greetings.



some of you may have noticed that i never posted the before promised two new rough mixes of songs from the upcoming album. that's the short of it. i'm not posting them. if you want the longer of it please continue...



the longer of it is that i am intrinsically opposed to rough mixes from the beginning. by nature, they are "rough." meaning, unfinished. not how they will be when they are finished. there are thousands upon thousands of decisions that are made between recording and mixing and then even more when mastering. i'm personally not comfortable putting out anything halfway or incomplete or substandard of what will be (which is another reason why i hate youtube with a passion). like a chef sending out meat partially cooked, asking you to taste it, then asking you to imagine how much better it will be when he takes it from you and cooks it a little more in the oven...i just couldn't do it.



so why did i ever say i would? simply put, for money. at the moment i am short $9,184 of the goal of covering the recording costs through preorders, and i thought if i put out a brief taste of what the album would be some more people would be inclined to preorder the album. but before i am broke, i am an artist. and when i heard the rough mixes i just couldn't allow you to hear what i know some of you will love soon enough. it went against my artistic integrity.



hence, you who care will have to wait a bit longer to hear what we are cooking. my apologies for getting ahead of myself and disappointing. let it be a comfort that i want to make beautiful art that touches hearers, and i'm very concerned about your deserved reception of it as i am in my presentation of it.



in the meantime, at the moment there are 58 more hours left for you to preorder and help fund the album. preorders end this friday september 2nd evening.you may do so here: http://www.indiegogo.com/bradleyhathaway


so much thanks and appreciation to those of you that have made donations, bought shirts, come to shows, follow along, tell friends, whatever. i love making art and i love that you love it. i can't wait for you to hear the new album when it's released. i think about you all the time, when i do my homework, when i drive the same arkansas roads everyday, when i get online, when i help foreign girls make copies at work, when i see the stars, and when i brush my teeth.



sincerely,

bradley



p.s. in october i will be hosting two private shows in my very own dome here in goshen, arkansas. only 25 people allowed at each show. wine and an assortment of goodies. you can even camp out on my land. next week i will announce the dates and more info but i figured i'd let you know so you can plan a nice saturday evening for october!

july august tour

greetings.



i will be touring the western united states in july/august. TX, NM, AZ, CA, OR, WA, ID, CO, KS are my intentions. if you would like to book a show email me at sirbradleyhathaway@gmail.com with your city/state in the subject. i'm looking primarily for house shows but am down for about anything anywhere. to have me at your house you need a living room to have around 40 people sitting on the floor or wherever, friends willing to pay $8, provide some snacks and drinks for guests, and i'd rather you be at least 18 as my audience is primarily older than high school as i've stopped being funny. i've not been out west for around 2 years now so i hope you are as excited as i am.



first week of august i will be recording my new album in talent, oregon, then heading home to finish school.



where in texas...

houston, san antonio, austin, waco, dallas area, western tx?



where in nm...albuquerque



where in az...phoenix and somewhere else



where in california...anywhere



where in oregon...anywhere



where in washington...anywhere



where in id...anywhere



where in co...anywhere



as you can see just about anywhere.



sincerely,

bradley

tourdates and not booklists

greetings.

starting friday march 18 i'll be doing a short run while i'm on my own spring break from school. on that saturday my lovely friend eric of the apprentice will be opening up.

these are chill, laid back shows. mostly at people's houses and if you don't know the hosts you are of course still invited. i don't know them anymore than you do and other people won't know them either so no worries. there will be no drunk people yacking from the bar, no strobe light distractions, just a quiet, nice atmosphere for me to tell you stories.

most of you know i'm back in college wrapping up a degree and have been touring very little. actually, none for about a year now. these shows in march will most likely be the only time i make it out to these areas for at least another year so if you want to see me while i still have such a youthful appearance try to make it out. as for future plans...
i plan on touring out west in july. recording a new full length album with my boys in august. attending college for a final semester in the fall. then releasing that new album in early 2012 and hitting the road if it seems good to do so.

...

also, i hope by now you've picked up last summer's ep "a thousand angry panthers" and more recently the digital single "a storm coming."

...

