Hey! I didn’t see you there…how long have you been standing there? what exactly did you see? Oh…that’s ok then. No don’t be like that you didn’t miss much…its not like that we are hiding anything from you…oh ok..well show you…but its not pretty…infact…you really shouldn’t be seeing this:

Thanks for reading our blogs…your participation in what we do means the world to us and we hope you become even louder. Its a different world for musicians and audiences…the line between us is becoming blurred…one day in the future we’ll just think of a song and you’ll hear it. But really, its fantastic to have you around and please let us know your thoughts.

We have been driving up and down the Eastern Seaboard for the past couple of weeks on tour with Joshua Radin and The Watson Twins. It has been a great tour for us and we have met so many new faces along the way. Birmingham, Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, St. Pete, Atlanta, North Carolina and Washington DC…we’ve had a ball. We have alot of emails from people wanting us to come to their high schools and colleges for a Charity Water concert and we will be reaching out to you all shortly to set up something for the Spring. If you didn’t give us your info, reach out to us on Facebook and we will add your school to the list.

Here’s a Diary from the Radin Tour:

and…another!

Thanks again for tuning in!

Isaac and Thorry
The Kin

Heading down the Eastern Seaboard to meet Joshua Radin and The Watson Twins on tour for the rest of the month. This is our first time out as a duo since May, as we have been playing with a full band all Summer long. We swing low in the the van, ‘Baby’ only three amigos deep and there is certainly an excitement in the air to be on tour again (even though we have only been off the road for a week).

As you can see from the above picture…taken right now…our three dashboard mascots adorning our ride. The first is our safety mascot…’Cursulis’…he is the ugliest and scariest monster face we could find in the hope that he will scare off everyone else that is scary (being the most scary already). The second is an orange police warning flasher, a lighting fixture which Thorry could not leave behind one day in a truck stop. We have used it on many occaisions to blast through traffic, get out of compromising situations and get priority night time access to all drive through food outlets. The third is a brass fitted ‘we will rock you’ statue that was given to us by fans in Northampton, MA. The sun is making its way down and we are getting excited to be playing an acoustic set for a few weeks.

A song that we love and that we hope to record soon is called, ‘Two of a Kind’. We might play it live on this tour. It goes like this…

There was excitement…childish excitement when we discovered a bag of fireworks we picked up in Indiana last year. We have been designing ways to let them off…this one was the least intelligent…’cracker in a bottle’. 

We have also changed the music segment of our video blogs from ‘Songs from abroad’ to ‘Song For a Broad’ and will be spontaneous jams for unsuspecting dames…

Soonest,

I, T

Amigos!

Writing to you from Panama…no we are not fleeing the government for tax evasion, nor are we involved in some complex south American crime ring. We have taken a week to relax after 7 months of touring and thought it best to get the hell out of dodge. We managed to find a hole in the wall internet cafe, there is a man guarding the side with an AK47 and smiling like he is holding a lollipop. These people know how to party and live like its their last day on earth.

We want to thank ALL of our fans and friends who came out and supported us on our recent headline tour to release THE UPside. We had so much fun and learnt alot about the music we play. It was great opening up the set and taking our time to bring out some of the tunes that get pushed off a ’support’ act set list; like ‘Blue on blue’ and ‘Photographs’.

The guy is tapping his gun on the wall…which either means he has an itch or we need to get off this computer as he needs to skype his mother in Argentina…

We will leave you with two videos from our show in Northampton, a small utopian city in Western Massachusetts we love very much:

i don’t think i’ve ever felt unraveling till now ….. there’s no description for what pushing every last bit of you into a yr feels like is there ? and then stopping to take a breath …i feel like a 2 inch tape machine rewinding well sitting here, all i can think of is a insignificant, but desperate need for a cuppa tea…. its either that or an afternoon vodka hmm.. the journey feels like it only just begun….we just released the upside… then again …i don’t think it ever stops …. music never needed to be about albums and cycles.. it always stays relevant.. something easily forgotten in the eyes and ears of the artist…. the desire is to always re invent to peel away . maybe just to unravel.. to get closer to the core … i think maybe my core is a caveman?…someone that likes digging holes in the sand at least .. whats it like to be a true listener? i’ve always just made music ….or noise…
t

