And Introducing (belatedly)..... Lennie!!!

Welcome to the Girl 13 blog again. I’m sorry there hasn’t really been an update for sometime, but that is because gig wise, we’ve not really done anything for a while, concentrating on material as we have been. It has been something of a teething process as discussed last time because some of us are writing completely out of our comfort zones, relearning to use pieces of equipment (like Lennie and his double kick pedal) or learning new techniques (like Vinnie and the squealing harmonic). And yes, while there is some promising new material coming from this, the process is frustratingly slow.

I figured with this instalment of the blog, the best thing that we could do is properly introduce someone who’s new to the band. And that man would be Lennie.

Not much is actually known about him, even from Vince and Mike who knew him before I did. As far as I can tell, he wears a mask whenever he’s performing. I don’t know whether that’s because he’s got some sort of hideous facial disfigurement or whether it’s because it’s just a… thing that he does. We all suspect the latter, but you never know.

Secondly, we know he’s been playing drums for some time now. There are various speculations as to how long that is, but we estimate from the tantalising snippets he keeps dropping us, it’s been since he was at least twelve, so that’s nine years of experience behind the kit.

There’s also some mystery concerning his background. He’s remarkably guarded about his past, but he studied in Nagoya, Japan. Precisely what he studied is unknown, or even how long he was there for, but what we do know is that when he came back he started looking for a band to drum in. He had a couple of projects going, but eventually settled on, but then came to us. The time frame I think is between two to three years. While he was in Japan, we speculate that he learnt both Jiu-Jutsu and Ninjutsu, because he has a detailed knowledge of the arts.

Finally… we don’t even know whether or not Lennie is his real name. So all in all, the most we can say for certain is that Lennie is twenty-one, male, lives just outside of Cardiff and plays drums in Girl 13.

Er.... That's about it really... He's wicked guy, though. Look out for him. It won't be hard to miss him.

See you on the other side,

Jules

Teething problems....

We've been feeling the pressure recently to come up with new material, as it's been remarked in live jams several times that we aren't really jamming so much as just practicing. Nothing wrong with that of course, but jams should be that; jamming, not going over, again and again and AGAIN.....

So this has of course meant a push towards newer material... which has been tough as hell to write, because none of us seem to agree on anything.... except that we don't want to sound like every other band out there. So at the moment, we're only really working on four new pieces, and one of them we've called "Dog" because that's precisely what it is. The Dog of the set at the moment. It's got a shed load of potential, is fast paced, punky, catchy.... and almost totally im-fucking-possible to finish. We keep adding new bits, scrapping it, starting again, arguing over the structure, playing it.... and the worst part is, we come to a jam expecting to work on it, and no one can remember what was changed....

Grrrrr.....

That should, hopefully, have stopped. It's been transcribed, lyrics appear to be finished, and there's some set structure now. So that's one. There's '7:41', an entire song born out of tiny snippet of guitar harmony no more than fifteen seconds long that Mike gave us to play with. It's very dark, atmospheric, and definately metal... And Some of us are struggling to get our heads around it. And once again, it's impossible to finish. It's got two major time signature changes, and about five parts.

WTF?!

Then there's the other metally one. Hopes are high for this one actually, because we just went straight through the writing process in the space of an hour. It sounds cool, is the newest piece, but..... Has no lyrics yet.


......


And finally, there's 'Lose control.' One from the pen of Mike. It's probably near as dammit complete, maybe one or two harmonies on guitar need tightening up. Other than that, it's pretty much done.



So there you have it. It takes time to write our songs. Time, a lot of frustration, heavy use of the care package, lots of tea, and lots of soft drinks. You guys better love them when we play them next, cos we're going nuts trying to write them for you!

Cheers Guys,

G13