I'm SO Lame... (07.22.2008)

Apparently I haven't written a journal entry for our website in 3 years! In fact the entire website has been extremely neglected in a long while and unfortunately the fault is mine. But, now that I've apologized and we've made up, let's talk about what's happened...in a very stream of conscience kind of way.

Show Highlights...
The band has been playing regularly on a lightened schedule since my daughter was born as much of my attention has been lost to her. Highlights of the last couple of years included playing Celebrate Fairfax right after Sister Hazel in 2006 and right before our friends in Loyd Dobler Effect and Eddie from Ohio in 2007. We played for 3 hours on New Year's Eve 2007 in the lobby for the Pat McGee Band hosted Downtown Countdown, which was a blast! This year we've played a number of different shows with some very cool local bands including Twenty Somthin' and Bradley James and Roadies that we hope to play with more in the future. We're all extremely excited about the Gobblerfest show this September at Virginia Tech with our old friends in the Pat McGee Band...hopefully that show will get its own entry with pics and maybe even a video...

New Material...
We've written about 15+ new Slightly Something tunes that we're getting ready to start recording this summer. My brother Ammar has joined the writing for the band as well and in addition to some of the amazing songs that he's written alone (Wanted in Mexico, Song in C, and Biology), he and I have co-written a couple of really fun songs as well (Can't Stop the World and Borrow Some Love). Oh, I've "learned" to play the mandolin since my last journal entry, so that's in the mix with the instrumentation now as well. I've also been playing a lot more sax since Ricky has been in Texas getting his Master's in Sax glory. He'll be back soon though so keep an eye out for him at our upcoming shows. Well, I hope this counts as a journal entry I will do my best to keep up with this going forward so it's not so splotchy (is that a word?).

~Osama

First Thoughts (06.20.2005)

So this officially marks the first journal entry for Slightly Something (dot com) and I'm hoping this will be a place where we can share some of our thoughts about different shows, recording, songwriting, funny stories, etc. We've been extremely busy over the last two months so I'll just write a few words about everything and elaborate later...

Fairfax Fair...
It was hot, literally! I think the heat index was somewhere in the mid 90s and it was a true Northern Virginia muggy day. Thank you SO much to everyone who came and sweat it out with us, it was an honor for us to just be there sharing the stage with some awesome bands like Better Than Ezra, Rick Springfield, Blue Oyster Cult, plus local favorites like The Getaway Car and Welbilt (looking forward to us teaming up with both those bands in the near future). The show was awesome, this was basically Ammar's debut with the full band on bass (New Year's eve doesn't count because it was an acoustic show) and he kicked some serious butt. I think this was the first taste of the ska-energy that he's going to bring to the band. Very exciting.

Fairfax Corner...
First off, sorry we didn't get a chance to get the word out about us playing at the Fairfax Corner Summer Concert series, it was short notice for us too. What had happened was...another band canceled earlier that week, and the same kind folks that put together the Fairfax Fair are in charge of that, and they were happy with our set at the Fair, so they called us up and asked us to fill in short notice and play a two hour set on Saturday night. It was a blast, the weather was perfect, there were tons of people out enjoy the FC (as I like to call it). Some of the highlights of the show were Kevin Sneevley sitting in on the drums and playing a wicked drum solo, Aaron Stanley sitting in on lead guitar (he'll be at Jammin' Java too!) and rocking the 12 minute version of #41 which we haven't done in a long time. There's a chance we might come back and do that again sometime in September, we'll keep you posted.

Recording...
So we've been going out to West Virginia on our weekends to work on this record for about 2 months now. I'm very happy with how it's sounding so far, definitely better quality than anything we've recorded on our own, and it's been fun to throw in different versions of some of the songs we've been playing for years now. Personally, this has been fun for me because I got to lay down some simple piano tracks to almost half the tunes for the first time ever. Plus the full band songs are all faster and more rockin' than ever before. John's drum solo on Glory is killer, Aaron came up with some very cool licks for Up Here, Ricky wails on Deepest Ocean, and I wrote a brand new bridge for That's Just Me. Summer schedules have been nuts trying to get everyone in there, but I'm trying to get Beth in to sing the lead part on Cross My Heart, however, if it doesn't work out, then I may sing that song, which should be interesting because it's real low for me. All in all, we've got all the major instrument parts on there, I'm going to go back and add Djembe to a few of the acoustic songs and then we're ready to sing the vocals and mix it down. I'll put another journal entry up later with a song list and get into it more. Maybe we'll start putting set lists up on this part of the site too... Stay tuned.

~Osama