Upcoming Shows:

6/18 - Goose Island (Clybourn) - Chicago, IL
6/30 - Beat Kitchen - Chicago, IL

saynotobadpop.com
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"Don't stop believin"

Journey

 

News:

6/8:

Hey there pretty people,

Well we've missed you all dearly, and since maybe the warm weather is here to stay in Chicago, we're FINALLY emerging from our recent hibernation this Saturday at the Elbo Room(6/13).  Mikey's back in town, and we're really looking forward to playing for you all again.  It's been a while, so we wanted to make this show a special one.  Check it:

312unes Presents:
Common Shiner
w/ Eddie Gumucio & The Electrics,
Dan & Leland (from LA), Daysleeper

IPOD GIVEAWAY!!
Bring two or more friends, tell the door guy you're there for Common Shiner, and put your name in at our merch table to be entered to win a BRAND NEW IPOD with the entire Common Shiner catalogue on it--including unreleased live tracks!

Also, 312unes is sponsoring, so if you find the 312unes rep in the crowd, you can get free beer and Goose Island swag!!

Openers start at 8:30pm, CS is HEADLINING. And you may hear a new song or two!

We'd like to make it a great night, especially for friends Dan and Leland who will be here all the way from California!

Also, check out our calendar on commonshiner.com, myspace, and facebook, as we've got all kinds of shows coming up both in and out of town (and plenty more to come), so come hang out with us, and tell your friends.

We can't wait to see you all again.  You complete us.  You had us at hello.  etc.

Nothing but love!
~CS

4/12:

Hey all you lovely lovely people,

Well Spring refuses to come to Chicago, and we keep making promises we don't keep.  :(  That promise is that we haven't sent you a "real" newsletter in a while.

Well the reason we haven't had a chance to this time is because our very own Michael James Brooks has been cast as the leading role in Actors' Theatre's Production of "A New Brain" up in Grand Rapids, MI.  The rest of us in the band are very proud of Mike and excited for his new endeavor.  You can check out more info on the show here:

http://actorstheatregrandrapids.com/

So we're taking the next month and a half or so to book our summer and work on some other things.  And you who are anywhere near the Grand Rapids area should all go out and see Mike singing and dancing his heart out.

However, we do have one show coming up very soon that we're very excited about.  We're playing as part of the International Pop Overthrow Festival this coming Thursday at the Abbey Pub in Chicago (http://www.internationalpopoverthrow.com/schedule-Chicago-2009.htm).  Here's the details:

Date:  4/16
Time:  8pm
Place:  Abbey Pub (3420 W Grace St, Chicago, IL)
Cover:  $8

We're very excited to make our first appearance as part of the IPO (and since you can still download our latest ep at http://www.saynotobadpop.com/, the IPO is something we're definitely on the same page with :)).

Come on out and hang out with us!  We would absolutely love to see all of you!  (and you can celebrate the Hawks winning game 1 of their playoff series, for those of you that care about hockey)

There are plenty of other irons in the fire, so you're bound to hear more from us soon.

We love you dearly!

~CS

3/18:

Greetings Lovelies!

So we strive to have interesting and entertaining newsletters, and as of late, we have been failing on that promise.  Not to worry, we promise we'll have a normal (or at least our definition of normal) newsletter soon.  So stay tuned!

In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that we'll be back out in Wrigleyville this Friday (3/20), celebrating (almost) the start of spring and therefore baseball season, bike riding, park attending, and all the other wonderful things that come with spring.  Here's all the details:

Underground Lounge
Address:  952 W Newport Ave, Chicago, Illinois 60657
Date:  5/20
Time:  8pm doors
Cover:  $5
Details:  Band Called Catch Jen Hall, Big Livy, and The Blamers

We hope to see you soon!  We've got some fun other announcements coming up soon, but we'll keep this email brief.  If you can't make it, at least let us know how you're doing or something.  :)

Common Shiner loves you.

