It's been so long...

and much has happened.

"Tuscarora" was released
Matt left the band
the "Cemetery Ride" single was released
Grasshopper played some shows
Sam released 2 solo LPs and 1 EP

more to come soon.

HAPPY V-DAY!!!

Exciting News!

First and foremost, TUSCARORA IS COMPLETE. Mastering was finished this very afternoon, and the guys in the band all agree that its an amazing piece of music. It is most definitely Grasshopper's finest effort to date, and represents focus and group vision more than either of their previous releases. Stay tuned for info on when it'll be available. Very, very soon...

Also: the band have entered into a relationship with a Mr. Rob Huenger, who is now their manager. He's a really great guy and a big fan of Grasshopper's music, as well as incredibly dedicated to their success. You can contact him about all things Grasshopper: rhueng01@shepherd.edu.

Finally: Grasshopper has signed up with Zoomoozik, an online record label/music distribution site. As of right now, the band is part of a free program, but will most likely be entering into an upgraded plan very soon. We'll keep you posted. Anyways, things are lookin great on the horizon, keep checkin back for more updates!

Top 10 Albums of 2007 by Sam

Ps... read Matt's post below... its very good. 

keep in mind, this is my top 10. Admittedly, I was dirt poor all year, and didn't really get to buy everything that came out, or even everything that i wanted. but oh well, it was still a damn good year, and here's my top picks from what i got out of it:



1. Radiohead- In Rainbows

By now, everyone’s heard the hype about this record and its release method. But really, it’s a fantastic record, and my top pick of 2007. It’s got pretty much everything you’d want: hard, soft, gorgeous, chaotic, spacey, rockin, ghostly, haunting MUSIC.
Fav. Track: “All I Need”

2. Wilco- Sky Blue Sky

It’s old news that Wilco is my favorite band, but they’ve really outdone themselves this time. With laid-back 70’s vibe that conceals its outstanding experimentation and unexpected jagged edges, this album is the very definition of a grower. It gets better and better every time you hear it. Plus, it’s guitar whiz Nels Cline’s recorded debut with the band. Oo la la.
Fav. Track: “You Are My Face”

3. Ryan Adams and the Cardinals- Easy Tiger

This is by far the most cohesive record Ryan Adams has been a part of since his early days with Whiskeytown in the 90’s. It’s amazing country rock all the way through with great stylings courtesy of the Cardinals, and even a guest appearance by Sheryl Crow. AND, it’s got some of Mr. Adam’s prettiest and most accessible songs to date.
Fav. Track: “Rip Off”

4. Queens of the Stone Age- Era Vulgaris

Perhaps QOTSA’s best album. Sexy, hard, rock’n’roll. Driving beats and squealing guitars abound, with some neat synth experimentation and sonic deconstruction thrown in. I’m really surprised this one hasn’t gotten more press. In my opinion, it’s the most innovative, refreshing record the band has ever put out.
Fav. Track: “Turnin’ On the Screw”

5. The White Stripes- Icky Thump

Put quite simply, the White Stripes doing what they do best. Nothing more to it. But luckily, there doesn’t have to be any more to it. Because it’s goddamn amazing.
Fav. Track: “I’m Slowly Turning Into You”

6. Bright Eyes- Cassadega

Let me preface this by saying, I don’t like Bright Eyes. Or at least I didn’t before hearing this record. I was totally blown away. I am the first one to admit that Connor Oberst’s voice and songwriting are acquired tastes, but on this album they fit wonderfully into the soundscapes. The whole deal has a very unique feel to it: at once archaic and very much contemporary.
Fav. Track: “Four Winds”

7. Band of Horses- Cease to Begin

I bought this record based soley off of hype, and I was not let down. The coolest thing to come out of the South since My Morning Jacket. This is definitely pure indie-rock, but somehow manages to punch through the pretentious posing usually associated with the genre. Basically, it’s a collection of great pop songs.
Fav. Track: “Islands on the Coast”

8. Nine Inch Nails- Year Zero

This album is probably the only time I’ve ever heard a Concept Album pulled off completely successfully. Trent Reznor created a world for his album to live in, but instead of singing songs about the world, he sings songs from inside of it. Really amazing. The production on it is also a sound to behold. Lots of really scary beats and blips and screams and coolness. And holding the whole thing together is Trent’s typically good songwriting. A few of the songs actually provoke intense emotional responses from me.
Fav. Track: “In This Twilight”

9. Neil Young- Chrome Dreams II

Although it isn’t consistently GREAT all the way through, it is great overall. It contains some of the best songs Neil Young has released in a decade or so. It signals his triumphant return to both Crazy Horse-esque caveman rock and CSNY-era folk songs. A few of the songs are pretty bad, but he’s never promised perfection. And that’s kinda why a body loves Neil.
Fav. Track: “Ordinary People”

