Here’s the Good Kind Of Crazy sheet music to go along with it.

Requests? We’ll be happy to put together a How-To video of any tune you’d like help with. Drop us a line and let us know.

We have largely set aside the thank you’s and other such notes in favor of letting the music speak for itself. But Oh Lost was a little different. It was the culmination of a lot of work we’d been doing for a long time. Then in one big and short burst, we had a record—and man, does it feel good when it’s that easy.

Matt wanted to write something for this album. Something that would tie in where he was during all this, where we all were. The title itself comes from a track called World’s On Fire deep on side 2. And the liners pick up where that song left off, furthering those ideas of confusion and some sort of self-realization and validation.

Listen to World’s On Fire from Oh Lost

We hope you’ll pick up a CD at our Bandcamp page, but if you’re a digital dude or dudette, here are the liners in all their glory. Note: in the CD package that Jim laid out, he did some crossing out of text——his usual role.

Oh Lost Liner Notes

I keep wondering what it was like for F Scott Fitzgerald to write the last page of The Great Gatsby. To wake up one morning, have coffee and a light breakfast, sit down at the typewriter and type so we beat on… Or did he write that after lunch towards the end of a frustrating day gazing off into the twilight? Was he listening to music at the time? Did he have a cat sitting by him? Did his mother or girlfriend ring him before he finished? The point is someone sat down on a given day and wrote something that beautiful, unique, and complete. I want to do something great—I thought we all did. We want to build and create and be admired by our friends and peers. But when’s it going to come? When is it going to happen?

We’d been messing around trying to get at it. Messing with the 80’s again and singing over new wave back-beats, shaving the sides of our heads underneath long hair—experimenting with mullets and loud colors and it was fun but somewhat unsatisfying. So many anthems that the anthem was losing the qualites that made it what it was in the first place. And that seemed to always be the problem: everything always had that feeling of trying on your fathers clothes rather than feeling like a real movement. But maybe that’s just what the times were. After all, in the void of a signature movement, in that absence of a definitive time we are left with the opposite end of the spectrum: where we could be all times, all movements, and it could mean everything.

It feels good to be anything you want for a while—to not limit yourself to playing with the unknown. It feels good to begin sentences with the word and no matter what EB White & Strunks said. Style can come from anything—throw out the rule book, steal what you want. And for a while it has felt that way. But how to make it mine; how to make it really something to hang your hat on. You want to be F Scott Fitzgerald or the Fucking Beatles and make something akin to Gatsby listening to Revolver and dripping paint on the start of Pollack’s Greyed Rainbow. But it just never seems the day for it and the days just slipped away—ideas shimmer like love then dissappear like lust. It’s always tomorrow or something.

You stare at the keyboard and think perhaps it’s the way the QWERTY Keyboard is leading your thoughts and sentence structure, and perhaps if only the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard had won out and you didn’t have to travel such distance between letters, or if you could write in a language that moved right to left or up and down, and these letters and symbols and the finality of a dot didn’t feel so arbitrary; that it all stops making any sense and you begin to lose the thread feeling you need a better understanding of so many things in order to create this thing you only guess at. You need more depth, need a better grasp of science and history and linguistics and knowledge. And suddenly I am gripped with fear thinking of how little I know and now—sapped of my confidence and my hair—it doesn’t seem fun anymore; my clothes seem silly and I am just a boy wearing the ideas of other better men of past decades that rose to the occasion. Oh lost!

In being know-it-alls and having access to so much, stealing at will, and mashing it all together, we left ourselves wide open to the sinking feelings that could attack us at any time: that we were in fact nothing of our own making. We’ve been pushing the money around not creating anything substantial and it just hurts——like so much thieving and sarcasm and posturing coming back to haunt me.

But I step back and I breathe, and I recover a sense of humor and curiosity and look around surveying the wreckage and see that right there is something to write about because that is what is there and that is what came out and that can’t be taken from you. The people, situations, and things that went on around here during these times. That’s all you need. That’s all there is. Oh lost.

