Love Drunk Studio turns 5 (w/John Klemmensen & the Party); Dead Meadow tonight…

Category: Blog — Tags: , , , — @ 1:02 pm June 16, 2015
Love Drunk Studio turns 5 today.

Love Drunk Studio turns 5 today.

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Today marks the 5-year anniversary of the launch of Love Drunk Studio, the live, one-take music video website created by Django Greenblatt-Seay that has featured just about every decent band in Nebraska plus a ton of decent bands from outside of Nebraska.

I first wrote about Love Drunk way back in 2011 for The Reader (here). Here’s an excerpt:

The idea of creating one-take performance music videos started almost by accident. “I was experimenting with my home audio recording studio, trying to get a better understanding of how to use the equipment,” said Greenblatt-Seay, who also plays in bands Down with the Ship and Midwest Dilemma. “I asked my good friends in the band Flashbulb Fires to record a song in one take. They had a friend filming it with a flipcam and I had a crappy point-and-shoot. Afterward, I thought maybe we could edit it all together into a one-take live music video.”

Five years later, Django is still at it. In fact, to mark the occasion, Love Drunk Studio released Session #131, which features John Klemmensen and the Party performing their song “Ghosts” recorded live inside Urban Outfitters in the Slowdown complex.  Check it out below, and celebrate the entire Love Drunk Catalog. And if you see Django, wish him a happy 5th birthday…

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Tonight D.C. stoner rock band Dead Meadow graces the stage at fabulous O’Leaver’s. The band has released albums since 2000 primarily on Matador Records. Opening is Super Moon and Sun-Less Trio. $8, 9 p.m.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2015 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Lazy-i

Love Drunk World Tour V2.0 launches Friday; Desa announces tour dates; The Drums tonight…

Category: Blog,Interviews — Tags: , — @ 12:32 pm May 1, 2012

Love Drunk Tour 2012by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

Ah yes, it’s that time of year again when Django Greenblatt-Seay (G-S for short) and his band of merry pranksters heads out across the wilderness to capture the best and brightest up-and-coming indie bands livin’ and lovin’ along the Eastern Seaboard.

Of course I’m talking about the Love Drunk 2012 Tour.

The map and list of bands are right there at the top of your screen. We’re talking 17 days, 14 cities, 8 people in one very smelly van.

The Love Drunk Team

The Love Drunk Team, photo by Daniel Muller.

Actually, the trip has been split into two tours of duty, with four of the eight splitting time between two legs of the tour. It breaks down like this: G-S, Ben Semisch and The Normans (Angie and Andy, the dynamic duo behind Hear Nebraska) will be along for the full tour. Matt Hovanec and Andrew Roger will be on for the first leg. At some point they will be swapped out with Brendan Greene-Walsh (of O’Leaver’s/So-So Sailors fame) and superstar photographer Daniel Muller (who I refer to as Omaha’s Anton Corbijn).

Like last year, I haven’t heard of many of the bands they’re filming on the road, which G-S said he found via friends, friends in bands and “Facebook trolling.” However, we all know that Cymbals Eat Guitars just got off the road with Cursive; and Spinto the Band opened for Basia Bulat at Slowdown a couple years ago. Beyond that, G-S tells me that Laura Burhenn of The Mynabirds suggested Jukebox the Ghost. Sarah of Millions of Boys suggested Nelsonville. And Spinto came by way of Love Drunk regular Arrah and the Ferns.

So what’s Love Drunk? It’s a live, one-shot music video project that’s featured a number of the better indie bands from around Omaha, including It’s True, Little Brazil, Conduits, Digital Leather and so on. The videos are housed at lovedrunkstudio.com, of course. Read this 2011 column that outlined last year’s tour. Or read my new column about Love Drunk, which will appear in this week’s issue of The Reader.

Love Drunk continues to see its viewership grow. The site’s 73 current videos have been getting a total of 18,000 views per month so far this year, about a 25 percent bump over 2011. Not bad. But we all know imitation is the greatest indicator of success; and just a few weeks ago the Omaha World-Herald began their own version of Love Drunk called Guest List, created by paid staff rather than volunteers. G-S ain’t worried. He says there’s room for two (or three or four) different music video projects in Omaha.

Speaking of money, this year’s Love Drunk Tour is being funded by a couple sponsors — Proxibid and Havana Garage. They’re ponying up much of the $5k needed to make thing work. But G-S still wants more, which is why The Sydney in Benson is hosting a fundraiser for Love Drunk Thursday night featuring Honeybee and Hers and Bazooka Shootout. It’ll be your last chance to say goodbye to the Love Drunk team, as they’ll be hitting the road on Friday…

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The boys in Desaparecidos announced a few more tour dates this morning, including Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle and SF, all in mid- to late-August. Check out the sched at their website. Will there be a new vinyl release soon? Keep your fingers crossed.

In addition, Conor Oberst announced some solo dates, including a string in late July out east. Those dates are listed here on his website.

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Finally, Red Sky announced today via its Facebook page that it will name names for its 2012 “festival” next Monday, May 7. Ho-boy, can’t wait for that one…

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Tonight red hot Brooklyn band The Drums plays at The Waiting Room with Craft Spells and Part Time. $15, 9 p.m.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2012 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Lazy-i

Column 324: The story of Love Drunk Studio and its quest for the perfect take; Underwater Dream Machine tonight…

Category: Blog,Column,Interviews — Tags: , , — @ 12:31 pm May 26, 2011

Column 324: Love Drunk Measures Success One Perfect Take at a Time

by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com

It starts with a tight close-up on a perfectly lit guitar or keyboard, cropped to the strings or the hands or the ivories. The camera is steady, but moves oh so slightly, just so you know that there’s a pair of worried hands holding it. And then someone says in the background, “Whenever you’re ready,” and the song begins.