10. The Broken West- I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

The discovery of this band for me was a fluke: I saw them at ACL this fall, simply attracted to their name. And when I got there, I was greeted by a fantastic mixture of power-pop and alt-rock, all wrapped up in a sound that was distinctly reminiscent of their hometown, LA. The recorded versions of the songs I heard that day are delightfully lofi and loose. This band is definitely one to watch; this is only heir first LP.
Fav. Track: “Shiftee”


Honorable Mentions: Arcade Fire- Neon Bible, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band- Magic, Neil Young- Live at Massey Hall, Ryan Adams and the Cardinals- Follow the Lights, the Shins- Wincing the Night Away



So there it is. I have high hopes for 2008. Already, I know of some great stuff being released in the first few months of the year (Drive by Truckers and Sun Kil Moon, oh my!), and hopefully there will be much more after that. Hope this year was a good one for everyone musically. It was for me!

~SAM

Fear and Loathing Music

I just thought I should submit some thoughts I've been having concerning the sincerity of music.

I've been thinking about something lately. There really hasn't been another arising in the music industry lately. I'd hardly count Radiohead's non-label album release as one, being that they signed to a label recently. However, I mean in the sense of something turning music on it's side. Maybe not something as hard or intense as "Punk" or "Grundge"...but something sincere, and classic. Much like Bob Dylan and The Beatles were to the 60's. Many people won't remember this era of the early 00's as very bright time for music, except for those of us listening to the "good stuff". I will most definitely remember bands like Wilco and songwriters like Ryan Adams. I just have really large hopes that the 10's will be a great era for music. And, I most definitely hope that Grasshopper is on the front lines. And I can say with 100% satisfaction that we most definitely are sincere, and are all about presenting a body of work that is valid, interesting and most-importantly: good. So, to those of you reading and listening to us: we definitely have more in store. And we have very good feelings about "Tuscarora".

Happy Holidays,

Matt

SONG BY SONG-- by Sam

first, a note about songwriting...

Writing songs is a tricky thing. It’s a balancing act. A writer has to walk the line between extremes without going to one direction or the other. Honest but not irritating, poetic but not pretentious, sincere but not too obvious. I write songs in two different ways. Sometimes, I have an idea, a phrase, or an image that I build a song around, and the “big picture” reveals itself later. Other times, I have a larger, overarching idea, and fill in the details.

Either way, songwriting has to be completely natural and unforced. When I really TRY to write a song, it doesn’t come. Or when it does manage to come, it’s crap. Songs come from the sky. Songwriters filter. That’s why you can’t force them. I seriously believe that the reason that half of the bad music out today is so terrible is because of forced songs. It’s like trying to force a baby to be born 6 months premature. It can’t happen.

I also want to make it clear how important collaboration is. One person’s mind can only reach so far in a certain situation. A lot of songs are written exclusively by me, but a good number are written in union with one or more people in the band. Each one of us brings something special and unique to the songwriting process, something that is generally outside of the mindset of each other. In the end, the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts. Every member of the band has now contributed to more than one song. In most cases, it is many more. And the collaboration will only continue and improve.

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BARE BONES
Our debut album, a conscious effort towards experimentation. I view this album as a record of stories. A lot of them were written to be anti-autobiographical. Of course, nothing a person creates isn’t in some way autobiographical. Although I think the band and I have moved forward leaps and bounds, I still love this album. I think it has great songs.


The fact that More and Less changed so much from the demo version to the final is quite fitting, since essentially it is a song about change. I wrote it in a period of time when I was full of doubt (these periods are common, I’m coming to find), and confusion as to which direction to head. I was feeling alone and caught up in many things, and for me the images of spiders, roots, and angels all added up in my mind.

Lost My Way is one of several songs I wrote in the year or so before Bare Bones was released, and its original version existed on a four-track tape recorder before Grasshopper was even a notion in my head. It follows a lot of the same themes as More and Less, except it mentions specific people in my life. The characters in the song are the members of Hydroplayne, my first band. I suppose I sensed that I was moving away from that group, from that music.

Telephone Wires was written standing barefoot on my cold tiled kitchen floor. Personally, I think it’s a song all about images. In the words there is an unspoken idea of distance, perhaps even in the idea of telephone wires themselves. I have a theory that the vague events in the song are imaginary to the characters. The static is not a sample. I tuned my radio between AM stations, and tweaked the knob slightly. Voices and sounds from strangers and strange lands came through. But if anything, this did not signify connection, just reiterated the distance.

My first attempt at writing a straight-up love song produced Goodnight Sleeptight. Obviously, I failed at making a straightforward love song. But I think I got something much more interesting instead: love, doubt, promises, and dreams.

