shawn avery

" my life has become a fable ."

this is a message thread that took place this weekend. sent to the spots myspace page. this is why i love this band: 9.20.07- unnamed bham band - would yall want to set up birmingham show somewhere soon? 09.21.07- the spots - i don't understand the question. 9.22.07- unnamed bham band - sorry, we'll take that as a no? awesome. we played some fairly dark music at speakeasy this past weekend. we had a nice crowd eventually, sometime between 11 and 12. we apparently kept playing until almost 1am. wow. i guess we were having our " prince - darling nikki scene in purple rain " moment. nice .

we are continuing our residency at speakeasy with a show this coming saturday night. it promises to be more interesting visually, and perhaps more texturally ambient than our last few shows. there's no filming or recording happening, so hopefully we can just channel/invent some great music for a few hours. october is the busiest month yet for the spots. along with promoting our new ep, we are doing an appearance on fox news, back to back shows on october 26th and several private gigs. we now have a means of purchasing the ep online, thanks to fred at laser's edge, one of the finest independent record stores in the south eastern u.s. click here to purchase the ep online, or grab a copy at one of our shows. here's the poster for this week's show. i asked a mutual friend of the spots, hunter barrow to design this one. he's an art director in bham. and i sorta have a mild man crush on him. our october calendar: 10.11.07 - fox 6 good day alabama 10.11.07 - mcwane ce...

this was the best show (musically) that i watched in austin at SXSW . bottletree co-founder, brian teasley is playing drums in this clip. myself, along with members of through the sparks, red blondehead & bottletree staff were standing at the side of the stage. antone's has very high ceilings by the way. it made me feel secure. i think this was our last night in austin . i can't remember. anyway... as for her debut record, you should buy it. track 10, human racing, is fantastic. click here to check it out. and the brazilian / pat metheny -like guitar part is at once prog-ish and traditional. perhaps this is the girl from ipanema , 45 years later, exchanging the lyrical basis from helô pinto to romeo and juliet at one point, posthumously apparently . she then moves on to address other impossible characters. side note: les nuby (verbena, vulture whale) plays a cool xylophone figure on this track. les played lead guitar this past saturday for the much a...

so... i've been traveling and otherwise busy this month. here's a little bit of what i have been up to... on the music front, ashby and i along with a good friend have something in the works that will hopefully influence the bham music scene (and beyond) in a positive way. not much to mention yet. but it is percolating. that same week, alison and i went to morgan's birthday party, which also doubled as an engagement party... here's some pics i took with morgan's camera: the next day, morgan and duquette played the role of a married couple during the filming of a video for the song falling out of favor with the neighbors by through the sparks. here's a few photos from that shoot. i dunno who took these... the week or so before i went to maine was basically spent catching up on the housecleaning and doing some planning for the next spots show. and of course packing... i'll post some photos of the spots in a little while... for now, here is the direct ...