Chicagoan Splendor

Some people hate Mondays. Some people really hate Mondays. And some people hate Mondays in the same way they might hate someone who killed their mother. Normally, I fall into the first category. On Mondays after a weekend on which we've played a show or hit the studio, I fall into the second category. And I can now say that on Mondays after a weekend in which Burn Rome Burn was played on the radio, I fall into the third category.

That's right. On Sunday night at approximately 7:55 pm, WXRT 93.1 FM in Chicago played the first song on Bottle Boy, Nothing's Changed . It was pretty damn cool to hear us on the radio. The DJ, Richard Milne, even said some very nice things about us and plugged the CD release show this coming Saturday. Additionally, we've been told that on Wednesday, February 1, at 9:45 pm CST, and Saturday, February 4, at 4:45 pm CST, Burn Rome Burn will be on WXRT 93.1 FM again as part of the Local Anesthetic Capsule feature.

If anyone outside Chicago is interested in catching us on the Capsule, you can stream WXRT at their website (linked above). After we listened to the broadcast Sunday night, we walked over to the Thai Room, which is right across the street from our house, to celebrate with Barret and Aoife. So needless to say, going to work yesterday was not all the fun, a situation exacerbated by the fact that I wound up having to stay until after 6:00 making copies of a filing. Indeed.

I felt like Harvey Pekar back in the file room after going on Letterman. Just on a much smaller scale. 

But there is a larger point here about progress and reality. It's really easy to get bogged down in the day to day things you do to get by when you're building a career in the arts. It's easy to get depressed, especially when success seems to happen at a glacial pace and you've made the decision that you want to succeed artistically on your own terms making your own music.

But if I step back and look at the arc of Burn Rome Burn and how it compares to other bands I've been in and other bands I see around the scene... well, that brightens even the worst Monday.

It seems like every time I turn around, we're doing something for the first time, something I've never done, or something very few bands get the chance to do, e.g., playing the Double Door as our first show, playing Metro 3 times in the first 9 months we were a band, playing big summer festivals, getting out of town for club shows, playing House of Blues, playing Summerfest, opening up for Cracker, getting played on 93.1 WXRT, and, most important of all, recording a full length album that I feel like will still sound great 10 years from now.

When you look at it like that... we are defining success on our own terms and succeeding without compromising. Another first: tomorrow, Wednesday, February 1, at 5:00 pm CST, we'll de doing an hour long preview of the album and interview at Chicago's best little internet radio station, Fearless Radio. So that should help push us into the CD release party and we're hopeful that more press will show up towards the end of the week.

Ah hope. So easy to find, so hard to sustain.

jbg