Hey there you with a sad face…live it up. The words in the middle were omitted because they are really bad lyrics…but hey it was the early 90s. While we have been touring for the last 6 months we have adopted a few techniques of stress relief. This is not the kind of stress that comes from an annoying boss or the crustation of a cubicle, but from the sheer insanity of driving and driving and driving in an enclosed space with the same baboons. These mood enhancing rituals have often included: making up strange parodies to songs (especially our own and friend’s bands), buying fireworks in states where they are legal and letting them off defiantly in states where they are not (this we will blame on our Road manager JV), looking for useless items in truck stops that we simply don’t need (Thorry recently purchased a police light…which is useful but we really shouldn’t have it at all), we hit the push up bar as we pump the gas (something akin to a bad Levi’s commercial), make JV do his strange voice that consists of him sucking air inwards (this should be at the top of the stress relieving list), eat eggs every single morning at diner’s that have over enthusiastic Italian or Jewish mothers working the tables, meeting our fans and hearing their stories as talking about ourselves bores us to painful painful tears …as you can tell from this here blog. The rest of this list will not be told yet for fear of being tracked by the F B I

When we were recording THE UPside with Jack he kept thinking we were singing ‘Have you seen the Waterbugs’ as opposed to ‘Waterbreaks’ (for anyone who thought we were singing ‘Watersnakes’…it was even more superb when he looked dissapointed that we werent singing about a plague of Australian locusts.

Waterbreaks is the first song on the new album and it came out quite like Never Be The Same…quite accidentally. Especially lyrically. Musically, it was a cool riff that Thorry had been playing during a rehearsal at the Engine Room down on Canal one day and we all looked over and nodded our head. But lyrically it happened over time. Our grandmother is a very wise woman who was an English teacher in Adelaide, Australia. Her name is Jacqueline. She sat us down one day and told us the story of Mark Twain and how he would walk the docks and watch as the ships would come in. She pointed out that he chose his name to sound like the phrase that the salty old men on the warf would cry out as the ships would come in, “MARK TIME, MARK TIME”. This immediately grabbed us because it was like a warning to stay sharp and alert otherwise you would grabbed by a moving rope and get sucked off the wharf and under one of these old ships. We took it as the motto of the song and Thorry and I went to work on a call and response type vocal jam…the chorus lyric came out phonetically and had no real meaning behind it, however Isaac had a recurring dream over a few years of tidal waves (yes he was washed away a number of times). At the end of the day the song is about the tidal wave of the moment, as big and daunting as a maritime ship approaching, coming at you so ‘Mark Time’!

So if its waterbugs or tidal waves…we go it.

Thanks for reading this blog and watch out for moving ropes!

Love

I, T

We apologise for the choppiness of this blog as it is being written in between scenes of the new Larry David episodes which is not nearly as good as Faulty Towers, but it satisfies a mindless urge to witness other people’s neurosis.

We write to you on the eve of our first headline run in a year (since we started being a good little support act) and the night after the release of our new album, THE UPside. It is an exciting time, almost like a bird falling out of a nest (a one winged dove perhaps) and hoping it remembers how to fly before the ground. Overwhelmed is a state we try to avoid, but keep coming back to like Pavlov’s dog. It keeps a steady flow of adrenaline in the blood.

Time after time we were told how people would love to fall asleep to Rise and Fall. We want you to wake up to THE UPside, to get moving and look up at the sun. It was an important time in our lives, we had alot of stuff we were going through that we had to leave behind and move on from and find the upside in things…so here it is:

Grab your copy of ‘THE UPside’ now:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=332167756&s=143441

Thank god its friday…we have forgotten the feeling of Friday, since Friday and Monday are no different to Sunday…any day is a work day on the road. I can remember how good it felt at School…clawing at each minute to get to the bell. I imagine it feels somewhat the same in an office job, waiting to get rid of your boss for a couple of days and go let your hair down with your friends. It just feels good to imagine the excitement of Friday…the weekly revolution of emotions built up and squashed down, washed down with coffee and small rebellious conversations with co-workers…until it erupts. Maybe we all gotta get out more?…not just into the bars…but out of our heads…into what we really feel. We press on into the Friday traffic near Syracuse, NY, as we follow the Rusted bus. Tomorrow will mark a solid 6 months of national touring and our last show with Rusted Root. If you haven’t seen the live, you really should experience it. They have taught us some new tricks and have been very good to us. Mike’s voice is strong and primitive and Liz makes otherworldly sounds while the band jams out deep grooves that take the listener on a walkabout.

One of our favourite songs on THE UPside is ‘Never Be The Same’. It was written and recorded on the same day in about an hour in Robert Lang Studio, Seattle. Today we are previewing it on youtube for your listening pleasure. Here it is:

We have been writing out our set list for our headline tour in October, it will be good to stretch out and play a full set…These are REALLY important shows for us and need all the support we can get from our friends and fans. If you live anywhere near the cities below or know people who do, please forward the info below and bring a crew out to the Album launch parties we are throwing. Just in case the shows sell out, please get your tickets early!

