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Sort by: Band News | Tour Journal | Press
To our Braddigan Family: It is with a heavy heart that we announce the cancellation of the rest of Braddigan's fall tour (all shows between 10/29-11/15) due to some minor scarring found on his vocal cords. We anticipate that Braddigan will fully recover his voice resting up over the next few months and we will certainly make every effort to reschedule all tour dates for the spring. As always thanks so much for standing with us, and please now more than ever keep playing it LOUD! Stay tuned to Braddigan.com for updates. -James Kenly, Horizons Management Labels: band, concert, press, tour
so it's been quite a sushi grade romance that we've had with the land of the rising sun :) yes indeed a raw adventure every time... and this being our 4th jaunt through the green lush misty mountains and tall mirrored riddle high rise skylines of Japan, well we sort of think we're getting the hang of it... i guess it's because we know how to say really important things like Utay (shoot!) or Magiday (oh really?) or moto popocon kudesai (more popcorn please!) that is giving us a new sense of confidence as we remember the glories and laughs of this tour... yea, we're almost locals... so the first few days of our tour were spent at the surf, skate, and snow convention called Interstyle where we played and hung out with our sponsors (Jedidiah, Cobian, Keen, Surftech, Christian Surfers) and ogle over all the up and coming gear for riding the waves, mountains, and sidewalks... life is truly a ride :) and then after that we headed right out to the countryside beach town Ichinomiya where we bunked up with our buddies at the Surf Garden for a few days... just chilling, sleeping through our jetlag, and surfing was such a great restful break for us... and then we headed to Kanazawa where we played an incredible show at a really viby place called Cajon! yea, a place in Japan named after rey's favorite piece of percussion?? it was too cool... surf shop up front, amazing restaurant inside, and a beautiful all wood listening room w a stage... so we played there to about 90 people who bought tickets to come? we had no idea that it was a ticketed event, and we also didn't know that anyone knew our music... so it was really cool when everyone showed up and man were they stoked? we were fired up because of it and we'll be going back there every time now from here on in to reconnect w Yuki, Miho, and the rest of our Cajon family! next was a show outside Bros Surf shop in a parking lot where these 2 pit bulls were running all over the place... sort of fliiped me out at first, but then i realized that they were lovers... i guess not all pits are scary :) anyway, the Cobian guys sponsored this show for us and it was a blast... grassroots parking lot rock and roll! an the beach was super close and a huge harvest moon rose as we played... Five For Rose was really fun and furious and Fare thee Well made us smile too... (Fare thee Well really seems to be a japanese hit for some reason??? everyone sang along at nearly all the shows we played?) then we headed for the Navy base and hung out with our good friends the Rhineharts and their 2 little groms Gavin and Taylor... such a sweet family and they always take such amazing care of us that it's brutal to leave... tatami floors, endless royal milk tea, and Nashi???? oh my gosh it's my new favorite fruti in the world FOR SURE... Japanese pears?? who out there knows what i'm talking about? amen. unbelievable. our shows at the navy base were really cool, met a bunch of dispatch fans, played with marc broussard, and it's always great to be able to hang and bless the sailors that are over there serving... last stop Okinawa... paradise for sure! mr mayagi's home in karate kid? yea you know it... it's really the hawaii of japan... it's about 3 hours south of tokyo by plane and man is the water amazing- it's just super laid back, the island is lush and the reefs make the water look turquoise. we went there to play our first Japanese Festival, the Blue Lagoon Fest... it was a really good experience for us to roll into a place where no one knew us and to just play to try to win new fans one at a time! we only had 25 minutes to play but we loved the challenge, and that there were palm trees everywhere, and a gorgeous sandy beach right behind us :) made some great friends, had some hilarious lost in translation moments, and managed to get ourselves really lost driving on the wrong side of the road a few times... yea i'm a japanese driver now. it was crazy trying to rewire my head that the turn signal and wiper blades were backwards and that the stick was on the left side... but we survived the adventure with a couple "watch out, watch out, WATCH OUT! WRONG SIDE!" or with me getting perturbed that i always turned on the windshield wipers whenever we wanted to turn... anyway, clearly Okinawa is going to be a new home for us as the entire culture there seems to love our style of music, and the place is as restful as they come... God spent a little extra time there lingering over the sunset paintings and clouds... i absolutely promise you i saw a perfect little bear staring down on us, eyes, nose, ears and all in the clouds there... i mean every night it was the cloud show? amazing... so thank you to names like Momo, Youichi, Yuki, and Tomi... and still dreams of meeting a girl named Koyuki over there :) and many mmany sushi and sake memories until next time... oh and i broke my first board ever over there. yea! "nice attack" said Youichi with a smile... Labels: concert, japan, tour
