2016: Who'd have thunk it!?

2016.

Who would've thought we'd ever make it this far without Skynet blowing us all up, right?

So, looking back at this old blog, it's been something like 3 years since I published anything. I was talking about how excited I was to have found a drummer for my band, then called The Savages. Fast forward 3 years, we have a drummer and bass player, and in the time that's passed since that last blog post, we've changed our name to Agent 37, released a full length album, a "proper" music video, and have played shows with, and become mates with some amazing bands. The absolute highlight for myself has been supporting Frenzal Rhomb, one of the bands that, without them, I may not be into Punk Rock at all. So, being lucky enough to play a show with them, in our hometown no less, and to meet these guys that were myself and Curt's heroes when we were 15-16 years old, was quite definitely a dream come true.

What's more, they're a fine, upstanding bunch of gentlemen.

But, as we in Agent 37 grow older, family life begins to take shape, and two of our members are now either new fathers, or soon to be a new father. This has meant that we're on somewhat of a break at the moment, unless something major pops up that we can't say no to.

Every cloud has a silver lining however. This break gives me the opportunity to focus on my solo music this year, something that I've wanted to do for a long time, but have never really followed through on. That changes this year.

My solo music has been a bit of a challenge. In the past 5 years my songwriting style has varied hugely, but I'm at the point now where I feel like I'm the most honest version of myself in my songs that I've ever been. I struggle with putting a wall up to not let people in too deep, and that also comes through in my lyrics at times. I listen to my friends songs and to me it sounds like they're taking their heart out of their chest, slapping you in the face with it and saying "THESE ARE MY FEELINGS", and I can't do that. I'm working on it though.
My goal this year is to put as much effort into my own music as I have with the band for the last couple of years, and see what comes of it. I would rather be someone who tried, and didn't get anywhere, than a jaded asshole sitting somewhere complaining that he could have made it if he'd just gotten a chance. Make chances in life people, they don't always come to you.

3 years. What else has changed in 3 years. Well, I was in a relationship for about a year, up until December 2015. It was great, but in the end, it wasn't right for either of us. We're still friends, and I think both happier that way. It was a good experience. If you've followed my blog since the beginning, I probably talked a hell of a lot about a certain previous relationship that didn't end so well. This was my first experience of a positive, healthy, serious relationship. And I'm glad I have that to remember.

This year, just recently in fact, I started DDP yoga. I may have acquired some of the workouts from someone, but my reasoning is this: As you all (should) know, I have a muscle disorder. I didn't want to lay out a hefty sum of cash (once you factor in currency conversion), if the DDP yoga program wasn't something I would be able to physically do.  But.... turns out, I CAN do it. I will talk more in-depth about that in another post. But just know, DDP, if SOMEHOW you read this, I'm buying your stuff, just as soon as I get the money together. I'm into it.

Oh yeah, I MOVED.
I'd lived in the same place for 12 years. 12 years. Can you imagine that? I certainly never could. I moved over a dozen times before I finished high school. I moved state when I was 10. But, since the age of 18, I had lived in the same place, up until November 2015.
Now, I'll admit, I'm not good with change. But this was on a completely different level. Not to mention my new place was aptly dubbed "Spider Manor" by my ex-girlfriend. Little did I know I was moving in to a share-house, already occupied by a family of Huntsman spiders. If you're from anywhere but Australia, those are the ones that are as big as your hand. YES THAT BIG.

But, jump ahead a few months, after evicting the spider family.. well.. I say evicting.. I mean exorcising and cleansing the house of them really, I feel pretty good here. It's still different, but I'm comfortable, it's newer, the roof isn't mouldy (something that began to cause me some pretty bad health issues), and myself, and my awesome 9 year old Garfield-esque tabby Rupert both love it here. Now if I could just find the time to sort out my spare room, that would be great.

I also, in september 2015, was about 4 metres away from Kevin Smith, listening to him talk for over 3 hours about life and taking chances and using your experiences to create something unique. It was amazing. That man. I could listen to him speak forever.

So, 3 years. I'm sure I'm forgetting some important events, which I will try and cover if and when I remember, but, dear reader, I feel like I'm back! I've got some more ideas I want to start to write about, and I feel like, if I can keep my motivation up, this, plus my youtube channel, could become a creative outlet of a different kind, so please tell me what you think, what you'd like to read/hear/see, and leave comments and share and all the things everybody tells you to do when they want you to pimp their shit. Do it for me!

