I don’t know if you guys are into Streetlight Manifesto, but I’ve loved there music for a long time now. They’ve been having some trouble with Victory Records, the company they’re signed to. Apparently Victory has been known to take more than their share of record and merch sales (way more) through sketchy accounting and other crooked bullshit like that. I preordered the new Streetlight record, The Hands That Thieve (appropriate title if you ask me), from an independent store set up by the band so they’ll actually get paid but Victory is refusing to send the music to the band so everybody that paid for the music has to wait on it. PLUS Streetlight’s front man, Tomas Kalnoky, has a kick ass side project called Toh Kay comprised of stripped down, chilled out versions of his songs - well, apparently the Toh Kay version of this album (The Hand That Thieves) has been cancelled. 

As a musician this serves as a reminder: we have to be careful who we do business with because the world we live in is fundamentally based of taking advantage of people and “capitalizing” on other peoples’ hard work. 

The band has asked that if you want to buy the album to get it from the RISC store, but they’ve also hinted at some alternative ways to get the album (I’ll let you figure that out). If you’ve never heard Streetlight Manifesto or Toh Kay you might want to check them out and show them a little support. You can watch Toh Kay’s music video for the song “With Any Sort of Certainty” here. 

We cleaned up the river last weekend for Water Aid. It was really fun.