Beleza! Valeu Valeu a todos :) yea that's as far as my portuguese goes after a week rolling through the hills of Brazil... & what a beautiful country? unreal. mountains, trees, every shade of green, cliffs, beaches, & little towns scattered like gravel all over the countryside with some of the warmest smiles you've ever seen wherever we went... so i've got to rewind the tapes a bit here - back to the the first time i heard mention of this amazing bass player from Brazil... i was in Hawaii hanging with some friends at YWAM when i overheard some of the local musician guys talking about this guy Tiago Machado who was set to return from a few months travels... they said he was a great bass player and remember wondering why that i'd try to cross paths with this guy before heading back to CO... i knew when i heard a friend in Hawaii mention this bass player from Brazil. Sao Paulo was such a wild experience... i flew in from Nicaragua, 10 hours total of flight time, and arrived at Sao Paulo's Int'l airport at 8:30pm - well we had a gig scheduled for 9:30pm the same night as it turns out and when i got there at 9:20pm we found 1,500 people waiting there for us... it was epic! such a killer cool crew of people and such a warm welcome to Brazil... it really set the tone for the trip, such grace and warmth - i mean we've never played there before, we've not paid our dues in any way, and people were lining up around the block to come in and see us play... really because of three things: 1. Walking on Water's films are big down there and so our music has been there a little ahead of us 2. any int'l band is celebrated down there bc they're super hungry for new music 3. there are a crazy core group of Dispatch fans down there too... unreal - but yea, what a crazy first hour in Brazil being whisked off to an "i must be dreaming" show that was there waiting for us... so we left the sprawling city of Sao Paulo and headed off into the countryside in our tiny little hatchback of a tour bus! it was hilarious... we were supposed to have a van reserved but the rental shop just shrugged their shoulders and gave us our little turtle of a car... she was a speedy little number though and we must have put in about 400-600km a day - Piritininga, Curitiba, Floripa (Florianopolis), & Guaruja were our stops on this test the waters tour... Rio was on the docket but we had to can it in favor of some other towns... but we'll be back there for sure in January ... Check out a cool video Rey put together and some photos from Tiago and some friends down there... -Braddigan UPDATE: Our friends at Plywood Surfboards wrote a post with photos from our visit (in portuguese). And our friends who came to the show in Floripa serenaded us when we arrived! Labels: brazil, concert, dispatch, nicaragua, tour
Japan. feb 15-24, 2007. no matter how many times i've been driving on the wrong side of the road, my heart still jumps whenever we come around a bend and see a car coming... and yes it is the wrong side- some may say opposite side, but i think it's just flat out "wrong." i mean come on, how hard would it be for everyone the world over to just agree on driving on the right side of the road?! obviously it is called the right side for a reason, hello :) but then again there is the whole metric vs inches bit too... and funny cell phone stuff the world over too come to think of it... ok, ok- enough said... i guess the bottom line is that i just need to stay on the passenger side of the car whenever we're in Japan (which funny enough takes retraining too bc you're naturally walking to the driver side to get in as a passenger!) so Rey, Tiago, and i just got back from our first full band trip to Japan! it was such a good time, packed with plenty of adventures, sushi, and laughs... returning this time was cool too bc it was our third trip, so we had a boatload of friends to return to- and everyone there was so stoked to meet Tiago after all that we went through last time to try to get him there, but to no avail... this time though everything came together for us and Tiago was able to fly 11,000 miles from Brazil to meet us in Japan (via DC?? ouch!)- it was pretty crazy bc while Tiago was up in the air for days, Rey flew direct from NYC to tokyo... and i flew from denver- san fran- hawaii- to tokyo... so all 3 of us were up in the air criss crossing all over the globe, eventually to come back to the ground to hook up in the Narita airport by our favorite fresh mango juice stand... we just laughed man to think what random band mates we seem to be- God's got a great sense of humor :) we also forgot about the international date line somehow and ended up arriving a day later than we had planned?! now that was a rude awakening... so much for a day of rest before starting to play our shows?! so we ended up driving straight to the first venue with no sleep and completely confused jet lagged heads to play the kick off gig to our japan tour- Jedidiah ended up co-sponsoring our tour, alongside the US Navy that brought us in to play a base-wide Presidents' Day concert... so we were able to reconnect with all our Jedidiah Japan buddies for the first few days, and then