At the beginning of April, my girlfriend Cat and I relocated to Phoenix, Arizona. I had lived in the valley for about 5 years in the past, and absolutely loved it. After about 6 years back in New Hampshire, there were many elements of desert-living that I missed more and more, and was growing increasingly stir-crazy and ready for a change. Sometime around the second blizzard into the winter, we decided it was time to make that change, and started making arrangements. Early in the morning on April Fools Day, we loaded all our combined possessions into a 16-foot box-truck, loaded my little Kia onto a trailer on the back, and began our cross-country drive.
Upon arrival, we moved into half of a split-floorplan house in a nice suburban-ish section of North Central Phoenix called Moon Valley... We both lucked-out on the job-front, and were able to sorta-kinda "transfer" our existing jobs- I'm working behind the bar at a sushi/ Japanese/ nightlife spot in North Scottsdale called Sapporo that happens to be owned by the same company as the bar I worked at in Nashua, and Cat is working for an eye doctor in the Camelback Corridor.
Besides the "how we pay the bills" nuts-and-bolts, we are here primarily in order to advance our "actual" careers as working artists, in a scene and cultural-climate that I have always felt to be more exciting, vibrant, inclusive, and inspiring than that of the Boston area. (no offense to my New England people who are working hard and getting shit done, it's just an entirely different vibe here. I feel like desert cities have a sort of "wild wild west" take on creative endeavors- almost everyone's from somewhere else, so there's always a refreshing sort of "you're doing something interesting? Sweet! How can I help?" vibe that tends to be lacking in older-school, more established communities where everything's about how well you follow certain rules and who you happen to know.)
Despite a VERY busy couple months getting settled in and situated, we're well underway diving headlong into those sorts of goals. Here's a quick run-down of current and future projects in the works-
We've revived The Green Sea, a side-project act that I had maintained for a couple of years before leaving the valley the first time around and continued to collaborate with across the country during the intervening time. This former experimental side-project has now become our primary band- a high-energy, live-show-focused electro-punk trio. I'm on lead vocals and guitar, Wes Hopeless is playing synths, sequencers, and general electronic-wizardry, and Cat is on live electronic-percussion and keytar. We aim to be ready to start playing out with a spastic set of fun new songs by the end of the summer. In the meantime, like us on Facebook and check out some teaser-content that we're dropping a little bit at a time.
Cat and I have also begun work on an additional musical-project, a bar-entertainment cover-duo called Urban Forestry. Check out some basic info on what that's going to entail here.
In the meantime, we've both also been hard at work our various sorts of visual-art contents... check out my Etsy site at LeVautour to peruse some recent works of that sort.
In writing-news, I have finally almost finished editing the book-project I've been working on writing since I finished grad-school... Look for updates on that soon.
