i love family guy. guilty pleasure. watching it this very moment. i love when south park makes fun of family guy. or when the simpsons make fun of south park making fun of the family guy. i grew up not watching a ton of tv. ok, not watching any tv. in fact, all i watched (per parental instruction) were musicals from the 40s. how embarrasing.

now i feel like i'm catching up with 18 years of tv depravity... is there tvholics anonymous?

to live. to free myself from the couch, from 25 minutes of advertising an hour. from half-wit plot lines and cheesy soundtracks. it was warm today and i could smell the good times coming back. i don't know why but since college, every winter i get that cold depression in my bones, and it's amazing how much i sit up and notice the warm weather coming in. it breathes life and excitement and adventure.

in other news, ATOMICTOM is recording demos this week and next, traveling to virginia later this month for week of writing in the state that's "for lovers" and gearing up for some great shows in April and May. love ya'll!

it's effffffing cold.

but.

i'm content. it's been a good week. my boy nate is back in town. although.

from the way things read. we're losing him to.

nashville.

love all the new artists on here. ben and jade and cassie are.

ruling this onelive site.

i hate limbo. that moment before the storm. or the crazy. or the "what the **** was that" moment. i guess i'm.

impatient.

you ever get to that place where you feel like you're totally in control, and then you're reminded every so subtley that you're.

not. of course.

it's stupid. this is the process. the journey. and in all honesty. i'm enjoying this crazy ride. and i should. because who knows. when the moment comes. it could be.

dull and boring.

love the process. love the journey.

btw. the cult are amazing.

it has been a CRAZY week.

i'm up early. 7am is early for me. we're about to venture out on a mini-tour with our boys the click five. gots to get going. but i wanted to share a few things with everyone.

first, you HAVE to check out Eric's blog about his "mac-n-cheese" experience in NYC. it's HILARIOUS!

NEXT, check out our tour dates on our myspace page. if you're near a show, PLEASE come out and support, 'cause between Ben Romans and I, these shows will be NUTZ.

Also, check out the new mix of "You Always Get What You Want" on our myspace page... we released the inevitable "radio mix". Yi-YEAH! 

Finally, we FINALLY took some "official" pictures. you can check them (you guessd it) on our myspace page... 

The excitement for this tour and especially the New Jersey and New York City dates is off the charts. It's gonna be good times with The Click Five boys... so def hit us up and let us know if you're coming out!

I know, this has been pretty much a shameless plug blog. but i'm just REALLY giddy right now.

good times.

have a kickass week. we'll keep you posted about our adventures on the road.

luke 

impulse. pulse. e.

i love connotation. i love subtext.

does this mean i love manipulation?

television. vision.

i love distractions. i think i'm a.d.d.

lighting.

set the mood. take you to that place.

should songs ever be about more than just writing about where i'm at and what i want to speak about?

intentional. there's nothing wrong with being.

intentional.

control. i want it. i don't have it.

honesty. i want it... 

i'm climbing up something. not sure what this mountain is made of. but when i hit the summit. i'll send you a text. 

one month.

since my last blog.

i hope this finds you well.

two holidays.

crazyness.

its so easy for me to look at this space and think, "how can i complain today?". no good.

its 2008. i don't do resolutions.

i will say this about the new year.

i'm very excited.

i'm most excited about being with my friends. about learning from them. about making dinners and band brunches and coffee slash french beer writing sessions and loud, crazy dance moves at shows and singing miley cyrus at the top of our voices and coming up with new things we've never done before...

i'm excited about the freedom of spirit.

i'm excited about the healing of artists.

i'm excited about chilling the F**K out.

i'm excited about hanging with my lady.

i'm excited about fresh perspectives. about good strong coffee. about the art of the pop song. about the increasing measure of the independent artist. 

good times.

echos.

millions.

saying the same thing.

gawd do we want to be unique. but we already are. there is only one of you.

snow on the ground. 6am sunday morning. i'm the first person in all of brooklyn to walk on it. or so i'd like to believe. please leave me my dreams.

sleep last night. first in a week. dreams keep me from sleeping.

i'm not telling you what you already don't know. but maybe i just need to hear it. type it. 

me and paul giamatti in the elevator today. he forgot to push his floor button. speaking of the button gods. 

what's in a song. why do you get goose bumps when you hear the first point zero two nine seconds of the song. because its beaten into your head? not anymore. because you and that song had a steamy love affair over dry bean coffee and the world wide web.

i want to create love affairs while dreaming when i'm awake talking to paul giamatti about how to make good movies that involve spanish wines in the snow. 

famous last words. self-occupational-termination. now. 

listen to hard-fi = good music.

millions.

echos. 

what the hell!?

writing is such a fascinating craft. you start off with a crazy entrance sentance, something to grab the reader with, then throw a few ridiculous sounding statements that contain the hint of truth, draw conclusions based on emotional response, and then end with a hanging question...

or at least, that's the very critical opinion of this blogger. actually i have a huge respect for people with an actual talent for writing. i don't count my vomitting on your computer screen as a legitimate form of that craft, but hey... you're still reading...

i had a crazy weekend in the land of New Jersey, America. People died and were buried. Still such a bizarre concept to people who have yet to really live. It always sobers me. For about point zero two nine seconds. Now i'm back in the land of the not-yet-living. What do you do? I am a songwriter.

I am a songwriter.

People in other countries NEVER ask as their first question in a conversation... "what do you do?" Only us Americans are freakishly concerned with playing the ego game when it comes to how we make our money. BUT, our dollar sucks. so WHY!!!

i found this on a myspace page today and it hit me right between the eyes...

