Blog posts

• 

  Sep 05, 11:47 AM

  Nick in the Studio with Ray Junior

  (Originally posted on Nick's Blog on www.dreamofsleeping.com)
  Hello friends!
  
  Last week I began recording an EP for one of my best friends Ray Padilla (He goes by Ray Junior but I just feel too weird calling him that in a personal context!). Ray has played music with us since high school and is a great guitar player and all around awesome musician. He was in a band called Bull Mountain with Easton and I for a few years before The Dreamer and the Sleeper (search us if you must but just as a warning, we were pretty terrible!) and now he has started playing bass for D&S.
  
  I've wanted to record his songs for a long time now but was always too involved with recording D&S. After I had recovered from the grueling Autumn in the Evening recording and mixing process, Ray and I decided it would be sweet to get some of his own tunes recorded. Although Ray, Easton and I's songs are, in my eyes, very different... we all have pretty much the same influences. Steven Jenkins (Third Eye Blind), Zach Smith and Rob Crow (Pinback), and Nate Ruess and Sam Means (The Format, Fun.) to name a few have really shaped the way that all three of us look at songs and the songwriting process. So well the songs and style of Ray's music may differ from ours, there are also many similarities. Add that to me doing the recording and mixing of his songs and I think our fans are really going to enjoy these recordings!
  
  We started recording an EP and so far the songs are coming together beautifully! It's been really great working on his songs and hearing the songs I've heard him play for SO long really come to life. It's looking like it will be a 5 - 6 song EP that will be released on Icarus Kids Recordings most likely sometime this Winter.
  
  I'd like to keep posting updates on this recording process because I truly think that if you are here because you enjoy our tunes you are going to love these as well! Add Ray on Myspace and follow him on Twitter!
  
  I have some quick news from the D&S camp as well! We have a tentative plan to record a new song next weekend. It is a song that if you have seen us play lately you have most likely heard OR if you remember this video we posted way back when. It's a really fun song that sadly got pushed off of the Autumn in the Evening song list pretty early, only because the mood and feel of the song clashed so much with the rest of the album. We really have NO CLUE what will become of this recording whether it will end up on an EP, Album or just released as a single. But it'll be great to get back into recording and I can't wait to see how the song turns out!
  
  That's about it for today!
• 

  Aug 28, 11:46 AM

  Autumn in the Evening Free Download on AbsolutePunk.net

  Our new album Autumn in the Evening is now available for free download on AbsolutePunk.net as part of their Free Music Friday feature! This is a great feature that AP.net has where they post free albums, eps, and single song downloads from smaller bands.
  
  Check out the link below for this weeks Free Music Friday featuring our newest album Autumn in the Evening plus a number of other great independent artists!
  
  The Dreamer and the Sleeper's Autumn in the Evening on AbsolutePunk.net
• 

  Aug 20, 11:43 AM

  Dream of Sleeping Gets a Make Over

  (Originally posted on www.dreamofsleeping.com)

  
  As you may have noticed the website (www.dreamofsleeping.com) has received a bit of a make-over!
  
  We have some cool new stuff to tell you about! We know that signing up for YET ANOTHER stupid account just to login and leave a comment on here was really annoying. So we have set up Facebook Connect and Twitter Comments on the site. You can now comment on stuff we post here using your existing Facebook Profile or your Twitter Account. To login to your accounts click the Comments link below a post and you will see the Facebook and Twitter login buttons. We can't wait to hear from you guys!
  
  Also we have made a few more aspects of the site quickly accessible from the main menu such as Nick and Easton's individual blogs, a discography, and a few more goodies! This site is a work in progress so if you have any ideas on how we can improve it, please! leave your suggestions in the comments!

   
• 

  Aug 14, 11:40 AM

  New Merch Added to the Online Store

  

  (Originally posted on www.dreamofsleeping.com)

  We have released a new merch item in our online store, which can be found here: The Dreamer and the Sleeper Online Merch Shop 

  
  

  The new piece of D&S merch is a t-shirt featuring a foul-mouthed feline. The shirts rocks the phrase "TDANDTSMF" which of course translates to "The Dreamer and the Sleeper M#ther Fu&ker!" Don't ask. 

  
  

   
• 

  Jul 16, 04:26 AM

  New T-Shirts Coming Soon!