made our way over to Yokosuka to step into a little bubble of America over there on the Navy base- just such a cool experience for us to get closer to the reality of what life looks like in the military, and to be able to support and bless the families that are sacrificing so much in their daily lives over seas for us back home- i keep coming away from there so humbled and thankful that i live in the US near my family bc of all they do... then the third chapter of our trip was playing the Interstyle trade-show again... It's the biggest surf, skate, and snow convention in Japan, where we've been invited to play the last two times- it happens twice a year, and this one was the biggest yet. It was incredible getting to be a part of it, meeting so many huge names in the surf world, riding all of these new fangled skate boards and funky bikes around the convention hall, reconnecting with our friends from Cobian, Keen, Jedidiah, Arbor, Surf Tech etc... Just one big party with loads of smiles and laughs, and as always there were plenty plenty "lost in translation" moments! Other than than, all i have to report is this: Koyuki is still playing hard to get, Japan has the coolest vending machines in the world, Royal Milk Tea is definitely still my favorite beverage anywhere anytime (hot or cold watch out Starbucks!!), Jedidiah Japan will someday rule the universe, 7/11 is crazy crazy crazy over there, (if you've been there before you know what i'm talking about!) japanese taxi drivers wear white gloves, Yen bills are like little pieces of art compared to our boring dollars, and the newest discovery for us this time around was definitely trying out an "Ontsin," which is a Japanese hot spring that feeds into a bunch of different pools/baths- sort of like a natural water park, with all of these hot restful pools carved out of the rocks along a mountain side... and then if that's not cool enough, each bath has a different blend of ingredients from green tea, sake, charcoal, red wine, eucalyptus etc... yea, cold chillin' in J-pan- can't wait to get back... Labels: concert, japan, surfing, tour
Conch is hard to pronounce. i know it looks easy, but go on and try it. ok, now 99% of you are wrong... and me too, because it's pronounced "conk." yep, they just mispelled it, that's all :) i was wondering why every time i said conch with a "ch" everyone always smiled... at first i thought maybe it was just their favorite food, but as it turns out that word tends to separate us tourist kooks from the true islanders with a laugh - anyway, i be a true islandah naw mon... conk. so rey, tiago, james, and i just got back from a handful of days on San Salvador, one of the most eastern islands in the Bahamas where Christopher Columbus is said to have landed on Oct 12, 1492. it's a beautiful sight to behold bc there's not much to see other than water and sand. around 1,500 people live on the island, 90% of which are locals... and there's hardly any build up--only a few towns and a lot of green brush. Coconut juice, a boatload of sashimi'd wahoo, and sandra's banana cake too... yea... Our good friend joe had a vision of bringing the islanders together under the sun and on the beach and so he brought us there to provide the tunes from the stage. The island's main watering hole, the Juice Bar, is a bunch of dance rooms, each literally lined with speakers and subs and the music is always blasting the thoughts right out of your head! I think all the bass thumpin' from the subs adjusted my heart beat. We MacGyver'd a sound system with those speakers and a mixed bag of cords, microphones and some borrowed amps and set up in an open air room attached to the Juice Bar. We started playing just in time to watch the sunset on the beach, and soon after dusk a grill sparked up and carloads of smiling faces pulled up. Saturday morning was busy - snorkeling, spear fishing, reading, and just chilling in the sun :) as the band was preparing songs back at the house for the celebration, joe and a crew of island architects were building the stage! Right on the beach, between a monument to Columbus' landing, a monument to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, and a beach volleyball court! Just around the time the stage was finished - built on sand with cement blocks, 2x4s, and plywood (it even had steps!) - Rey speared his first fish! The show ended just after the sun disappeared behind the waves with an island jam of Fallin' - literally the island was jamming on Rey's drums!!! We invited all the kids on stage and quickly rearranged all the mics so that every kid with a drum, shaker, tambourine or clapping hands could be heard across the beach! So many smiles that night... the Bahamas. wow, what a beautiful bunch of islands... as you fly over them they start looking more and more like little stepping stones to paradise- but when you land you find the truest beauty in the people that come grinnin'... And if you don't have a smile to give back, you might as well go home. "too blessed to be stressed" i saw hanging in Wenzalee's car window... and her husband Floyd's smile speaks the same wisdom. Granville's eyes sparkle like the waters behind him... Kenny the Carver just sits chippin away at blocks of wood laughing the day away... Just remember CONK - its the way to becoming a true islandah! Labels: Bahamas, concert, tour
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