"I'm never bored. That's the trouble with everybody - you're all so bored. You've had nature explained to you and you're bored with it, you've had the living body explained to you and you're bored with it, you've had the universe explained to you and you're bored with it, so now you want cheap thrills and, like, plenty of them, and it doesn't matter how tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it's new as long as it flashes and fucking bleeps in forty fucking different colors. So whatever else you can say about me, I'm not fucking bored." - the film NAKED

i read something in this book "the artist' way" about "paying attention..." - to the colors and life around you. i have a distinct memory of this evening back in boston, i was soooo brain fried... just in a crazy place... too much input, not enough letting go, i was walking to my then girlfriend's apartment... and the colors of every sign and billboard just blared out at me (no, i wasn't on shrooms...). it was my brain crashing... my body telling me there was too much going on... i got to my girlfriends apartment and just curled up in this chair, and didn't move for an hour... my brain had to "restart". i was "paying attention" to all all the "fucking bleeps in forty fucking different colors" rather than all the incredibly beautiful things and people going on around me. and i have so many incredible people around me. i hope i get an opportunity to add value to their lives, as they do for me.

i have a show. a big show. people are coming from everywhere to see us. we're getting press like crazy. everyone is excited. and...

i have jury duty. right now.

in fact, i'm writing from the "jurors' lounge" in downtown brooklyn. here to serve my country.

so far, no throwing myself out the window... but it's only 10am.

the past week has been crazy. if you read nate campany's blog, you'll get a glimpse of a few things happening that are good times. nate, my friend phil (bass player for ATOMICTOM) and I played a CMJ week show at one of my fav venues. there was a cool little writeup on mtvnews. "nate campany writes like a man in love"... love it.

i've been doing these morning pages - which means i wake up and the first thing i do before i breath is write three pages of freewrite. it's mostly shit that's vomitting out of my brain and no one will ever be aloud to read it. and i hate it. cause it's carving some craziness out of me. but i'm hoping it'll get me closer to the good stuff.

anyway, my country calls. def check out the mtvnews.com writeup... and just in... apparently my song "you always get what you want" did well in the New York Songwriter Competition... just to tute my own horn there. good times. red times. red sox that is...

i love contrast. visually and lyrically it can so powerful.

but my head is spinning around the contrast of feeling so alive... and seeing friends looking like death is laughing at them. my good friend nate loves the fall. we share this love... the changing weather does seem to bring a crisp clarity to life... even as all organic life from the ground dies around you.

my weekend back home in virginia was... really strange. people i hadn't seen in ten years or more. it wasn't a reunion officially, but it might as well have been. and i just saw all this sadness around me. so many dreams unfulfilled, so many of my friends realizing that everything they thought life would be actually never happened. and instead, life, literally was sucking their "essence" away.

people think that new york city is a crazy place, with pillaging and murder and muggings. but to be honest, i found my hometown to be an incredibly sad place, empty, disillusioned with the lack of anything exhilerating. and i love being here, in new york. it is filled with people seeking their dreams... looking for fullfillment... looking for love... looking to live... to be alive. god i love this town.

ps. rusty... save darfur. 

stream of concious. im awake. at the butt-crack of noon. and i'm seeing two of everything. this from my xbox rager till the wee hours of the morning. gears of death will give you nightmares.

virginia is such a beautiful state. so serene. so quiet. too quiet. i can't stand it for very long. but in this moment. i hear nothing. incredible.  i have this desire to just lay my body flat on the grass outside and make grass angels.

i'm curious. does the social network world have a beginning, middle, and end? business people will tell you that every "product" has a life-span. and it certainly seems like myspace is about to die a horrible, flaming, gut-pouring death while writhing on the ground in eternal pain. or maybe that's just i wish it would do. but another rises to take it's place. really. the blog to analyze social networking sites has been written too many times. but i'm curious. how much of real life has ebbed away in the poorly programmed pages of myspace? ugh. 

we write because we cannot afford therapy. 

so, as we are less than 10 days away from the new Radiohead album (which they're releasing for whatever you want to pay for it - genius), i'm dusting off the older albums... preparing my brain for the onslaught of what is sure to blow me away. if i don't prepare, by listening to the entire catalog from Pablo Honey through B sides and rarities (like the acoustic version of Motion Picture Soundtrack) to Hail to the Thief, my brain won't get it... it'll turn to itself in the mirror and say "what the hell is this?" I've got 10 days to listen to over 400 songs and not kill myself in the process. Should be easy - i'll be in Atlanta for three days, then NOVA for three more. If you don't see another blog... then i'm dead. death by radiohead. sounds like a drug...

cheers.

Radiohead Has Changed the Game

Radiohead Has Got People Thinking

Radiohead (bob lefsetz)

i only say that because i find it hard to locate in myself sometimes. i don't refer to telling lies versus telling the truth. i mean opinions - as in what you find in blogs. i mean when someone asks you what you think. i mean being honest in conflict. i mean taking risks in relationships.

blogs seem to give honesty a second chance. it's always been easier for me to write down what i'm thinking in my head then to actually say it. i suspect it is that way for many of you readers / bloggers. 

so, here, on The One Love, I am looking forward to sharing with you our honesty, adventure, risk and a few random stream-of-conciousness thoughts. so, while we wade together through endless amounts of content... i hope we find the few moments of magic that still exist out there.

and, if you haven't already, check out (and by check out, i mean, visit, volunteer, give, slave away for, become a vital part of, change lives with) the charities that this blog super site supports. it's why we're here...