Fri March 18 St. Louis, Mo @ Paul's House 8pm $7
1244 Cottagemill Dr Ballwin MO 63021

Sat 19 Carmi, IL @ The Lighthouse 7pm - $5
127 Haley Dr. Carmi, IL

Sun 20 Evansville, IN @ The Big Oak House 7pm - $5
208 Oak St. Evansville, IN

Mon 21 Indianapolis, IN @ Helfrich’s House 7pm - $5
972 Woodruff Pl. Middle Dr. Indianapolis, IN 46201

Tues 22 Canton, OH @ Devin's Apartment 9:30pm - $5
147 25th Street NW, Canton, OH Apt #A1

Wed 23 Cincinnati, OH @ Blake's House 7pm - $5
2835 Claypole Ave. Cincinnati, OH

Thurs 24 Memphis, TN @ The Abbey 6:30pm $8adv $10door
1015 S Cooper St Memphis, TN

Fri 25 Corydon, IN @ First Capital Christian Church 7pm - $5
305 Oliver St Corydon, IN 47112

Other Upcoming Shows...
April 9 Springfield, MO @ tba
April 22 Ada, OK @ 205 S. Francis Ada, Oklahoma 74820

...

i'm always open to doing fly out shows and shows within reasonable driving distance of fayetteville, arkansas so don't hesitate to ask.

...

god be with you,
bradley

Barbra Streisand and Baby

I saw a special on Barbra Streisand the other night. She had an exhibit opening at the California Hall of Fame or something like that. As she looked around at the collected memories she commented that it was like looking at another person’s life, unfamiliar. When asked what her proudest moment was she said, “Giving birth to my son.”

What is my proudest moment? Let me think. I have some very proud secret moments. I have some very public failures too. In fact, I’m more aware of my failures than my proudest moments. Surely the list for successes is longer, but the failures weigh more. Weigh me down. It’s the power of suggestion. It’s the power of the mind. When I get stressed I get really bad headaches. That’s a trip. A mystery.

I am forever amazed at our capacities to deal with change in our lives. I used to like cartoons. I didn’t have a father for a long time, but now I do. My paw paw and I would eat at a buffet at least twice a week, but now I never do, and he’s dead. For six years I was in a different place just about every day, and now I sleep in my own bed each night. I used to have a ton of people wanting something from me all the time, now not so much. And on I could go, some serious and not so serious things.

I miss a lot of things that used to be in my life but aren’t anymore. Certain people. Certain places. Certain feelings. But life is survival of the fittest. And if we don’t accept the changes that come our way then we start to become most unpleasant. We drain the joy out of ourselves and eventually out of those around us. The artist allows this for his perverted sense of what he thinks a necessary conduit for good art. The narcissist allows this because he wants to, he wants to, he wants to. The average person just because of laziness if nothing else.

Our fear of change, our fear of things ending are a sign of our desire for eternity. It burns in my chest and keeps me shifting at night. If something is good, I want it to last forever. If it’s bad, then of course I want it to end as soon as possible. (That would be our sense of justice.) But it seems like the good things are always ending before the bad ones. And that’s the confusing part. That’s the hard part.

People suffer. People die. People grow apart. People hurt each other. The cost of living goes up. The safe neighborhood gets shady. This world and all therein are in a process of decay…or is it and are they?

I used to think people could change the world for the better in a massive way. I’ve never been a humanist but I thought man had enough good in him to do right by everyone and everything around him. From his mother, to strangers, to the redwoods, and dolphins in the sea. But I’ve lived and studied enough now to know better. I’ve done poorly enough to my neighbor and beyond enough times to know we are all going to hell in a handbasket if left up to our own efforts…but are we?

This is where eternity steps in. This is where all these suffering and endings, failures and endings, beginnings and endings, are put into their proper perspective. Survival of the fittest is not the most physical but the most patient, the most aware. A romantic image: a farmer, swollen hands, wrinkled face, plants, waits, harvests, turns up the soil, repeat, repeat. He’s been through drought, freeze, flood, and knows enough to know that eventually, at some point, at some time, a crop will be this year or next, or next, or next.

In the form of a baby, hope was born. Salvation for this cycle of suffering, boredom, and endings. Eternity came to us wet and naked and bloody and crying. He pierced our sense of time, our births and deaths. Our beginnings and our endings. Our pasts and our futures, in that ever present moment of his promises: that the maker of the heavens and earth loves us: that he desires to be known by us: that in our failures against others we are failing against him, but he forgives us: that through this little baby’s death the failures of all will not be held against them: that death is no master of the one who makes life: that we are invited to join in his plan of redemption for humanity and the things created: that we will fail him, but he will redeem our failures somehow all the same.

Through this baby, the one called Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Joseph and Mary, who would be born, killed, and raised from death, life makes sense to me. I make more sense to me. You make more sense to me. These proud moments and failures, these beginning and endings, these yearnings for eternity, all are put into their proper place. That is not to say that some things are not still mysteries. In fact, more things than not are probably more perplexing, confusing, and mysterious. In all that perplexity I soon find myself anxious. But it’s then that I hear the crying of a newborn baby, and my heart rests.

Merry Christmas.

