Forest City Lovers

Beautiful pin-hole camera photo, exposed over 365 days. – Michael Chrisman.

Hello lovelies!

I hope your year has gotten off to a great start. Holy moly, it’s 2012! Mine certainly is starting well as I am leaving the (barely) wintry skies of Toronto and getting on an airplane to fly a few hours away. I’m taking a lovely vacation on the west coast to get some much needed sunshine and warm air. Sorry, no shows out here this time, this is pure vacay! And much needed. But when I get back, we will have a few shows to announce in Southern Ontario and some other upcoming fun things. So stay tuned!

keep warm
-kb

Hi friends! I want to take a minute to tell you about a great organisation we’re involved with called Not Far From the Tree [link]. We’ll be donating some money from our merch sales to help them out. They work locally to put Toronto’s fruit to good use by having volunteers picking and sharing the bounty with the food banks.

From their website: When a homeowner can’t keep up with the abundant harvest produced by their tree, they let us know and we mobilise our volunteers to pick the bounty. The harvest is split three ways: 1/3 is offered to the tree owner, 1/3 is shared among the volunteers, and 1/3 is delivered by bicycle to be donated to food banks, shelters, and community kitchens in the neighbourhood so that we’re putting this existing source of fresh fruit to good use. It’s a win-win-win situation!

From us: We have friends that volunteer for this org. They have a blast picking and it’s really amazing how it helps foster the neighbourhood community. The food bank gets fresh, ripe fruits to dispense to those who need it and the people that help out get something too. Pretty neat eh?

This month we will donate $1 to NFFTT for each t-shirt, tote bag or cd that we sell on our tour [dates] or through our online store [link]. And, as a bonus, we’ll donate another $0.50 if you take a photo of you with your swag and tag it on our Facebook page. Easy enough, eh? Go tell your friends.

We are excited to spread the word about NFFTT and hope that it will encourage groups to start in other cities. We’ll see you on the road!

xo
Kat

Happy summertime, everyone. Well, in the Northern Hemisphere anyways….

How has yours been so far? Done any amazing things? School’s out (yay!), lunch breaks at work can be spent outside (yay!) and if you’re lucky enough to be “funemployed”, there are so many adventures to be had (yayay!). Here at the Forest City Lovers camp, we’ve been taking it sort of easy this summer.

Oh, we totally played a high school prom though, and it was super FUN. [click]

and had a lot of fun at NXNE (Thanks Toronto!)

Everyone in the band’s been doing different things, keeping busy and creative over the last little while. Over in my corner, I’ve been spending my summer vacation holed up at my favourite-place-in-the-city-but-not on Toronto Island, making noise, crafts and paintings [click]. It’s a pretty special place. If you’re interested in the goings-on you can check it out over at my other blog [click]

I’m also super excited about a project we’re working on with the talented writer Michael Barclay [click] to celebrate the re-release of his book, “Have Not Been the Same”. I am picking up my copy next week, Kyle got his in mail a couple weeks ago and we all suggest you go pick it up and read it. [AMAZON] It’s a fantastic in depth look at some of the artists that rose up in 80s and 90s and became instrumental to the development of what Canadian music is today.

Next week we’ll be heading to Kearney, Ontario to play the quaint River and Sky festival. Looking forward to camping out for the night! Closer to home is Wolfe Island music fest, on the 6th of August in Kingston. There are few things more fun than playing Canadian festivals in the summer, that’s for sure. Something about spending the day outside in the sun (or rain) and the combination of fresh outdoor air and sweaty arm pits is a very, very special thing. Bring your bug spray!

Also, I rarely do this but this but sometimes I feel like sharing things that I think you should read:

The Book of Negroes by Lawerence Hill - I can’t recommend this book more. A fascinating historical fiction piece about a woman and her journey from Africa to the American slave trade and back. It’s a big book but, honestly, I could barely put it down when I started.
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistestop Cafe by Fanny Flagg – I had heard about this book (and more about the movie) from my Granny my whole life and finally took the time to read it after returning from the Deep South. It’s really good, great characters and has sections written from the town gossip’s point of view in her weekly newsletter.
American Chronicle – How to Poison a Milion People by Prentending to Grow Potatoes – this is a very important article to read and if you hav a moment, please educate yourself about this situation. In a nutshell: giant amount of land purchased under the pretense that it would be for potatoes, turns out it’s a private company vying to build a massive quarry.
Sauce Farm - some of our friends live on a farm and do fun things like make syrup out of flowers and sell vintage clothes
Catcalled with Turnips - Liz Schieck writes passionately and anecdotally about food and the creation of such. I help her sometimes and there may or may not be ridiculous photos of me eating things.

xo KB

This is my dog, Fergie, helping me clean out the van recently. It was a snowy-stormy day but we had fun – well, mostly she had fun, running around the van and sitting in the driver seat like the cutest-thing-ever. I recently signed over the ownership of this beautiful red beast to the Ontario government’s Retire Your Ride program, for a miniscule monetary reward and the knowledge that it will be recycled for parts in an environmentally responsible manner. Sigh.

