Till the Wheels Come Off

1 year later…

We are coming up on 1 year since Miss Shevaughn and I started our 2011 tour that took us to 29 different states, saw us play to 125 different crowds (okay - sometimes MUCH less than a “crowd”) of people, and put over 40,000 miles on our beloved Honda Element. We camped a lot. We grilled out A LOT. We fought, just a little.

So we’ve taken some time off. We’ve been recording an album that took all year to build up to. There are some old songs - there are a couple new tunes, too. But everything we do sounds better than we ever thought possible. It damn well better had, too. We played those songs so many friggin’ times we should be SICK of ‘em. But we’re not. That’s gotta be worth something, right? Our friends seemed to think so, too - since Bill Brown flew to Los Angeles on his own dime to play drums on an album he very well may never be compensated for (pretty sure that’s not why any of us signed up for this). Same goes for Dan Stone, our long time collaborator who played a little bass and lead guitar for us.

We’ve taken some time off because we are going to have to regroup a little if we want to do this right. If we want this album to be born the way it should be, if we want to get it out there to the world so that people will actually hear it, we are going to have to bide our time, and more importantly, money.

We may have to go back to working jobs for a little while - because there are CDs to press, t-shirts to screen, publicists and managers and booking and licensing agents to be courted… All the aspects of music that has almost nothing to do with the music itself!!! These are all mouths that we have to feed, because that is what we will have to do in order to eventually JUST MAKE MUSIC. To be able to JUST MAKE MUSIC and not have to borrow from our folks in order to put gas in the tank. In order to eventually afford that little place in Joshua Tree, California that we have been eyeing, and be able to pay for it by JUST MAKING MUSIC.

We’ve come a long way in the last year. We are better musicians, but we are also tougher, smarter people. We could cut our losses and realign ourselves with the 9 to 5 world. But at the risk of sounding like dialogue from a Michael Bay movie - WE ARE ALSO PAST THE POINT OF NO RETURN (something explodes)…

At this point we take the record we have been making and show it to the world. And we either keep slouching towards musicianship… Or we fall flat on our faces, fail miserably and go back to Chicago with our tails between our legs, play music on the weekends and drink the weeknights away, quietly. “At least we had ourselves one year of adventure”, right, guys?

Nah… Miss Shevaughn & Yuma Wray have only two options. We can either hold up what we have done with our lives in the last year for the whole world to hear. Or we can cock it up so badly that we won’t even be able to start a Lana Del Rey cover band…

Fingers crossed for 2012, kids…

-Yuma Wray