Oh yes, my youtube channel is http://www.youtube.com/c/davidgrimsonmusic Please, go check it out and subscribe if you haven't already!

Smell you later,
Dave

Wrestlemania Eve, Paranoia and Music Galore!

Twas the night before Wrestlemania, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring.. wait.. I'm sitting here writing, that has to count as stirring right?

Hey folks, it's certainly been a little while since I've written a proper blog post. So here's a quick catch up on what's been happening in the last few months.

I made some new friends, one in particular that I get along with so well, I played some gigs, The Savages even got to play a "full band show" with our old drummer who flew in from Perth especially for something else, and just happened to have the time to play a show, I have kept my diet up and am down a little over 8 kilos now (I've still got a long way to go, but it's a pretty decent start I think) And I've cut way back on my facebook usage.

That last one leads me into the subject of this here blog entry.

Once again, that whole confidence thing that I talked about a few months ago is something that I'm still having problems with. So much so that I'm worried that I may have screwed up a budding friendship with a really great person.

I should tell a bit of back story here right? Well, without naming any names or getting too specific, I made a new friend in the last couple of months, and we get along amazingly well. We bonded over some similar circumstances and just clicked. You know what I mean.. you meet someone and you just click instantly? That. That's what happened.

 The problem is, this new friend of mine is a much busier person than me, and frequently goes on trips to melbourne, along with working, and doing all the things most people do. So sometimes it can be hard to get in contact with them. Which, I totally understand and I'm not complaining about it at all. People lead busy lives. I tend not to, but that doesn't give me the right to be like "hey.. why didn't you message me back straight away?"

So, here's my problem. My new friend, let's call her Alice because I'm sick of using pronouns, and plus, Milla Jovovich plays Alice in Resident Evil and she kicks ass. Anyway, Alice has had some hard times lately from what I can gather, but I think because our friendship is still new, she hasn't felt comfortable really talking to me about it, which again, I totally understand. I had some rough times last year, and there was only one friend I felt comfortable talking to candidly about it all, and really, there's still not many people I'll totally open up to when it comes to hard times.

But of course, that didn't stop me from acting like a moron.

Now, when I say moron, I don't mean I said something really dumb, or went totally crazy, and honestly, this could all just be in my head, and I could just be somehow picking the worst time to text Alice lately. Bad timing seems to be the theme with me lately. I met a girl one week too late and she met someone else in between our two dates, a girl told me she thinks I'm great but she'd just gotten out of a relationship with a guy called David, who even LOOKED like me... I even started talking to a girl who was leaving like 2 days later to go on holiday for a month. Just bad timing.

On the plus side, I have a hell of a lot of new songs written.

But back to the story. Really all that's happened is that I haven't heard from Alice in about two weeks. The problem is, I've sent her half a dozen messages in that time, and haven't got a response. Now like I said, my logical brain tells me that's most likely because A: she's not comfortable talking to me at the moment because of what's going on in her life (which, as I said, I completely relate to), and B: I'm picking bad times to text.

But the problem is, and this is the real thing for me, I would text her, get no response, and start this cycle of thinking that goes something like "Oh, she probably hasn't read it/wait, she must have read it, I just saw her online on facebook/she mustn't want to reply to me/oh I'll just say hi on facebook now/ok now I know she saw that message, facebook tells me so/why didn't she reply?/oh man I've screwed this up, I should text her and say sorry/wait no I can't do that, it's too soon/but if I don't talk to her she'll forget about me and we won't be friends/I have to keep in touch otherwise the friendship won't last.

And there is the problem. Last year I felt like I'd lost a really good friend who I have known for about 15 years, because I decided to stop putting all the effort into my friendship with her, and we lost touch. I think that's part of it at least. I feel like, especially with new friendships, I need to keep in regular contact or I'll lose the friend.

But, it's more than that, because I'm not like that with every person I meet. Something's different with Alice. It may be that because I really feel that great connection that I really want us to be friends, and I don't want to lose what we were building. It may be that I feel like I don't have many close friends these days, and want to hold on to those friendships that feel close and good.

