This Could All Be Yours Tuesday

WARNING: The following is a really lame, congratulatory blog dedicated to a band that I have had an unhealthy obsession with for the past 11 years. This blog could cause eye bleeding, runny nose, gout, and in some cases severe "get off it, nobody wants to read about a stupid band you loser" disorder. Reader discretion is advised.

This Tuesday marks the release of the newest album from my favorite band, Guster. I'm really excited because it's been almost five years since their last album, even though they only briefly stopped touring just in time for everyone of them to have kids. I remember when their last album, "Ganging Up on the Sun" came out, I was a freshman in college and treked out to Providence with my best friend the day of the release to watch them perform live at Station Park. It was awesome. Although, the crowd only knew one track...the one that had been released on iTunes a week before and was currently playing on WBRU in between audio garbage such as Fall Out Boy and...well...Fall Out Boy. Naturally, I downloaded the track, "One Man Wrecking Machine," and played it 4000 times that week causing some sort of dementia with my friend, who went through phases of both love and hate for Guster not unlike a recovering alcoholic that week. I later apologized...but totally didn't mean it.

Don't criticize The Gusters. A**hole.

Anywho, the new album, "Easy Wonderful" has been in the works for like three years and it's finally done and produced and the hyper critical trio are done chopping songs for it. Several songs were left off because lead singer Ryan Miller didn't like them, one of the guys left the band (their jack of all trades "extra" guy, Joe) two weeks ago, and every song on the album is going to have a video for it.

I know all of this because of twitter, road journals, and most importantly, facebook.

The guys of Guster have a strange sense of humor, so I love the Twitter postings and the blogs. The video thing is actually more of a contest where they are taking any videos into consideration for their only currently undirected song "Bad, Bad World." They're doing this through facebook as well. Today, they released all the songs from the album on their facebook page and band website, and I've poured through a few of the tracks already. Yes, I'm at work. No, I'm apparently not professional enough to wait. They're just lucky I have the common courtesty to do it in my sound studio, and not on the air.

The point of all this (not really, I just wanted to blog about the album) is how dominant a promotional force social networking is now compared to just five years ago. I've known every step of the process in making the album and I've now heard all the tracks and seen several of the videos just on facebook alone. Guster is a band that's very close to their fans, and it seems like this social networking is a perfect storm of self promotion for them. Granted, it's not the greatest way to get new fans...but it's the best way to please the one's you already have, and that's all Guster seems to want to do with "Easy Wonderful." Through the blogs and the postings, fans already knew months ago that this was going to be a much more upbeat, uplifting album (again, they all had kids) then their last effort, which was sort of a melancholy reaction to the emotional misery of the beginning of the decade.

I've bobbed my head to "Do You Love Me?" and finger drummed to "This Could All Be Yours" and rewatched the stellar video for "Stay With Me Jesus" about 75 times in the past week. I've read about the song writing process and the different instruments Guster learned when they were trying to flesh out the album and not go back to "just bongos and acoustic guitars" like they were known for on college campuses in the early 90's. Hell, I actually heard some of the songs on the album six months ago when I saw them live in Worcester and they announced that some of the stuff they were playing was a "test run" to see if they'd want it on the album and, therefore, play it over and over at live shows. After the concert, there were a dozen photos on facebook tagging them in the songs that were new. On YouTube, the new songs being performed live sprouted up like weeds every time you searched the band's name.

Guster doesn't have YouTube take them down. They love that stuff. Most of the band's success was based on viral videos of their shows being passed from person to person in the 90's, and the brunt of the success in the early 2000's came from similar word of mouth and the sprouting of the internet.

So I guess none of this is surprising at all.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a song to listen to instead of a commercial to make...