~CS

3/4:

Hey everyone, hope you all had a happy Ash Thursday!  (If you don't own our album So Long..., you will not get that joke)  And if you're following the Lenten tradition and denying yourself things right now, we wish you strength!  Morgan gave up coffee, Mike and Vijay gave up whiskey (harder than you may imagine), and we may have talked Jake into giving up peanut butter (possibly his only true vice).

Well first off, a huge thank you to all of our friends who came and hung out with us at Billy's Lounge up in Grand Rapids (special thanks to those who drove from far distances too!  You know who you are).  We had such a great time, and felt very loved.  It was also a lot of fun to share a bill with our good friends Bless You Boys.  I hope we can play shows together until the day we die.

So big semi-last minute news here, but we're going to be making our Beat Kitchen debut in two days!  We're excited to finally play at one of our favorite venues in Chicago, and we hope we caught a lot of you with free Thursday nights so you can come hang out with us.  And good news for those of you who have to work the next day, this is a slightly earlier show than most of our Thursday shows have been.  Here's all the details:

Beat Kitchen
Cost:  $8 (21+)
Time:  Doors 8:30pm, show at 9:00pm  (we are on first!)
Address:  2100 W Belmont, Chicago, Illinois 60618
Additional Info:  We'll be followed by two great bands, Doe & Stag and Animal City.  So if you can manage it, you'll want to stay out to hear those guys too.

Since this is our first show at Beat Kitchen, we'd love to have you all there with us!  Hope to see you soon!

We love you immensely.

~CS

12/8:

So if you were one of the beautiful people at Cubby Bear Friday night, you already know this and are telling friends. Thanks so much for coming out--it was a fantastic show (well, until they started kicking people out so fast we couldn't say goodbyes). We can't tell you how much it meant to have you there, nor how much our hearts swell when we get on stage and see the faces of many dear friends. You keep us going. And we have to say, it was yet another show that state lines were crossed to see. We feel unbelievably blessed.

But in case you couldn't be there Friday night, we wanted to pass this on to you tonight so *you* can have the EP and be passing the website on. We intentionally made it pretty easy to remember. HERE IT IS!

www.saynotobadpop.com

("say no to bad pop dot com")

You just go there and enter your name and email and start the free download! It's a zip file that contains all four songs, and even some album artwork, lyrics, and a Common Shiner desktop wallpaper for fun.

And just so you know, we *are* still doing this all indepently, and still need financial help whenever we can get it. So after you download the album, there is a button to "donate" that will take you to a Paypal site where you can contribute whatever you can. And by the way, sorry the donate button is so big--we're not trying to push, Paypal seriously wouldn't let us make it any smaller. :)

WE LOVE YOU ALL SO MUCH! It's bittersweet to be going into this figurative cave for a couple months, but we hope to emerge better artists, with new music and new thoughts. Assuming you're not one of the few people we'll see up at the Turtle Creek Casino shows in two weeks, we'll see you in February.

All love, and Happy Holidays,
CS

9/1:

Hey all you wonderful people,

Well we've been keeping busy with all kinds of stuff.  Not just gigs, but we also spent a couple days in the studio laying down some of our newer stuff that you may have heard at shows already.  We've also taken some new pictures of our sometimes pretty faces that you'll be able to see soon too (you could maybe even see one right now on our myspace :-)).

STORYTIME
====================================
So we mentioned before we had a couple great stories, so we figured we'd share them with you.

First Story:  Rainy Day Occurrence
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We played about a month ago at Subterranean, and for those of you in Chicago, you'll remember that as the night a virtual hurricane blew through in the form of two gigantic thunderstorms.  Well as we were packing up, our very own Vijay (the Professor) discovered that his passenger side car window was shattered, and everything he had inside was gone. He was also planning on driving out of town immediately after our show, so he had all of his clothing packed for the night, directions to where he was going, all kinds of extra stuff, and all of it was gone.