I really can't put my finger on what it is, but I know that it definitely has to do with my complete lack of self confidence. I feel like I'm not good enough for Alice, that I have to prove myself worthy to be her friend, and I find myself thinking "why would she want to be friends with me?". And yes, I know that way of thinking is not great, but I can't seem to get away from it. I'm sure she doesn't think like that, and I don't really know why I do.

Well, I mean that's not totally true, I do know where it stems from. But I feel like I should be past all that stuff by now. It's almost been three full years since then.

And a totally separate part of me thinks that I'm just being an idiot and paranoid and that I shouldn't worry about it, and I should do what feels right.

I just don't know which side of me is winning right now.

What I do know is that I really hope I haven't made Alice feel like she doesn't want to be my friend any more. She's a pretty great person, and it makes me sad to know she's having a hard time at the moment. We may have only met a couple of months ago, but my life is better for her being in it, and if that changes, it will most definitely suck.

So that's it, I just needed a place to get all this stuff off of my chest without it being too specific or anything.

Wait, some positive news to end this. That's a good idea right?

I have my first solo gig for 9 months coming up this Thursday night! I'm really excited about it, as well as a bit nervous, but I feel like it's going to go well. As I said earlier, I've been writing a lot of new stuff, so it'll be fun to show off some new material. Let's just hope I have a somewhat decent crowd there to listen to me.

                                                 Here's the promo video I made for the show:
                                        

Also today I bought, for the first time in a long time, some new music DVDS. I'd gone into JB Hifi to pre-order a new xbox game, but walked out with 4 new DVDS. Nirvana Live at Reading, Iron Maiden: Maiden England 88, Johnny Cash live in Denmark, and End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones (which is an amazing documentary).

Oh and I forgot to pre-order the game. Smart stuff huh?

Also I've recently purchased a new video camera and Tablet, so from now on, I'll be able to play Angry Birds on a bigger screen and then make a full  HD video blog about it.

Good times!

That's it folks, thanks for reading, sorry it was mostly a downer.

There's really only one thing left to say.
WRESTLEMANIA TOMORROW BABY! 21-0

And I'm done.

The weigh in!

Hey folks,

Really quick post today, but I just wanted to give you all an update on my new dieting and meat-tox and what not. I decided to weigh myself this morning (Saturday morning), just to see if there'd been any improvement since starting this new diet on Tuesday. I was expecting maybe to lose a couple hundred grams, but to my surprise, the numbers had changed quite a bit more than that.

Here's a quick video in which I talk about just what that change was.

Take a look, and like, share, comment, subscribe, tweet, post, pin, add and all the usual social media stuff!

Follow me @D_Grimson on twitter, and like my facebook pages!
www.facebook.com/DavidGrimsonMusic
www.facebook.com/TheSavages37

Also just quickly, if anyone is interested in music lessons, I'm starting up skype music lessons as soon as I get some interest, so let me know on here, or go to www.facebook.com/DavidGrimsonOnlineMusicLessons

The Meat-tox

Hey guys, really quick post today... I only have 6 minutes before the Royal Rumble starts, and I don't want to miss it.

So, here it is. I've put on some weight again recently, and that's not a good thing for me, for a lot of reasons. SO, I'm starting what I'm going to call a "meat-tox" tomorrow. Think of it the same way as a detox, but with meat.

The reason it's a Meat-tox, is because if I did a detox, my body would literally stop working and start eating itself. Scary huh?

The basic idea is that I'm going to completely stop eating all the stuff that I know is really bad for me that I've been eating too much of recently, and also to really cut back in general on the amount of carbs I eat, because carbs are not my friend.

To help keep myself accountable I'm going to be doing video diaries and blogs about how I'm going. Firstly I'm trying for a month, to see how well it works, and if there's any little tweaks I need to do to keep things going well.

                                                So here's the first video diary entry thing.



Wish me luck!

It's time, it's time for a punk rock party

Hello folks,

I feel like this year is getting off to a much better start than last year. Without going into too much detail (and so I don't jinx myself) let's just say that I had a lot of stuff to deal with in a short amount of time last year, and it took a while to wrap my head around it all.

But this year, I have a band, I have a new(er) car, and I have the drive and determination to make things happen.

I also have the option to start a Bachelor of Arts course mid year this year.

I'm not sure if I'm going to accept the place in the course though, as my main focus is my band, The Savages.

That's what this blog is going to be about. My band.