Down was the first song I wrote after Grasshopper was actually formed. It’s a song that captures a lot of the feelings of traveling as a child. I always was living in my own head, as I think I often am now. The whole song has a warm, sepia sound to it.

In Mind was written right after I returned from a trip to Spain. Although it doesn’t follow real life events exactly, it captures the mood of being alone in a hotel room thousands of miles from home and the person you love nicely I think. When you’re separated from things you hold dear, you start questioning the original connections. And before long, it seems like you’re not seeing things right. The song sounds like it was played by ghosts.

Speaking of ghosts, Silent Ghost is about things perhaps too personal to mention. I can say that it’s about more than one loss. And more than one kind of loss. This is the first song I realized that I could develop my own style as a lead guitar player. This is significant because up until this point, I was definitely a rhythm player only, and was pretty unconfident in my abilities at a guitarist at all.

Morning is a deeply personal and autobiographical song. The events are as follows (risking embarrassment and being altogether too exposed): I was in a friend’s field, in a teepee with a fire in it. There were four of us there. The ground was covered in snow, but had a tarp over it in the teepee. We were drinking. My friend’s mom came out to the field, livid because we were underage. We went our separate ways. Fearing her own parents’ outrage, one of my friends came to my house. Deeply frozen, damp, intoxicated, and shivering violently, we held each other platonically until morning. This may be too much information, but this is the only song based on incredibly specific happenings (with some embellishment, of course). The whole thing sounds like a dream.

From Under the Waning Moon is another song first recorded as part of a solo project on a four-track. I don’t really know what to say about it, except that it’s about two completely different subjects that work together only because their words seem to fit.

Definitely the oldest Grasshopper song, Sand and Shadows existed as early as 2004, once again as a solo song on my four-track. My then-girlfriend asked me to write a song for/about her. This is what came out. I’m not sure I ever showed it to her. This is another image-driven one. The name has a certain ring to it. A version of this exists in a more “poppy” arrangement, but after listening to it, I hated it. I gave it a week to ferment in my head, and listened to some Wilco, Radiohead, and Grant Lee Buffalo. The results were unlike anything I had produced up until that point.

Big Sky is simply an expression of my infatuation with America, a theme that has popped up in my songs many times. I tried to capture the scope and drama of the country and its land, and the feelings they produce. Ambitious and arrogant, I know. But so is America.


SPEAKING TO THE DEAD
An album about relationship(s [of all kinds]). There’s some great song work on this record, and some great genre play. I think we started to really come into our own with this one. We started sounding like a real functioning band.

Exactly What I Mean is interesting on many levels to me. Not only do I think it has some great images in it, but I think the whole theme of communication and miscommunication is shown really well. The lines are a collection of seemingly random images and ideas strung together with “I know you know exactly what I mean.” That line contains so much frustration, pleading, assumption… lots of things. The title is funny to me for the same reasons. And I absolutely love the noise freakout at the end.

Fireflies really is a song about the intense (albeit relatively brief) loneliness a person feels after they say goodnight to someone they love and head home. This song was my first foray into the world of sampling and filtering. The results still excite me.

A hard song for me to pin down, Killing Time is mostly about being depressed I think. It has bleak words, bleak sounds, and a bleak message.

She Says started out as a joke between Craig H and I about a mutual acquaintance, but it turned into a portrait of a couple of pathetic people. I was afraid that it would come out as too much of a cliché, but I think we had something unique to say and found a way to say it. This song went through two versions, the final has a classic rock sound I really love.

I Wasn’t Looking is a slice of Americana. The addition of Gracie Jones’ vocals give it a real old-timey feel that, for me at least, conjures up images of the old singing families of days long gone.

I guess an album about (among other things) a relationship has to have at least one breakup song. Out of My Hands is one of them. It contains all the anger and sadness of the death of a relationship, but also a distinct flavor of denial or disbelief, which is something you don’t find all that often in similar songs. It sounds like smooth Neil Young. And something else that I can’t put my finger on. I guess its just Grasshopper.

I did not write the great majority of What Do You Have To Say For Yourself?, so I cannot really speak about it in depth. But I do think we pulled off the soundscape nicely. I did however, have a hand in Answer (Cracking), which is just what it says it is. A song about all the things you’ve ever wanted to say but couldn’t find the right words for. But …melodically with a folk-rock arrangement and Beatles-esque harmonies!

The next three songs have always seemed part of the same cycle to me. They just seem to fit together. So I’ll write them up together. Raindrops was written far before Speaking to the Dead was released (just after “Sand and Shadows,” actually), and demoed on the trusty 4-track. It’s about and sounds like dreams I have had. Coincidence is a pretty straightforward song about being in love and living right outside of DC. We’ve all been in the place Tripping on Words is about: tongue tied, blithering, unable to say what you mean, but with the absolute best of intentions. Plus, I think it sounds gorgeous.

