The Gaslight Anthem

We’re leaving today for Canada to begin our tour supporting Rise Against with Hot Water Music.  I tell you what, if you told my eighteen year old self that one day I’d be on tour with Hot Water, well, let’s just say you couldn’t contain me.  This is awesome…  and I’ve got a deep fondness for Rise’s Tim, he’s a great guy and a wonderful thinker.   I learn a lot from my discussions with that guy.  

So we’re gonna be writing songs on this tour, gearing up for whatever comes next.  If you don’t use it you loose it, I’ve heard.  It’ll be good to get to play a lot of these new songs live for you in the US.   Our sets are looking heavy on the new songs, but there’s some real old ones coming out too in order to balance it out.  We hope you have fun.  We’re sure gonna.  Make sure you come out to the shows on time.   Don’t miss a single beat, or you’ll hear about it from your friends how you missed out.  

Thanks to everybody in advance fro hanging out with us, and thanks to the RISE fellas for having us out again.  

Don’t believe the hype.

XOXO -

Gossip Girl(s)

It’s been a few… sorry about that.  We’ve been very busy lately.  We are nearing the end of our European Festival Run and we’ve got Reading left and then home for a minute.  Then we begin with Rise Against in the States and Canada, then Europe Headline, then some East Coast Headline Dates, then a few radio shows and then home to hibernate for the winter…  

The record has been doing awesome and that’s a great feeling to have everyone come out and tell us how much they love it, so thanks to everybody we’ve met in the last few weeks!
I’m trying to think of all the stuff that’s happened in the last few weeks, but it happens so fast it’s hard to process exactly what is happening… I do know that I got to play at the Stone Pony with The Wallflowers, which was a dream come true!  Hometown and one of my favorite bands…amazing!  Jack Irons plays drums for them now so it was even like I got to play in one fifth of Pearl Jam at the same time… which Jaded Punk Hulk knows all about that!    The Wallflowers new record “Glad All Over” is coming out pretty soon too,
it’s awesome, check it out.   

We did Lollapalooza and I got to grab one of the very first ‘64 American Vintage series Teles thats about to be released by them!  It’s amazing!  Check one of those out for sure!

Now just trying to get some rest on a day off before Reading… Let’s see what happens…

xoxo…

Gossip Girl

Welcome to the tour!!!!!

Thank you to everyone who bought their tickets in advance, we’ve officially SOLD OUT the whole tour!
So thank you all so much from all of us!

Remember we will be planning on playing more shows all over the world throughout this year and into next so if you didn’t get tickets don’t worry, we’ll be doing bigger venues and hitting way more places. We just wanted to trim it back and remind ourselves what it’s like to play in a smaller place and have a blast!

Don’t believe the hype. Don’t believe what you read.
Outlive them all, keep walking and enjoy the scenery.

Play for the lovers…
Xoxo
Gossip Girl

Hey thanks to Jazzy Jazz from Mercury we just got an HD Flip Cam for tour!!!!
So now, we’re finally gonna be able to post up video of what we’re doing, things we wanna talk about and maybe some rehearsals and just to have some memories of all the great places we get to go to! Now you are gonna be able to come along for the ride! I for one am very excited about this. It’s something we’ve looked forward to for a while! Super cool! We’ll start on the July tour beginning next week! Maybe you can watch me trying to learn German on Rosetta stone… I just started… Oh my.
Xoxo- Gossip Girl

I guess I’m gonna have to change this blog’s name to “Sticking Up For People.com”

***EDIT: To clarify ONE THING… Mars Church or whatever… I have no idea what this is.  I’m writing this to address people I read attacking Dustin himself.  I know nothing of this church, and so I can not defend them because I don’t know about them.***

So Mr. Dustin Kensrue feels led by The Lord to leave Thrice and play worship music.
Awesome.  I love that he’s doing that.
   I understand some Thrice fans might be bummed that they broke up, but bands do that from time to time and it happens.  You have to keep in mind that it’s not your band.   These people have lives that are more important than the thing they do that we love and admire.   Real life happens to people in the spotlight.