Maybe the most effective type of music video is one that simply captures a band performing. If it’s done right, you leave the experience three or four minutes later not only knowing a band or performer’s song, but what they’re feeling while they play it. And maybe — just maybe — you’ll be so taken by the music and the images that you’ll seek out more.

Love Drunk logoIt’s a simple premise that drives Django Greenblatt-Seay, the mastermind behind Love Drunk Studio. Don’t call it a company. Greenblatt-Seay (or just G-S as he’s listed in production credits) prefers to call it “a project.” But what started as an experiment in sound and light and technology has become one of the hottest grassroots music “projects” to come out of Omaha in years.

The idea of creating one-take performance music videos started almost by accident. “I was experimenting with my home audio recording studio, trying to get a better understanding of how to use the equipment,” said G-S, who also plays in bands Down with the Ship and Midwest Dilemma. “I asked my good friends in the band Flashbulb Fires to record a song in one take. They had a friend filming it with a flipcam and I had a crappy point-and-shoot. Afterward, I thought maybe we could edit it all together into a one-take live music video.”

He liked the product so much, he wondered if he could “get it to look good on purpose,” so he lined up his first real video shoot with Portland singer-songwriter Nick Jaina. That was June 8, 2010. Almost a year later and G-S and his merry band of Love Drunk videographers (as many as 30 volunteers) have shot 43 sessions, 20 of which were for Nebraska artists including It’s True, The Machete Archive, Gus & Call, Sarah Benck, Conduits, Honey & Darling and Noah’s Ark Was a Spaceship. You can see and hear all of them online at lovedrunkstudio.com or the studio’s affiliate website, hearnebraska.org.

After awhile, shooting local bands became old hat. “All the gear is mobile, so we didn’t have to stay in Nebraska,” G-S said. “We decided to hit the road for the same reason that a band hits the road. If we didn’t try to make this regional or national, it would eventually devalue the videos and no one would give a shit anymore.”

So he scheduled some vacation time from his corporate communication gig at OPPD, and asked for volunteers to come along on tour. Angie and Andrew Norman (who run hearnebraska.org), photographer Daniel Muller and fellow videographer Andrew Roger (who runs Ingrained Video) all took the challenge — to shoot 15 bands in 13 cities in 15 days. The Love Drunk Tour started in Kansas City April 29 with indie band Everyday/Everynight, and concluded in Chicago May 13 with indie band Holyoke. In between the crew traveled throughout Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island and Michigan.

Highlights include Arrah and the Ferns performing on a Philly rooftop, electro-dance band Quitzow playing in a New Paltz, New York Laundromat, and punk rockers The Menzingers playing at the Ava House in south Philly. The day of the Menzingers shoot, the band signed a three-record deal with Epitaph.

G-S said he choose the bands based on personal preference, geography and recommendations. None of the bands said no, and why would they? Love Drunk videos cost them nothing but time and one perfect take (and yes, they’re all really done in a single take). G-S said the videos are a way of giving back to bands who often are asked to perform for free for fund-raisers and other events. “On the other hand, no one ever does anything for free to benefit the bands,” he said.

While bands can receive copies of the video files to post on their websites and YouTube pages, G-S asks that they point users to lovedrunkstudio.com “so that people that watch the video can be a couple clicks away from finding other videos we’ve done. If they like them, maybe they’ll be enticed to buy some of their music.”

Think of it as sort of a video version of Daytrotter and its famous recording studio in Rock Island, Ill., where some of the best bands in the world drop by for a couple hours to record sessions that wind up on daytrotter.com. Since it launched, users have downloaded songs more than 21 million times from Daytrotter.

G-S said Love Drunk videos have received about a thousand views each on his site. The Menzingers’ video is the most popular, with nearly 6,200 views. “It’s very important to get music bloggers to re-post our videos,” G-S said. “We’ve had videos picked up by dozens of blogs, including punknews.org.”

While a fund raiser helped cover some of its costs, G-S personally dropped around $2,000 on the tour, mainly for hotels. Though they were offered places to stay 14 of the 15 nights, travel logistics often made those offers impossible to accept.

Regardless of the cost, G-S said he’s planning another Love Drunk tour next year, perhaps down south. Meanwhile, he continues to shoot bands right here at home, including recent shoots with members of Little Brazil and The Show Is the Rainbow. The videos have become so popular that bands are now approaching him for shoots, a situation which can be awkward.

“If your band isn’t putting out a new album, isn’t touring or is otherwise new, we’re probably not going to be able to help you,” G-S said. “We want thousands of people to watch these videos, but if you’re not working hard to create momentum on your own, then it’s tough to get that kind of mileage out of our work. If you’re writing really great music and if you have worked hard to build a buzz, then you’re probably already on our radar. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. But if we call you, fucking call back. Jesus.”

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Tonight at Slowdown Jr. Underwater Dream Machine opens for Lincoln band Cool It, Action, along with The Betties. $7, 9 p.m.

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Read Tim McMahan’s blog daily at Lazy-i.com — an online music magazine that includes feature interviews, reviews and news. The focus is on the national indie music scene with a special emphasis on the best original bands in the Omaha area. Copyright © 2011 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.

Lazy-i