witches or steering a pirate ship. We fed off of each other’s energy and fueled each other’s energy.

I tried writing a song about these feelings and memories. Here is a video from one of our first attempts playing the song live. Right now its called, ‘Best Friend,’ but I’m working on the recording so everything is subject to change! (things can get crazy when it comes to recording 🙂 ) I dedicate the song to all of my good friends who I grew up with. Man we have sure learned a lot of lessons together! I’m so happy to have music as a channel through which to express these childhood memories.

 

About us

So what the heck is my blog about?!

In the most simple explanation, the purpose of my blog is to share the fun musical endeavors of The Rungs, an electronic indie pop band formed by my husband (Diwas) and me (Mandy). Let me give you a bite-size version of the back story:

My husband and I spent our first year together in a long-distance relationship while I completed college. He was a dedicated guitar player in a local rock band in upstate New York and I was studying plant science at the University of Delaware.  I was never quite fond of my college town (no offense Delaware!) and as soon as I graduated I loaded up my car and headed to New York to live with my ever so compatible dude 🙂

Now being a Florida native, in the very beginning of my first upstate New York winter I discovered I needed a serious indoor hobby. Something that could keep me busy while sitting next to the heater in thick warm socks from December to March…those long winter months!

With Diwas in and out of the house on band tours and practices, I took advantage of the rotating population of guitars in our living room. ‘Okay guitars, its you and me, lets do this!’ Diwas taught me basic scales and chord progressions, bought me a metronome and downloaded Reaper, a nice user-friendly recording software to my computer. At this point my little musically unexperienced brain was just like, ‘Wwwowww!!!&!#@$@!!!!!’ I thought that playing music at home was just the best thing ever and I pushed through my 9-to-5 plant-bio-lab-tech job with the thought in the back of my head, “I can’t wait to get home and plant myself in the living room with a guitar!!!” I spent evenings recording layers of guitar on top of each other (You can only imagine how awkward the first recordings sounded), somehow became obsessed with the White Stripes,  and for reasons I will explain in a future blog post I started singing.

About a year after this newfound hobby (or should I say lifestyle?), Diwas organized a Birthday Bash for me at a local venue. We played a few songs together and it was a blast of a bash! We got such a great response from friends that we continued to play together around town. Eventually we needed a name, and being the clever devil he is, Diwas dubbed us The Rungs.

Oh what a fateful night that Birthday Bash was! …as you can see in the dark fuzzy cell phone image provided by my sister… How long we’ve come since then!

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Fast forward to today: I’m boiling over with excitement about music and I needed a place to log and share this overflow of musical energy! I must admit I was a little hesitant at the thought of starting a blog, not really knowing what to write about or how to organize my pages. For the past few weeks I’ve been dipping my toes in and slowly swishing around the WordPress waters.  Already I’ve had a chance to visit some really cool blogs by very creative people! I’m discovering new music that others are sharing,  found some other great bloggers to follow, annnd I have more ideas about what pages to add. So blah blah blah enough about me and Thank You WordPress! I’m ready to get blogging 🙂