Ambulance Chaser is, in essence, a song about America’s obsession with death. One day, I heard a helicopter flying really low over my house. I walked out the door and saw it landing at the park down the street. I ran down, knowing it was a MediVac and wanting to see what was going on. When I got there, I found that the chopper was called for a Little Leaguer who got hit in the head with a bat. He was going to be fine, from everything I heard, and I was actually disappointed. Realizing this, I was pretty disturbed, and knew I had to write a song. And the song that came out was pure Crazy Horse.

Beach was written at the beach. It is a moment in time, perhaps one of the most content moments of my life and of that particular relationship. Craig H wrote the choruses, and they fit eerily well with the rest of the song (the dialogue actually happened verbatim between my girlfriend and I, and he wasn’t there). It’s one of our shortest songs, and one of our more sonically compelling, in my opinion.

What can I say about Speaking to the Dead? Most of me thinks that its too complex for me to completely understand. But I do know that it’s about losing everything dear to you: love, life, hope, etc etc etc. The bridge has the unbelievable rage to it. I don’t want to sound conceited, but that bridge still astounds and somewhat scares me. The other words are dark, resigned, and sad. The sound is even darker and ghostly. I listen to this song all the time, not because I created it, but because it speaks to me as a piece of music.

Back Rubs for Dan, the hidden track on the album, was written by Trevor and embellished by the rest of us. The voices are saying very definite things. Try to figure them out. The rest is Trevor’s--- you’ll have to ask him.

MD's Finest--- by Sam

Hey y'all,

So, this has been on my mind recently: whenever I'm abroad, and someone asks me where I'm from, or when I explain where the band is based, my response of "Maryland" usually draws blank stares and apathetic comments. I'm convinced that's because on the surface, MD is a fairly neutral, boring state. I mean, what do we really have to offer the rest of the world? We're best known for crabs. An oceanic bug. So... here's my list of what i personally consider to be Maryland's finest offerings, trying to be as local as possible. I realize that i haven't seen all of the Old Line State, but i have lived here all of my life. And that counts as something i guess. Here goes, in no particular order:

1. Maryland Blue Crabs--- okay, so i was kinda knockin them before, but i have to admit, these gnarly crustaceans are damn fine. I sometimes go to other parts of the country where restaurants serve "crab"... and i just laugh. Once you've had the real thing, once you've had the best, there's no goin back. Maryland Crab Cakes are God's gift to us.

2. Nils Lofgren--- E-street Band member, great guitarist, solo artist, piano player on "After the Gold Rush," etc etc etc. He comes from the DC area, and gets his hair cut at the same place that i do (no, i've never seen him there).

3. Neat history--- Maryland, and indeed my hometown of Poolesville, have really incredible histories. This mostly stems from our position between what is commonly held as the North and the South (although technically we're in the South). The state had an incredible position during the Civil War, and Poolesville was described by one Union general as "the most treasonous town in the South."

4. Our song--- "Maryland, My Maryland," our state song, has the same tune as "O Christmas Tree." How cool is that?

5. Washington DC--- let's face it, it's ours. Virginia may have delusions of grandeur about owning DC, but c'mon they're separated by a river. We surround it. We gave up our land so it could be built. It's ours. Thus, the Capitol of the most powerful nation on earth is in MD.

6. Questionable Content--- perhaps the coolest webcomic around. Sure, it may be based in Easthampton, Mass., but Jeph Jacques (it's author) was born and raised in Rockville, MD.

7. The Chesapeake Bay--- We envelope it, pollute it, and exploit it. Still, it's ours.

8. Jerry's Subs and Pizzas--- yep, started here.

9. Ledo Pizza--- same thing.

10. Our flag--- so ugly, it's cool. Looks like a cross between a Nascar banner and a medieval coat of arms.

11. The land and environment--- We have several different landscapes, from wetlands to mountains. Also, we have a bunch of preserved farmland. Our climate is pretty nice, with the full range of seasons and temperatures. As i write this, there are 4 inches of snow on the ground outside my window. Next week, it may be 70 degrees. Weird.

12. Baltimore--- the strangest fuckin city i've ever been to. It is beautiful, dank, inspiring, scary, STRANGE. It's an unlikely artists' haven.

13. Bioengineering--- BIG export. The guys who decoded the human genome work in "Genome Alley," which is in Gaithersburg, MD.

14. The snakehead fish--- that whole thing started here. Feel the fear!

15. White's Ferry--- just down the road from Poolesville, it's the only privately-owned Ferry still in operation on the Potomac.

16. John Waters--- Baltimore's favorite son. Amazing films. What more can I say?


I think that's all for now. Maybe i'll keep adding as i keep thinking up things.
~SAM