Hello everyone,

It is with great pleasure to anounce that my new record is now available for listening and purchasing. At the moment, the only place to get the record (Download or physical C.D.) is through my BandCamp Website. Please visit http://kevinlong.bandcamp.com/ !

One thing I keep hearing lately is that you’ve got to have a good story if you want to make it anywhere in music these days. An easily palatable back-story is just as important, maybe even more important, than the music itself in this age of attention deficit multimedia over-saturation disorder.

I was talking with some musician friends who are more successful than myself a few months ago and this came up. One of these buddies expressed relief that he was not always being pegged as the “post-christian angst” guy anymore, though it had served the purpose for a time in helping establish his fanbase, and another mentioned that people grabbed on to the fact that he used to be a fashion designer before going into music.

When I was on my first real tour last year, the main act I was on tour with was struggling a bit with a lull in ticket and album sales compared to previous years. In talks with his management team, they brought up this same point. Maybe he didn’t have a good story anymore, or that times had changed and that having a good story is really what is making things sell, that this is what they were observing in the marketplace today. This is a man who has written a hundred great songs.

I am probably just as guilty as the next guy for feeding into this–maybe it is an unavoidable part of our nature and our curiousity. The mythology of people like Nick Drake and Edith Piaf are probably a big part of why I’ve obsessed over their music. Even James Taylor (who I am somehow frequently compared to), the quintessence of Dad-folk, is the recovering heroin junky of “Fire and Rain” fame.

I’ll admit that in reading the bio blips for “Father John Misty” (Josh Tillman), I found them compelling for some reason. That this guy, after becoming so disenchanted with the state of acoustic folk music and depressed over living in Seattle and playing in a super famous band, hit the road with nowhere to go and a bunch of mushrooms and tripped his balls off and wrote a “novel” and then made a really silly and great record (it really is great though, maybe my favorite album of 2012).

Naturally, as an aspiring musician and songwriter trying to get my name out there, seeing these over-arching micro-histories as being of such apparent importance, has got me thinking about what my story might be. I’ve even hung my head a few times in despondence, with the uncomfortable thought that pursuing any career success in music might be an exercise in futility simply because I don’t have some kind of good story.

Then I want to smack myself. I can’t believe I’ve actually considered that to be a possible reality.
We’ve all got a story, and real life stories are complicated, and not gimmicky. My story runs deeper than anything else that I know, and thats why I’ve written a ton of songs, and why I feel like I have a million more in me left to write.

Sure I’m a white kid who grew up in the suburbs and I have a nice family, and I am thankful for all of that, but those things hardly define me as an artist. How do I even begin to tell my story in a way that the masses can swallow it up? Which story do you want to hear? Do you want to hear the story about the first time I took L.S.D. when I was 13 years old and saw carpets made of worms, trees that moved like organic machines and clouds that were made of skulls and bones (I made up an interesting phrase that day: Exspiralmenting Tetrahydracles), or about how every teacher I ever had told me that I was one of brightest kids they had encountered, yet I failed out of school over and over again and to this day I cannot get into a University without serious remedial work?

I could tell you about the day in second grade when I came to school on “Whacky Dress-Up Day!” and it was not Whacky Dress-up Day after all. My hair was spiked and had glitter in it, I was wearing my M.C. Hammer pants and a pair of Ninja Turtle slippers. That was an embarassing day, especially when I got up too fast for recess and my Hammer pants got caught on my chair splitting them at the crotch and exposing my tighty-whitey underwears. Walking home a sixth grader added insult to injury and said “I’ll kick your ass in those Ninja-Turtle slippers!”.

I could tell you about watching the members of my childhood church being “slain in the spirit” and hearing the pastor’s thunderous yells about tithing, and how these things planted the seed of doubt in me, or about my mother’s agony over the still-birth of what would have been her first daughter.

I could tell you about the first time I remember feeling left out, for not being picked for a soccer team in 4th grade, and how 15 years later I’d feel the same thing on literally dozens if not hundreds of nights sitting alone on a barstool, glancing over at groups of laughing night-lifers and wondering why I don’t have the guts to just introduce myself to somebody.

I could tell you about the 7 months I spent living in Haight-Ashbury, lying to the only few friends I had, about those nights when I would knowingly overdraw my bank account so I could score, and having nosebleeds in both nostrils and a heart beating out of my chest was not enough for me to stop putting that filth up my nose, even at 10 AM the next day after not sleeping. I could tell you about how when I was 14, my best friend was beaten to death in front of his mom by some asshole who breeds pitbulls and the 7 years the guy got in prison for it. Brandon left his guitar at my house that same afternoon, I still have it and will always keep it.

I could tell you about the thousands of pretty girls I wanted to say hi to but was too shy, the ones I did say hi to that ended up loving me, the ones whose hearts I broke and the ones who broke mine.

