1Resolution1Song1Month

May is upon us, and with it another new resolution.

Things have been a little hit or miss for us here at The New Resolution camp in the past couple of months. Our song releases have been delayed, our resolutions have gone unshared, and we’ve gotten down on ourselves for not being able to stick to the schedules we set for ourselves. We’re looking for a little inspiration to get us going.

We want you to be that inspiration. 

This month we want to hear from you. We’ve told you about our resolutions, but now we want to know yours. What are your passions? What are you doing to pursue them? What’s your story?

We’re making it our resolution to get to know you.

During the month of May, we will go out into the world and meet one new person every day.

That’s 31 new people.

We will ask these people to tell us their stories. Who are they? Where do they come from? What do they do? What drives them?

That’s 31 new stories. 

We will talk to them. We will get to know them. And we will ask them one simple question: What’s your resolution?

That’s 31 new resolutions.

Our resolution this month is you.

What’s yours? 

March was a very disappointing month for us. The followup to our first song Edge of the World not only failed to come out in the first week of the month as we had promised, it did not come out at all. This was incredibly frustrating for us. We had worked hard to ensure that the song would be out on time. In fact, at the release of Edge of the World, we were ahead of schedule. The song was recorded, and we had a couple of weeks to get the song edited and mixed. Unfortunately, as the days went by, nothing happened. We had put our faith in another person to take our song from a recorded session, to a professionally, produced track, but as the days of the month went by, our song remained in its unfinished state.

Now, we can play the blame game all we want, and believe me, we are nothing if not disappointed, but in being disappointed in another’s lack of accountability, we must also be disappointed in ourselves for ever allowing the situation to escalate to the point at which we find ourselves. This is after all our project, our music, our passion, and although we can ask others for help, the responsibility of getting our music out on our timeline ultimately falls to us. Yet here we are, a month after the intended release of our second song, still waiting.

We won’t wait anymore. If March was a month of waiting, April will be a month of action. In the coming weeks we will release, not one, but two new songs. While we were anxiously waiting for our second song to be completed, we were also busy writing and recording our third song, and tomorrow night we will finish the tracking process and get ready to start postproduction. Only this time, things will be different. 

We have two amazing, talented gentlemen working with us this month. Brandon Buttner, whose work ethic continues to inspire us on a day to day basis, and Chris Bartels who will once again be our mixmaster, even while working tirelessly on his own debut LP.

Now and in the future we will hold ourselves accountable to learn the art that we have yet to master. We will take the steps to become completely independent, and while we will still seek to work and collaborate with friends, we will no longer rely on the work of others to meet our deadlines. 

Look for more updates to come, and new music just around the corner. 

The sign of a good sports movie is whether or not it can capture and entertain a non fan. I don’t like baseball. At all. I find it to be slow, boring, and lacking in intrigue. This however, was not the case with Moneyball. Moneyball had me hooked immediately. 

While I could easily boil my fascination with Moneyball down to Brad Pitt’s performance as the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, I found that the film actually made me want to see more baseball. That’s not to say that I have any intention of watching baseball this summer or that I care at all about this whole Ryan Braun situation that continues to dominate my twitter and facebook, but during the film, I actually wanted to see some of the baseball action.

And that is the one flaw I found in this film. A lot of the film was exposition and montage, at least when it came to the actual game. Of course the intriguing part of this story is not what occurred on the field during the Oakland A’s historic season, but the philosophy that created it. That is the focus of the film, and that’s perfectly fine. However, in general, I’m not a fan of narrative media that feeds you exposition as a way of telling a story. I want to see events unfold, not get a summary of the events through a series of montage sequences. 

In this case, I guess I could say that the one flaw I find in Moneyball is the very signal that indicates that the film was in fact enjoyable and intriguing. I know that Moneyball is a good film because it managed to make me, someone who would never sit down and watch baseaball, want to see more baseaball. 

Ultimately, Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are the real highlights of this film. They are a pleasure to watch on screen. They take another wonderfully written Aaron Sorkin screenplay and knock it out of the park. Yeah, I went there. 

Moneyball is essentially the 2002 Oakland A’s of this year’s Academy Awards. In the end, it isn’t the best film of the year, but it might be the most intriguing.

I don’t like it when I come away from a film feeling like I’ve missed something. I enjoy a film that is challenging to grasp, but I like to have some sense of understanding when the credits start rolling. The Tree of Life is certainly a challenging film, but it also left me gaping, from both awe and confusion. 

It was unfortunate that we viewed this film in our living room on our small LCD television. This is definitely a film that was meant for the theater. The cinematography, if a bit heavy handed at times (Yeah, heavy handed! Sue me! I mean come on you can only be bluntly symbolic with these low angle shots soooo many times in one film), was truly exceptional. If I could project the images against the background of my life on a day to day basis I would. It’s simply beautiful to look at. 

Yay! Pretty Lights! 