The thing that drives me crazy is that all of the people who post ridiculousness about all these musicians and love to comment on everything but never actually go and do anything themselves.   Most of you have never taken a stance in your life like some of these people do. (yea, Laura Jane comes to mind…I dare you to come forward like that.)   You all just sit there and post on the internet uneducated quips about how Dustin’s a Christian so that somehow = racist, sexist, homophobe? (I wonder what Teppei thinks of Dustin’s obligatory Christian racism being he’s Japanese and all?)   The guy wants to praise his Lord, whatever… how does that affect you?   Even Fat Mike agrees with “Happy Guy” check that out.  And how did Christians become racist, sexist, homophobes?  What’s a Christian to you? FOX News anchors?  Awesome.   Well thought out, those people are class acts.   Ask my wife all about sexism (def: discrimination or devaluation based on a person’s sex) and how our household is run… I tell you what, this Christian’s house is a woman’s world!  And homophobia (def: a person who fears or hates homosexuals)?  Great. Why don’t you ask anyone who’s gay who knows Dustin about how poorly he’s treated them?  I bet you don’t get the response you were looking for.    Do you even know what these words mean before you go tossing them around people’s necks?  

 Bono, which whatever you think about him, once said something really great… “Don’t judge a band by it’s audience.”  Take that a step further and you go into humanity, don’t judge a group of people by one small percentage.  Are all Muslums terrorists because a few insane people used the religion for their twisted ideas?  No.  Were all German people Nazis? Absolutely not.   It’s a dangerous game you’re playing by being the very thing you speak out against.  Bob Dylan has a great quote I’d love to have posted above the White House’s doors… he said…

“In a soldier’s stance I aimed my hand at the Mongrel dogs who teach.
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy in the instant that I preach.” 

Think about it for one second.  I’m all about people posting their thoughts on forums and expressing themselves freely.  But it’s just silly now, and I truly believe it’s dangerous.
If we, as open-minded music fans become closed off to anything outside our realm of thought, then who will be left to be open?  Where will we be free to express ourselves? 
 

I don’t think we all have to agree… how many bands love Fugazi yet sell t shirts? I do.
But we do have to have open discussions.  We do have to be able to express our thoughts
and not fear chastisement from our peers.  We should be educating each other, and helping each other not throwing around unwarranted insults and slander.   Leave that
to the politicians.   

I can’t spell, I can’t form a proper sentence, and punctuation is a lost cause on me, but
I love you guys and girls, and guys who used to be girls and girls who used to be dinosaurs, and every other one of you.  And I love that Dustin sings about Jesus.  And if God bought him a house, good for him.  Long live Frank Turner.  

XOXO
Gossip Girl  

FAN CLUB!!!!

So with this record I’ve been working on being more consistent. You see, before, I’d just say things, whenever the mood struck me day to day because I figured no one really pays attention to my babble.  So one day I’d feel one thing, and the next something different… I’m a weirdo, and a little bit of a hippy.  

Anyhow, now that I realize people are actually listening to what I say, I figure I’d better get consistent.  …and quick… so I said there’d be a fan club, and THERE IS!!!! 

The 45RPM Club!  You can find it on our new site… www.thegaslightanthem.com

So here’s some things I wanted to point out about it…

1. First, I’m a member of the 10 Club from Pearl Jam (obviously) and there were some big kinks there when they first started it, but I’ve found that now it works pretty well as far as tickets and merch, so we’re gonna use a similar model (the same) so that it works out how I have found my experience with PJ has worked, which is great.

2. The Forum, this is an Official Gaslight Forum, but it’s not the only one… we also have a Fan Run forum called Dimestore Saints (http://thegaslightanthem.bigforumpro.com/)
and you can choose whatever you want to use.  The Dimestore Forum is great and I back it
so that’s gonna stay for fans by fans.  I guess we’ll try to do some different stuff on our forums, like official bootlegs and things like that.  But as with the 10 Club, all the things take time, so it won’t all be ready to go at once.  But we will try to have special things at our Official Forum from time to time, but for consistent and up to the minute stuff, Dimestore Saints is a great place to check out and hang with some really nice people. 

That’s pretty much all I can think of that I wanted to address right now, I’m sure more will come soon.

Enjoy and thanks for joining!
XOXO
Gossip Girl 

FANS FANS FANS!!!!!!!!!!!

So we are in the final stages of developing our Fan Club.   It’s going to be ready before the record comes out.   Here’s what takes so much time.  I’ve been reading your responses on twitter and I am so sorry that some of you got shut out of tickets for our US tour in July.  I am truly sorry that there are scalpers at the waiting for these shows.   But we can’t stop them, because we can’t find them before they get the tickets, it’s a flawed system but avoiding Ticketmaster is NOT the right solution… just read PJ20 the book and you’ll see what happens when you try to do a big tour by yourself.  Fake tickets, out of the way venues, unsafe set ups.  We can’t put our fans at risk.   Ticketmaster isn’t in favor of scalpers either, they don’t make any extra money on them, in fact they try to stop them.