Here are the shows:

PHILLY – Thursday October 8th, TIN ANGEL
DC – Friday October 9th, JAMMIN JAVA
NYC – Saturday October 10th, HIRO BALLROOM
BOSTON – Friday October 16th, RED ROOM
NORTHAMPTON – Saturday October 17th, IRON HORSE

All Tickets available through: http:​/​/​www.​thekin.​com

Thanks for your support,

IK, TK

The Kin

Its a smoky Tuesday in Bucks County PA. We have been racing around the Northeast for the past week trying to keep up with the Rusted Root bus and having a ball playing back on the East coast again. Our first show with Root was Asbury Park in NJ. We had never played the infamous ‘Stone Pony’ before and were excited to see what The Boss saw many years ago. There is nothing quite like the beach cultures of the East coast…always quirky boardwalks, funnel cakes, toothless old men fishing with no luck, and strange gift shops that sell everything you don’t need. We met a whole crew of original locals that night who impressed us with their tales of the Grateful Dead and stories of a day gone by when live music seemed to play a larger part in people’s lives…

We hustled our way down to Falls Church Virginia, where we played the old State Theater. We befriended ‘Preacher’, the very talented and magnanimous drummer for RR and hung out listening to stories of their road trips (including their recent interview at High Times). The next morning we headed over to ‘Voice of America’ radio and played them a few tunes from the UPside. If your in DC, get your butts down to our headline show at Jammin Java on Oct. 9th or else!

Whats the deal with North East traffic? Getting past DC, NYC or Boston to go anywhere on time has been a constant battle for our tour manager Jim Kaminski. We have known JV for 7 years now and he was our best friend before we asked him to be our TM, so we share EVERYTHING. When one of us is stressed and in need of venting, we just let loose and vent. So when JV gets road rage…we all get it.

A little back story on Jim…One Halloween some years back, Thorry and I were in NYC and threw a party downtown for our mates. There was an unusual cast of onlookers and some were particularly crazy. A fellow Australian artist, named Nadia Ackerman (check her out) brought her ‘big deal’ friend Jim, who was the head buyer for Tower Records in NYC. The first thing you will notice about Jim is his eyes. They glow in the dark some piercing green color and we think they have some hypnotic power to them. We immediately hit it off with Jim and he helped us out for years to come at Tower Records by putting an unsigned band in a listening station and putting up big posters for our local shows. It wasn’t until the Tower fell and we were starting to tour nationally that we asked him, ‘do you think you could come and boss us around for a bit on the road?’. We had no idea how much fun we would have until we did our first national tour with Josh Kelley and Pat McGee Band in 2007 right after the release of ‘Rise and Fall’. On top of having a brother bond to hold the band together, we also have a third brother in Jim. Some say we rely too much on each other, but it really feels like you need that kind of force behind you to keep doing something as unreasonable and gruelling as constant touring. We know how to amuse ourselves and find relief to any situation. We are grateful…beyond grateful for his friendship and his commitment to The Kin. And we wish he would stop swearing so much…

Back to now…we high tailed it to Boston, where we played the House of Blues. Driving down along the Fenway while there is a Red Sox game on is intense. We have never witnessed a more sport driven city than Boston. They deserve to win for their passion alone…and ofcourse JV is a devout Yankees fan so the first thing we have to do is make sure he is not wearing his Yankees T-shirt. We were thrilled to see 80 or so of our fans pay alot of money to come and see a short set…so we are really looking forward to our OWN show in Boston at the Red Room on Oct 16th! It was Darwin Johnson’s birthday so he got messed up and was kissing people and had to be extracted from all kinds of compromising situations…he made it out alive.

Hauling it down to Philly next we listened to the new recordings we did in SF and decided that it would form the basis for an ongoing side project that will be called BUSHRANGER. Watch out for them…

The TLA in Philly was our next hit…we love the sound there and the staff are such dedicated locals. Philly on a Friday night is wild…more wild than NYC in many parts…rougher and more soulful. We had a laugh trying to squeeze our van and trailor behind the venue along the small cobble stone pathway made for horse and carriage. If your in Philly, be sure to come to the show at the Tin Angel on Oct 8th, it our own show.

We are excited to announce that for the next two weeks leading up to our official release of The UPside on October 6th we will be putting songs for your listening pleasure on youtube. The first song to drop is WATERBREAKS…here it is!

Stay tuned and get your tickets now for the headline run in October – NYC, Philly, DC, Northampton and Boston! Please spread the word to those who have and have not heard us live…we need a little help from our friends!

Cheers

Isaac and Thorry
The Kin