The Savages really started about 12 years ago, when my best friend and I met, and had a music class together in high school.
We basically spent that entire year playing music together, and all of the years since.

We didn't actually form any official band until 2005, when we started our hard rock band, Abandoned Dream, which eventually morphed into our heavy metal band, Anihilism, which we stayed with until 2009 when we basically just stopped.

With these first two bands though, there always felt like a bit of a lack of drive, a lack of intent to get anywhere. We'd rehearse only occasionally, even when we had the few shows that we did play. Everything just felt like, well at least to me, that I was just waiting for stuff to happen, without putting much effort in on my end.

So, I took a break from music between 2009, and the first half of 2010. Oh, I should mention through all of this time with the other bands, I'd also been playing solo music. I've never been stuck inside only one genre of music. I feel like that would be far too limiting..I've written Metal songs, pop songs, punk songs, acoustic songs, even jazz and blues, and I have aspirations to try my hand at progressive rock, but I don't know that I have the skill at the moment.

So 2011 rolled around, and Curt and I started talking seriously about starting a band. We'd had a few conversations about it already, even written a couple of songs, but it wasn't until 2011 that we really got excited by the idea of starting a new band. Around that time we also went to see a band called Teenage Bottlerocket. I became immediately enthralled with the style of punk that they play. It's not as hardcore as a lot of punk that I'd been exposed to, and also not as poppy as what I'd traditonally called "pop punk". My definition for this term "pop punk" had been changed forever...and for the better too I might add.

So after that I started listening to more real Pop punk. Bands like Teenage Bottlerocket of course, but also The Lillingtons, The Queers, Screeching Weasel, The Huntingtons, and of course, The Ramones. I started writing what would become some of the first Savages songs, although the band didn't have a name at that point. I think at one point we were talking about calling ourselves "The Snowballs".. You see, we wanted a reference to the movie Clerks, because it is both myself, and Curt's favourite movie. And anyone who's seen Clerks, will know exactly where the Snowball reference would have come from. Incidentally, that's also why we use the number 37 for some of our band stuff, and The Savages is also a Clerks reference. (Bunch of Savages in this town...)

So we'd started writing, and even started rehearsing a little. And then, we saw Batfoot!, this awesome pop punk band from the Central Coast of NSW. In fact, I went to all three of their shows, in three nights. Which, for me, was a really massive effort. But I enjoyed myself so much the first night in Melbourne, that I decided I had to go to the Geelong show, and the final show was in Ballarat, which was easy for me to go to. It was awesome.

The Savages first T-shirt

Seeing Batfoot! gave us the final kick in the pants we needed. We came up with a name, we got a set of songs together, and we played our first gig in June 2012.

Since then, we've played nearly a dozen "plugged" shows with some amazing bands, and played four or five acoustic punk shows. However, the best show we've played was the last "plugged" show we did, where we were lucky enough to play with Batfoot!, which was amazing. We got to hang out with the guys, and just generally have an awesome time. We talked about us going up to NSW to play shows with them as well, which is one of our goals for this year.

Unfortunately we also lost our drummer just after that gig (we had a different drummer for the batfoot! show too because of double booking on our old drummer's part), and since then (the start of december) we haven't been able to find a replacement.

The plus side though, is that even though we have no drummer, we can still play these acoustic shows. I really love that the music that we've written translates to acoustic gigs, as well as a full band setup. I really feel like this band can go somewhere, and that is what motivates me to keep it going.

This past week we also recieved our first batch of "The Savages" T-shirts. There's a picture of them up there ^.

I feel so good about this band. It feels like the right style of music, the right time, and it all just fits together really well. Curt and I are on the same page when it comes to writing music, and when we come together with a song one of us has written, the other always adds something more to it to make it even better. We've got something like 25-30 songs that are fully written, maybe not gig-ready, but fully written. We've set ourselves some goals, and we intend to do our very best to achieve them.

We also plan to at least try to start a podcast, and also a video diary of sorts, the latter of which, we've actually already started.
Here's the link to the first ever Savages video diary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZXlucZFnYQ

We also have a show coming up at Dogs Bar in St Kilda on the 12th of February. Hopefully just one in a large number of shows we have planned for this year.

To finish up, I'm really happy with how this band has come about, doing so much in such a short amount of time, and with such a clear vision of where we want to go.

I'll keep all you blog readers up to date with how the band progresses, but for now, I'm outta here.