Bradley Hathaway
December 18, 2010
3:13 AM 

There Were Never Two People Happier Than You and I

yo.
i'll be posting an update in the coming days of recent books. apologies.

in the meantime if you find yourself still literary i've released a new ep "a thousand angry panthers" and think you will find the lyrics to suit your scholarly itch. it's on itunes and other digitial providers at the moment.

cheers.
bradley

Prerequisite: Last Name Starts With McC

Book: Carson McCullers: A Life by Josyane Savigneau
In my brief foray into literature I’ve discovered two things: Firstly, I find most interesting and enjoyable classic American literature, particularly of the South. Secondly, Carson McCullers is my favorite of this type of writer. Of her few novels that she’s written and of the fewer that I’ve read, she touches me in a deep, dark way that no other writer has been able to do so. She writes underwater, underneath my skin. Speaks to places few know even exist. She was very much aware and very much good at portraying the isolation and loneliness that some of us as human beings feel. Her weird, fascinating, and morbid characters continually revealed this isolation, this loneliness. If you’ve not yet read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter please do so. If you’ve not read more than a couple of her books I wouldn’t really recommend this biography of her to you just yet. I know biographies are about the most popular kind of book and that is good fine I guess but one will get much more out this biography after having developed a love for her writings. What I find most intriguing about McCullers was her being just past twenty years old she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. By literary standards, this is ridiculous. Unlike music, which is obsessed with youth, writers are usually much, much older before they are capable of writing a successful novel. One usually has to have much more life and much more time at their craft in this particular art form, which made McCullers a literary phenomenon. She was considered genius for being able to do this, and one can’t help but respect that at the least. Her life, though, was what could be considered typical of the prevelant idea of the troubled artist. The woman definitely had issues, and this book goes into them, revealing that her characters were not to far from her own home. For me one of the most intriguing things to me about her was her struggle to write despite her being crippled most of her life from around age 30 to her early death at just 50. She was bedridden and unable to care for herself during most of that time. She said she had to write and that it was writing that had kept her alive, even writing on the day of her death. I could go more in depth but like I say, if you like McCullers you will dig this look into her life and ways otherwise I don’t know that outside of that why anyone would read this. It’s not really going to inspire you like a Helen Keller biography or anything.

Sidenote: I do feel much more cultured after reading this biography because the author was a French woman and I’ve never read a book by anyone French before.

Book: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is apparently a big deal in the modern American literary world and to be honest I had no idea. I knew him as the writer of the novel No Country For Old Men but I had only seen the movie (and loved and was disturbed by it for a full three days afterwards). On tour my drummer and guitar player at the time were crazy about The Road written by McCarthy so I read that but didn’t find it all that special. But I like cowboys. And I knew he had written a few books with cowboys in them, and I’ve wanted to read them for some time. I’d go to the library and look at them, always wanting to read them, but never doing so because the time was not right. I believe there is a time for everything, a season, and books are no different. One could read any book at anytime but that doesn’t mean that he was meant to. Books are powerful, and if not handled carefully I think they can be a big waste of time so I am very particular about what books I expose myself to at certain times. So until a few weeks ago it wasn’t yet time for me to read McCarthy, and then it was. Now it is. It’s springtime. The weather is warmer. The wind is blowing. I can sit outside by a stream. Perfect for reading of happenings in the southwest. So I read All the Pretty Horses, the first book of a trilogy known as the Border Trilogy. Now this is less a review of All the Pretty Horses as much as an introduction to me diving into the writer and his works himself. I dug All the Pretty Horses, I really did. I found it a good story that gave me a bit of wanderlust and further cemeted my dream of riding a horse everywhere I go, making love to beautiful Mexican women, and eating beans and tortillas for every meal. But I don’t personally find it anymore than that: a good story. Unlike much of the classic literature I’m getting into, which has the power to change one’s view of the world, it’s people, it’s workings, and one’s own self, my experience with McCarthy is that he is just a good storyteller but beyond that little else. If a Steinbeck novel weighed a ton then you could carry a McCarthy novel in your back pocket. I don’t mean this to be an insult, hardly. For example, I appreciate music that changes my life but not every song is meant to. Sometimes I just want to hear something nice and easy. Sometimes I read to find pearls in the ocean, other times I just wanna sit on the beach. Same with books. So my interest in McCarthy is why there is such an interest in his writings to begin with. He’s won some hefty literary awards, has a society and journal named after him, and has around ten books written just about the books he’s written even though he has only written about ten novels himself…but why? As far as I can tell his stories just don’t have the depth that I would expect them to have for people to pay $30 something a year to join the Cormac McCarthy Society where they are exposed to news about his art and writings other people are publishing about his art. So I’m intrigued. I wonder to myself if I’m just missing something. And I wonder what it is about this writer that makes him so successful. And given the content of his novels, cowboys of the southwest and the extreme violence contained therein, I wonder what it says about the culture that follows his work. So, this begins my exploration into the work of Cormac McCarthy and the reasons for his success. I invite you on the journey as well if you’d like. And should you already have an opinion of him I’d like to know your thoughts as well.