I could tell you about going to raves in the 90s, computer hacking when the FBI actually got involved, crowd-surfing at a slayer concert, writing my first few songs at 3am sneaking cigarettes in my parents garage in the dead of winter with numb fingers barely able to press down the strings of my Yamaha FG-200, or about how when I first rode a bike without training wheels I jubilantly exclaimed to my grandfather “I FEEL THE KEVINEST!”.

We have all got a story, and it’s a damn shame we don’t hear more people’s stories in depth. I’m thankful for the chances I have had to tell pieces of mine through music, and really want to do a lot more of that. I just hope I don’t get throttled by this construct that I keep hearing about, that “you’ve got to have a story”, if mine doesn’t easily fit into the mold of it, as if we all don’t have an amazing one to tell if we are given the chance to. I didn’t escape a shark attack and wasn’t born in David Koresh’s WACO compound, but man, I’ve been trying to do this music thing for a long ass time.

I’m excited to be playing in Spokane for the first time in quite a while, on Feb 15th at the Bing Crosby Theater. My buddies Pickwick will be headlining the show, and Sera Cahoone is playing also. This show is a benefit show for my good friends Karli and Caleb Ingersoll, as they are raising funds to open a brand new all-ages venue in Spokane called The Bartlett

Click here to go to the Facebook event

It has been many moons since I posted a blog here. The rest of the tour with Rocky Votolato in May/June was fantastic and I am eternally grateful to him for bringing me (and my brother) out on the road. We got to see so many parts of the U.S. (and Toronto too) that we had never seen before. After the show in Minneapolis, the Kickstarter goal of $8,000 for the new album was reached and the project was successfully funded. I am so thankful to everyone who contributed. It has taken me much longer than I expected to get things ready for the record, but I hope to have most of it recorded by the end of the year and am shooting for a February 2013 release. The money has been safely tucked away in my piggy bank.

I have a few shows coming up in the NW:

Oct 19th – Seattle, WA – City Arts Fest w/Tiny Vipers, Neil Halstead and Case Studies @ Rendezvous
Oct 27th – Bellevue, WA – House Show
Nov 14th – Bellingham WA – Western Washington University “Underground”

More to come soon. Cheers!

Hey guys! I just checked into the hotel in Denton, TX where we play tonight.

I can’t believe so many cities have gone by without a blog post. Heres the skinny:

San Diego @ Casbah : Fun but Grimey spot, reminiscent of El Corazon in Seattle. Decently attended, maybe 125 people? The most memorable thing about the show for me was that people were being really loud, and I asked them super nice to be quiet and it WORKED. They were totally cool after that. CRAZY.

That night was super fun because Curran and I stayed with my friend Vanessa who I hadn’t seen in a long time, at her new place where her and some Coachella people who were STILL hanging around were all crashing! She left her keys somewhere and these guys had to make a human ladder to break into the window of her place. Other shenanigans ensued, and a dank breakfast @ a place called Mission was bomb dot com.

Phoenix @ Rhythm Room : Another sorta grimey place, but this was my favorite show of the tour so far, at least performance wise. The sound was surprisingly great, and I felt super comfortable that night bantering with the audience. People really listened well here. A drunk guy pretty much ruined Rocky’s set by singing along horribly and loudly despite Rocky asking him nicely to stop several times, they eventually threw him out but not before most of the show was over.

Albuquerque @ Low Spirits : Aptly named place for this stop on the tour. Attendance was super low. Curran and I were thinking a lot about Breaking Bad while here. I saw one old friend from high school but that was about it. OK Set from us. Curran had to leave and fly to Seattle to play a wedding and so I am playin the next 3 shows alone.

LONG DRIVE ALL DAY BY MYSELF AND STAYED IN A CRAPPY COW TOWN CALLED SWEETWATER TEXAS (in an overpriced hotel room that was huge).

Austin, TX @ Lambert’s: I had really looked forward to seeing Austin, but I honestly did not have a very good time there. The traffic was horrible, I had a hard time finding things and drove around stressed out a bunch. A lot of people came to the show, but the venue was a really bad place for me to play, especially solo. Tons of nice people were trying to listen to me, but the roar of the other bar patrons not there to see the show totally overpowered me and I didn’t deal with it well. I cowered behind my guitar and just played until it was over. I hope my next trip to Austin is better ! Sorry to anyone who had to see me and my bad attitude. Some people were nice and said nice things and bought my album which actually surprised me.

So here I am in Denton TX, and I cruised by the place we are playing tonight.. it looks pretty crazy, its like a band rehearsal spot with a bar/stage, This is some seriously gritty sh*t, its like a shack in the middle of a field. I hope I don’t get beat up here!

Having so much fun seeing the country.

ALSO , some super generous people who have seen me on tour are helping make the kickstarter a success. I am talking about a $300 and $500 donation from people who saw me play on tour. That is so rad! I thought that I would get more small donations on the tour, but I am getting fewer, larger ones from some seriously awesome folks.

THANK YOU!!!