Needless to say, we were all a little distraught and just generally disappointed with humanity.  So we cleaned most of the glass out of the car, and Vijay pulled it up to load in his stuff. He popped open the trunk, and there may as well have been a heavenly chorus of Ah's, as we noticed that all of his stuff was in the trunk.  Everything.  Even his google directions.

So putting aside the possibilities that Vijay was on a drunken binge that none of us were aware of (also, that he could manipulate time and space), or that the storm itself had perfectly transferred all of his stuff whilst keeping it dry, we surmised that what must have happened was that something in the storm, or maybe someone on accident broke his passenger side window, then some sort of street angel noticed this, thought either "someone's going to steal his stuff" or "all of his stuff is going to get wet" and moved all of his stuff to the trunk (with the trunk lever now being accessible, thanks to the broken window.

Faith in humanity restored.

P.S.  If whoever did that is reading this - Thank you!
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Second Story:  Using up All Our Luck
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You may know that we recently played up at Little River Casino.  Overall, we had a wonderful time, and while we were there, we decided we'd try a little gambling (responsible gambling, of course, if that's such a thing).  Morgan left the blackjack tables $20 up.  Jake dabbled with the slots and the blackjack tables and left $5 up.  Vijay lost every hand he attempted in Blackjack, and left down $40.

Then we move to Mike, who about $2 into trying out the slots, won $1,250.  We're not making this up.  He had to fill out tax information, then received $1,250 in cash.  So dinner was on him, to say the least.

And hopefully he has not used up all our luck.  :-)
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That's all for now, but more to come soon, such as details of our upcoming tour!

CS is growing quite fond of you.

7/24:

And finally, to conclude our Getting to Know the Band series, we've got one last guy to tell you about.
--------------------------------------
Getting to Know the Band - Vol. 4:  Daddy Long Legs

The last but certainly important part to Common Shiner is our skinny wonderful electric guitarist Andrew.  GR friends will know him well, but Chicago friends may not have had the chance to meet him just yet.  That's because he still lives in Michigan, working on his Masters (and PhD, possibly) in engineering at Michigan State University, no less.  He's a pretty smart guy, and if you ever have a hankering for a conversation about cars or baseball, he's your man.

He also likes Pearl Jam a lot, and if you've had the privilege of seeing us cover Alive, we hope your face has unmelted.

Andrew has also been in the band virtually since it's inception, joining Morgan very shortly after the formation of the band.  So he has been through it all, and has certainly played a key role in what Common Shiner has become.

He's hilarious and strange, so he fits in with the rest of us well.  We'll let him take it from here.......

(Morgan: want to write a bio?)

Andrew:  Bio?  I took bio sophomore year of high school.  It was the class that broke my 4.0, because I knew genotypes and phenotypes so well that my mathematical logic gave me intuition to know that if you had 2 traits, one dominant over the other, you would have an 8x8 square making 64 possibilities, and 1/4 of those would have the non dominant trait, so the answer to the question on the exam was 16, and i got it right. . . except I got 1 out of 10 points on it because i didn't show my work, and it gave me an A- for the class.  Frickin' Mr. Mulford. That was when I decided no more bio science for me, I'm going to physics and chemistry instead, and then I got to have Mr. Omar Bjarki for those classes the next two years, and those helped inspire me to pursue engineering, which is the root cause of me being the lost member of common shiner.  However, I should really thank Mr. Mulford for grading so dumb, because that A- along with one in my bonehead art class kept me from having to give a speech at graduation--we had two valedictorians with 4.0s, and the salutatorian had 1 A-, and then there was me right behind, sitting nice near the top of the list, but not having to bore everyone with a pathetic speech given by an awkward skinny kid with a zitty face.
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And by the way, this probably isn't the greatest thing to announce, but we're excited about it and we're nerds. But we have Common Shiner stickers now!  They're totally free, so when you come see us, grab a sticker.

And remember, Common Shiner L_ _ _ _  Y _ _.  Would you like to solve the puzzle?

~CS

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