The reason we can’t just put it up immediately is we have to talk to the ticket vendors and work out a percentage of the tickets that we can hold for our fans, we’re trying to hold as many as we can, but we can only do so much at our level.   But know that we have you’re concerns in mind and we are doing the very best we can to bring you tickets at the best price and at the best convenience for you all.  

We’re having the whole website overhauled now for a brand new look and that’s when we’ll have the fan club go up.   So please, please sit tight, and remember we’re doing a small tour only in the beginning, we’ll be doing bigger venues and more dates all over the world, so if you happened to miss out, you will get another chance to see us, with plenty of tickets to go around.  

And as always, we’re not some huge rock and roll band who has forgotten about the very people who put us where we are, and that’s you… the fans.  So know that as you are upset, I’m sitting up at night freaking out at everyone trying to find the very best way to make the fan club work with everything and most importantly that you all get tickets at a fair price, without you having to jump through hoops to get them.

Thank you all for hanging in there!

XOXO
Gossip Girl 

(photo (c)2012 Alison Wotton)

BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG…

Thanks to everyone who came out to our first couple of warm up shows in Brooklyn, LA, and Bamboozle!  We had a great time with you all!   We’re here gearing up to start our
tour with Soundgarden in Europe and then we hit some festivals!   We’ve also got some dates in July with Dave Hause in the US, and then another awesome run with Rise Against
and Hot Water Music!  It’s looking to be a great summer!   We also have more dates planned and we’ll be announcing them in the coming weeks, we’re working on setting up a Fan Club, and we’re getting a brand new website, which is gonna rule!

So we’ve done quite a bit of running around this last week and now we’re gonna try to keep it quiet for the next few days until we hit the road again.  Rest up, rock on.

Can’t wait to see everybody out there!!!!  

Everybody call your local Alternative Station and request “45”  we’re gonna get rock and roll back on the radio!  Let’s do it!  

XOXO
Gossip Girl 

So we’re going back on the road again!  

We’ve got some tour dates announced for a short US run in July… these are special gigs for us.  We decided to do a run of really small venues first rather than blast out the biggest possible places we could because we wanted another chance to remember what it’s like to be right there in the heat of it.  We’re gonna be setting up for the record to come out and we’ll play some new songs, but really what you’re gonna get is LOTS of old favorites.  It’s kind of our “Thanks to Everybody Who Got Us to the Big Places Tour”… so to say thanks we’re gonna dig up the old jams we might not’ve played in a while, in the venues we used to play them.  It’s gonna be super rad.

We’re kind of doing the same thing in Europe with shows like the KOKO show in London, we wanted to say thanks and play right up close to you again.   

So here’s to punk rock shows and hanging out! Let’s get it on!

More Dates to come!   

Don’t believe the hype.   
XOXO
Gossip Girl

PS - whoever’s photo that is… it’s rad so we used it.  Shoot us your name and we’ll be glad to give you credit and a link up.

So Tom’s gonna be Laura now… and in 2012 I still find people on the internet commenting  on another persons life how they insult and condemn a person for his choices.  

How about the people who go through this and never find peace and end up committing suicide?  Would you rather that?  Or maybe he could become a raging drug addict and ruin his life and family?  Would you rather that?  Or maybe we could have rules from a dictator where everyone gets killed for anything they believe against the government, oh wait that doesn’t work…

How about you leave the guy alone.  How about you let another human being make a decision about their lives without your snide prejudices and bigotry? This is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.  From my limited understanding of the subject, it means feeling your whole life like you were born in the wrong skin.  That’s something that 99% of us can’t understand.  Weither you agree or don’t, it’s not your life.  It’s not your family.  it’s not your band, it’s theirs.  

I don’t see the AM! guys very often, or if at all, but I always wish them well.  They’re a great band.  Leave it at that.  Just let them be a great band.

To those being kind, this is not for you…

If this is joke though, it’s in very bad taste to the people who actually go through this. But I will say that I still feel this way about anyone who makes a decision against what we call normal.  You can’t hate them, and they have the right, here in America, to make their own choices and live their lives free of prejudice.  

So go live, Tom.

XOXO
Gossip Girl 

****PS- EDIT NOTE**** - I do realize using “she” and “Laura” are appropriate but I was being considerate, since I don’t know Tom (Laura) that at this current moment to the best of my knowledge He is still a man named Tom, and hasn’t informed me to begin using she and Larua yet, as we don’t speak, and I haven’t read the article yet.  though he will soon be a woman named Laura, which I will then refer to her as such.  Can you please just look at the big picture here?
Thanks.
XOXO
What are you my english teacher?

(photo copyright (c) 2012 Rolling Stone)