By the way, though some of his books have cowboys in them, it’s not really John Wayne type stuff so don’t be put off by that idea. It’s much more modern.

Egg Explosion

At the request of one of you I’ve started reading Moby Dick. You see, up to a month ago or so I had been thinking long and hard about going sailing for an extended period of time, selling my home and just going for it. But real life and money have hindered that dream, so instead I thought I’d just start reading about others that have gone to sea. Hence, I’m a hundred pages into Moby Dick and thus far I’m into it. The writing style is nothing that I expected but it’s in nice little short chapters so it makes me feel like I can stop and not lose the flow or that I’m briskly moving the book (though in reality I’m not but the mind is interesting and I like to play it’s games).

…

I’ve also started a study of Ecclesiastes, Job, and Song of Songs. I never really understood Ecclesiastes and I can already see clearer with just a bit of effort. If you are maybe happy go lucky at the moment then I don’t know that the first of the two books will speak to you as much as those that are a bit in the trenches, or a bit more in despair, or a bit more confused. You’ll love Song of Songs I’m sure but those in despair will love it too after spending time with The Teacher and Job. My study has started with one of my favorite teachers, Peter Kreeft. He’s written a mad number of books and is a philosopher teaching at Boston College. He has written Three Philosophies of Life which see Ecc. as life as vanity, Job as life as suffering, and Song of Songs as life as love. This book along with other commentaries and the books themselves are opening up the ways of life, the ways of man, and the ways of God to me more at the moment.

…

Speaking of Peter Kreeft I also recommend his podcast to you. Just look up Peter Kreeft in podcasts and you should see it. Each episode is a lecture him giving somewhere, usually a university, followed by a question and answer time. He’s a Tolkien and C.S. Lewis fanatic and is always teaching about their ideas and such, along with ideas on God and philosophy. He is a hard out Catholic no doubt, so if you are squirmish around hearing this or that that you don’t agree with then this might not be for you, but I’d not turn away an excellent teacher just because you disagree with a few things. I do disagree with him on some things but since discovering Kreeft I am a more rounded Christian for it and I know the Lord more richly than I did before.

…

Another podcast worth checking out if you are into Tolkien is “The Tolkien Professor”. If you love Lord of the Rings and Tolkien especially, this rules. Something about hearing academic lectures on Tolkien just makes me happy. I feel full on dorkish and love every minute of it.

…

Things I’ve recently read or watched…

Book: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
After being engulfed in the Lord of the Rings for the past few years it was very nice to return to where it all began. I love The Hobbit most of all and reading it again I realized how fun and childish it is. I could go on but it’s The Hobbit, you are either down or not.

Film: The War by Ken Burns
For those of you that are PBS watchers this will sound familiar. For a good while it showed parts of this documentary every night. It’s a beast at 15 hours long. And while I don’t doubt that some people could watch 15 hours of Lost straight I’d find it hard to believe that one could watch this in single setting. This is about the most brutal documentary I’ve ever watched. It focuses on four towns in four different states and how each of them and their citizens were during World War II. Many of us already know the facts of WWII as we are taught this stuff all throughout school, but I didn’t care much for a lot of what I learned during school because I don’t think I cared to learn much until the day I graduated. And facts (like soldiers going into battles expecting themselves or 8 of their 10 comrades to die) only go so far but to hear and see the stories of these soldiers as they cry some 60 years later bring home the reality of all the death, all the tragedy, all the questions. It’s absolutely heartbreaking and has actually given me nightmares during and since watching it. I say watch it because one won’t view veterans the same, the idea of free will quite the same, good versus evil, God, America, etc. I’m a big proponent of thinking about things and such a film will produce many thoughts, good, bad, and confusing.

Film: The Horse Whisperer
I didn’t expect this to be so girly, but I should have known better. I did dig the Montana scenery though.

TV: Lost
After years of being adamantly against watching such a grown up soap opera where the writers didn’t even know what was going on, I caved. I’m hooked. The writing is killer and the characters fascinating. It’s doing a genius job of showing how everyone is a walking storybook, full of joy and pain and secrets. I didn’t expect to find such grace and forgiveness here. I am nearly halfway through season two. Yesterday I dreamed that Hurley worked at Wal Mart and was selling me two televisions. “Uh, dude, we don’t have that one in stock I have to special order it for you.”

…

So I was I was typing this I forgot I had eggs boiling. The water evaporated and they just exploded.

Sincerely,
Bradley