Unfortunately, while I enjoyed looking at the film, and I could certainly be content watching Jessica Chastain gracefully wash her feet for hours on end, I didn’t really make a strong connection to the themes or narrative. I think I understand the feeling the film was trying to convey, but I just didn’t quite connect with the way the themes were being explored. Sean Penn could just have easily not been in this film as far as I’m concerned. I know the whole film is him ruminating over his past, and God and existence, but without him the film wouldn’t have changed much for me. 

I think this is the connection I really missed. I just couldn’t relate to why Sean Penn’s adult-self was having these thoughts at this present time. Has he been constantly reflecting on his past, trying to find meaning, since the death of his brother? Was this reflection spawned by a different event in his present life? These probably aren’t questions I need to ask, and I’m probably just supposed to ignore these thoughts and just accept the film for what it is, but if I acknowledge these questions the film just seems deep in this really shallow way. Why are you telling me this story adult Sean Penn’s character?!?!

I’m confused too, Sean. I’m confused too.

Maybe why is a question I’m expected to ignore. Maybe I missed something incredibly simple. Maybe I’m just supposed to enjoy the pretty picture. Whatever the case, The Tree of Life is a film I’ll have to see again. Maybe then everything will click. Maybe then I’ll be able to accept it for what it is.

This month we’ve decided to watch every film nominated for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards. We decided to do this for a few reasons.

First of all, after a January resolution that didn’t go quite as well as we had hoped, we thought that this would be a resolution that could get our 1Resolution1Song1Month campaign back on track.

Our resolution to do yoga every day in January wasn’t a complete failure. We did do yoga in some way, shape or form every day. Whether it was in our living room or in a studio, for five minutes or seventy five minutes, we practiced yoga. Unfortunately we weren’t able to keep up with showing you the progression of our yoga practice the way we had hoped. As it turns out, even though yogis are exceptionally chill people, they aren’t as chill about bringing a camera into the studio. While we could have put together a bunch of clips from our practice at home, we didn’t think that would be as interesting as it sounds.

So, while in general we hope to make most of our resolutions things that we can share with you through the video blog medium, we decided that we would proceed this month in a way that will allow us to get back on the horse without too much difficulty and still give you some insight into what we’ve been doing as we do it.

Secondly, when it can be done, we would like our resolutions to be relevant to the time period that we incorporate them in. This month is Oscar month, thus we will do something related to the Oscars. 

Thirdly, we want to be more culturally aware. The Grammy’s were also earlier this month, and this month’s resolution could just as easily have been to listen to all of the Grammy nominated albums. That would have been a great resolution, but we both feel that our knowledge of the popular music of the past year is fairly adequate in comparison to our knowledge of the Oscar nominated films. While we both share a love for film, we had only seen two of the nine nominated films before the beginning of this month. So, choosing to watch the Oscar nominated films from the past year is making us culturally aware on a much greater level than if we had decided to listen to the Grammy nominated albums. 

And last, watching the best picture nominations is something that we were sure would be fun, and that of course, is the most important thing. 

For the next week or so this blog will become the place that we share our thoughts on the Oscar nominated films that we’ve been watching. This will lead up to our very own, the first annual Rezzy Awards, this Saturday at 7PM CST*** Hosted by, Cullen Fitzpatrick and Blake Rhiner, with special guests yet to be announced. 

So keep an eye out, the categories will be revealed throughout the week, and your votes will determine the winners!****

***The time of the Rezzy Awards is subject to change without notice, at any time, for any reason, including but not limited to, The New Resolution being in the studio, The New Resolution practicing earnestly to get their live show together, The New Resolution going to Chipotle, or The New Resolution napping after going to Chipotle. 

**** As long as Blake and Cullen agree with you. 

The New Resolution is a band, and our first priority is to make music that we love.

However, The New Resolution isn’t just a band.

The New Resolution is a lifestyle. It’s a promise. It’s a commitment.

Last year on New Year’s Day we decided to finally make our band a reality. We made a commitment to live together in the same city and to spend our time doing what we love more than anything else, creating music. After years of talking about it, we were finally going to do it.

Since making this commitment, the band has evolved. We’ve come to realize that in order for our band to become what we want it to be, in order for us to live the lives that we’ve always wanted to live, we have to stop looking so far ahead and start focusing on the here and now. We need to stop seeing the forest for the trees and just see the trees.

As people we want a lot out of our lives, and we’re passionate about many different things. We don’t want any one of those individual things to pass us by. We know what the big picture is, but for now, we need to focus on the smaller pieces of the puzzle. We won’t let life pass us by, and we won’t wait any longer to make our dreams a reality. That is the resolution. To make that resolution a reality, we’ve come up with a plan.

One Resolution. One Song. One Month.

We will begin every month with a new resolution, a new goal to bring us one step closer to living the lives we’ve always wanted to live. We will spend every day of the month pursuing that goal, ritualizing the act and bringing new adventure into our lives. Along with changing our lifestyle in this way, we will write and record one new song to give to you. By the end of the month, we will have taken one small step toward the big picture, and we will chronicle the whole process here. 

The New Resolution is a band, but it is also our journey.

This is the story of that journey.