Coming up, we have a bunch of shows on the books, and a bunch more in queue to be confirmed.

WITH TIM KASHER———
21 Mar Omaha, NE
22 Mar Champaign, IL
23 Mar Chicago, IL
——————————
11 Apr Ann Arbor, MI
3 May Cincinnati, OH

BMA + 7-hour Smoked Brisket + All that great company = Us, excited to head back down to Austin.

Check out the /shows page for all 4 shows we’re playing down in Austin.

What’s next? Stay tuned. It’s going to be a great 2013.

Company of Thieves + Brighton MA + Minor Characters
Metro | 3730 N Clark | Chicago
All Ages | Doors: 6PM | Show: 7PM

We’re also really excited about the poster for the gig. It’s a limited run hand-printed serigraph by the resident genius at Baker Prints, our buddy Kyle. He always nails it, and this one is no exception. We’re offering the frame-friendly 18″x24″ print for a mere $20. All orders come with a free 3-song sampler, one track from each band on the bill. Pick up the poster at the Metro gig, or have it shipped. Your call. Grab a piece of history and throw it on your wall.

This is your second taste of our forthcoming album Oh Lost—the sampler includes a reimagined version of one of our most popular tunes Good Kind Of Crazy as recorded by Brian Deck. Max Crawford lends his flugelhorn on it, and there are plenty of fun little percussive elements as well. Hope you enjoy.

photo by Stephanie Bassos

Our fearless leader and frontman Matt Kerstein recently sat down and wrote a few thoughts on what is our favorite music format. The essay was posted at The Vinyl District earlier last week. Along with alluding to some of his favorite albums, Matt also offers a peek into his system for hiding all sorts of odd and ends (spoiler alert: most things ended up in Beethoven’s Second Symphony). Below are a couple quotes from the writing, but it’s a great read all the way through. Many thanks to the folks at TVD for posting.

Brighton MA: The TVD First Date

“Guess there’s no real way to talk about loving a Beethoven record these days without sounding obnoxious. I used to stash all sorts of things in my vinyl collection. Beethoven’s Second Symphony was a main hiding spot. No one would ever put on the Second Symphony. Not in a million years.

“Thinking back on it now I should have had more of a system. You can’t keep everything in the Second Symphony – the vinyl packaging is big but not that big. All love letters should be kept in the Joni Mitchell Blue album…”

And maybe the more important point here…

“Putting your album out on vinyl feels to a lot of musicians like the only true closure to the horrifically rewarding experience of making an album.”

Amen.

Along with our new video, have a listen to the new tune via Bandcamp. Touch is your first taste of the tracks from our next album called Oh Lost that we’re readying for release this winter. With it, comes some fun we had in the studio at producer Brian Deck’s request.

Talking Heads are on most everyone’s short list including ours, and this is one of our favorites off of More Songs About Buildings and Food. It comes packed with big guitars, pounding drums, raunchy bass complete with an epic detune, and of course, Matt’s swaggery croon. Enjoy.

Above is a new video for a new tune from our new (read: forthcoming) record. The tune is called Touch, and is one we had been working on for awhile—that is, until maestro Brian Deck got his hands on the project and helped finish it off for our next record, Oh Lost.

In classic BMA fashion, and as Matt puts it: “Touch is all about livin’. L-I-V-I-N.” But here’s what Magnet Magazine had to say about the video:

Prepubescent rebels aren’t pleased when they learn they’re not nearly as cool as they think. So it goes in Brighton MA‘s new video for “Touch.” Our young hero thinks he’s the standout of the town because he looks like he could be in Insane Clown Posse, but he quickly realizes face paint and attitude don’t impress the hipsters around him.

We can’t thank Bailout Pictures enough for their direction, hard work, and production. Dudes did a hell of a job.

And of course, if you dig, please share!