I could go on for days about the big red Astro van that has been with me through my entire musical career, but I won’t bore you. I bought the van from a dealer in Oshawa in 2006 in prep for the first tour of the very first line up of Forest City Lovers embarked on, with our friends Ohbijou. Since then it saw all ends of our country and quite a bit of the US. It began to  fail on us when we’d drive more than 10 hours straight (I guess most people don’t drive that much?!) so we weren’t always able to use it for our long tours after a while, but it helped us in the beginning which was the most important. Now the big red beast is in car heaven.  I’m a little sad but I think the rest of the band is giving eachother high-fives in the air right…now…..

xO KB

We are very excited to announce that we’ve been nominated for an XM Music Award for best album (Carriage) and for artist of the year! If we win, it might be the only chance you’ll ever get to see Kyle wearing a tie. Kidding aside, we’d love your support and if you have about twenty seconds to vote, please do right here:

VOTE NOW

xo to the max,
KB

I hope you’ll join us! We’re playing an early (free! all ages!) show at Criminal Records on Thursday the 4th to get you pumped for Friday the 5th. Tell all your friends! xo KB

Cheesy? Psh, that joke was pure gold. It’s TIFF time. For the unfamiliar, that is the Toronto International Film Festival. It comes to town every September, and ultimately people go wild stalking celebreties and trying to get into fancy parties that are actually sort of lame because no celebreties show up. I haven’t seen any yet, but we’re keeping our eyes peeled (not really). Mainly though, we’re hoping to check out some of the fantastic films premiering in our fine town. We’d like to congratulate local director/producer team Darragh McDonald and Mike McMillian on their short film Love, Marriage and Miscarriage (which features our song ‘Orphans’ in the soundtrack) for getting into the festival.

We’re  starting to play again, after our vacation time, and we’ll be hitting up Eastern Ontario this weekend.  Peterborough, Ottawa and Kingston – you’re up! We’re looking forward to spending time in some of our favourite cozy venues.

We recently recorded a segment for CBC’s Definitely Not the Opera that involved playing a song on mine and Mika’s old street, hugging a tree and telling stories. It airs sometime next week (check CBC.ca for your regional station times.)

xo Kat

If you were at our Toronto show, you’ll know that there was a tower of cupcakes beside the merch table. They were lovingly made by Claire, Mika and myself and they were free with a pay-what-you-can donation to the food bank. After the show there were a few cupcakes left (I don’t take offense…haha) and a good amount of donations for the local food bank. Today I had some time so I went shopping and donated all the food I bought with your donations to the food bank in West Toronto that feeds local families.

So thank you very much for your kind donations while you [hopefully] enjoyed the treats. xo

That means it’s free so there is no reason to not click on this giant pretty image below…. xo

Hello internet friends! HERE IS  A SNAZZY POSTER. Lots more to read after so scan on down….

There has been a lot of excitement and fun over here in Loversland lately. We were honoured to be invited to play the season finale taping of Late Night in the Bedroom this past Wednesday and we had a blast. Beautiful warm people and popcorn! It was a great turn out (400ppl!) and it took place in an amazing new-ish space called the Toronto Underground Cinema. I look forward to seeing more events there, it’s a really great alternative space for music and arts, and of course films.

We’ve also been busy planing our album release party. I have been busy constructing some ridiculous installation for the stage. Hopefully I can figure out a way to install it…   and we have a window display going up in Soundscapes in the next few days. Which segways nicely into the other announcement that we’ll be playing a FREE and ALL AGES in-store at that same record store on Tuesday the 10th of August. I’m bringing cupcakes for you to gorge on.

This will get you all primed for our big launch party on Thursday the 12 of August at the Great Hall. Should be a blast, seriously. A “hoot” even. We plan on having fun. And more cupcakes. I’m pretty into the idea of cupcakes lately. Small…delicious.. cakes. Feel free to bring cupcakes to anything we ever do. I promise we’ll think you are cool.

After that we take two weeks off for va-cay and then begin the release shows in Ontario. Lots of fun planned for the fall!

xo - kat

p.s. if you live out of town and are not attending our launch party, you should watch Rookie Blue and listen for our song “Don’t Go” (featured on that episode) and just think about how much we love you.