Jan
19
2017

8123 Fest - And It Begins

8123 Popup Store, Bad Behavior & Lovely Little Lonely

(Add / View Comments) (0)Thursday, January 19, 2017 - 04:00:00 pm
(Posted Under: Tempe Music Scene Tempe Music Scene, Music Music, The Maine, 8123)
The weekend we've been looking forward to since September kicked off a little early, with early access to the 8123 Pop-up Store at Cityscape in Downtown Phoenix this afternoon.

A bit of a wait in line to get in. Once inside, it was pretty cool. Custom art of several albums (Good Love, Forever Halloween portraits - which I would have totally dropped cash for if they were for sale an not just for ambience). Inflated saguaros, couches, a turntable and 8-track. You can trust these guys to not half ass things. The phrase Lovely Little Lonely adorning one wall. New album title? Based on the line of t-shirts with the same phase, likely.






Of high importance was picking up the vinyl re-issue of Stay Up Get Down - the EP I illegally* downloaded 8 years ago that started this crazy ride. Very cool to finally have a own physical copy of it, especially since we weren't hip enough to get a copy of the very limited CD pressing in 2011. Very cool that there were reprints of the Wild West tees, and 8123 ball caps that actually fit my weird shaped head perfectly. (Thanks guys!)

(* Admittedly not actually very illegally given the way this EP back in the day, but suspend the belief. [smile] )

I have a credit card, and I'm not afraid to use it
That's been our running joke this week, and we definitely lived up to it. I think even Katie was surprised to the degree I was embracing it. I can think of many items I regret not just buying in the past, so not this time. Which definitely showed once we did make it up to the checkout counter, with two bags chocked full of t-shirts, sweat pants, flags & vinyl. YOLO is my mantra right now. The dude ringing us was probably thinking "these two are looking to make a killing selling this stuff on eBay". There would probably be less shame in that, if that's what our intention was. [wink] Alas, no, this ridiculous plunder of merchandise is actually for us.

There was little time between getting home from that shopping spree before tuning in to AltAZ to hear the band debut the new song. And of course, to further overload our senses mere hours after spending an obscene and undisclosed amount of money at the pop-up store, the announcement of pre-order bundles for Lovely Little Lonely on the air. This was unexpected, and had us scrambling for laptops to secure the deluxe bundle, determined not to have an American Candy pre-order repeat where we missed out (in only 16 minutes) the very limited vinyl. Listening to the new single really got lost in the frenzy of dropping a second large sum of money into the 8123 / Maine fund.

We did circle back on the song after we got done with pre-ordering. Sounds great, very Third Eye Blind / Out Of The Vein inspired. That record has been on high rotation in our house since recently picking it up (thanks actually to John), so we're looking forward to the new album even more. Early signs indicate a combination of American Candy and Out Of The Vein which sounds pretty good to me.

What an afternoon! I need a nap... [wink]

Switch Styles

About Style Switching.

!Weblog Index

Dec January 2017 Feb
SU MO TU WE TH FR SA
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31

Categories

RSS FeedRSS Feed