  (Originally Posted at www.dreamofsleeping.com)

  Many of you have been asking us for a long time, "When are we getting some new shirts?!" Undoubtedly either your old gas mask tee is word the eff out OR you didn't get a chance to grab one of only 20 some-odd TD&TS T-Shirts ever made. Well, we truly apologize for the wait.

  
  

  We have looked into a lot of different methods for making affordable T-shirts available to you guys. There are some company's that would allow us to upload a design and then they would sell print and ship the shirt to you. But we have always been very picky about what merch we make available and the quality of stuff we give to you guys. The thought of you guys buying shirts that we have never seen before and the possibility of them being a piece of crap, well... sucks! There is something about us being able to order the merch ourselves, taking the orders directly from you guys, and shipping them out to you ourselves that really appeals to us. And until it gets to a point that we can no longer handle the amount of orders ourself, we want to continue to do this! And trust us, we get no where near that many orders yet! :) With that being said the overhead costs for high quality T-shirts can be pretty high! And so far the printing of albums has come before T-shirts in our budget.

  
  

  But we are happy to say that we have checked out our iTunes royalties from the past few months, and thanks to all of you who either bought our cds or downloaded the album on iTunes, we have enough cash to cover the overhead costs for another round of shirts!

  
  

  Alright enough with the boring stuff, lets get to the design! The new design was designed by Nick and was designed with the lovely females as well as the dudes in mind. We understand that the gas-mask theme... was pretty dude-ish. I think that both the ladies and the fellas will be happy to sport the new design, and plus, it features the "f-word"!

  
  

  Rep The Dreamer and the Sleeper and piss your grandparents off at the same time!!! Juuust kidding Grandma. Below is a draft of the design we would like to use for the new shirts.

  
  

  

  
  

  Ideally we would like to print these on some sort of American Apparel ladies tee, as well as a plain old American-App unisex tee. Some of the girls have been complaining that the plain old Haines beefy tees don't fit well, and we want you to be feeling good as well as looking good! We are not POSITIVE that we'll be able to do this because of the costs but it is definitely something we would love to do.
  

  
  

  Also another thought we have had is to do a pre-sale of the shirts where we will sell them relatively cheap (at little or no-profit to us, all we really ask is that we break even). Stay tuned for info on this!

  
  

  We'd love to hear your thoughts on the new design! We know, we know, this is big deal over one little T-shirt, but as you may know we don't do this too often so we want to let you know what's up!
• 

  Jul 09, 02:23 AM

  The Song That Got Left Behind

  (Originally Posted on Nick's Blog at www.dreamofsleeping.com)

  Hello again!
  
  So I was reading Easton's blog post from the other day about unreleased songs and what we plan to do with them. Since we finished Fireworks we have talked about what to do with the 20 to 30 some-odd songs that we wrote and demoed but didn't put on either album. Easton tends to write quicker and more often than me so he has quite a few more but I have a few from each album session that I think are pretty good and I'd love to have everyone hear.
  
  I have one in particular that I wrote for Autumn in the Evening that was probably my favorite that I wrote for the album but somehow it just didn't fit anywhere on the final tracklisting. It was actually called "Autumn in the Evening" but now that it's not on that album... who knows what it will be called or where it will end up! I'd really like to see it end up on a future album so it gets a proper release, but then again had a song just like that from Fireworks called Los Angeles, and well... that one is still sitting on my hard drive so I guess we'll just have to wait and see!
  
  Anyways here are the lyrics to the song. They were probably the most personal lyrics I wrote for any song on Autumn in the Evening further asking the question... why the fuuu isn't in on the album?!?!
  
  Autumn in the Evening

  
  

  in the backyard, on the water

  i'm floating... i'm sleeping... i'm waiting

  are you calling? are you calling me now?

  oh oh whoah

  
  

  you're always humming,

  you were always humming the songs

  and there was "darkness"

  and "control" and now "i can tell..."

  
  

  oh that winter's on the rise

  hoist the old white flag tonight

  
  

  we were so young

  just a crush on a washing machine

  and on a tile floor

  i was bleeding, but you kept me breathing

  
  

  back when we believed in love

  oh did it catch you by surprise

  and winter's on the rise

  hoist the old white flag tonight

  
  

  and this is autumn in the evening

  oh, and winter's on the rise
• 

  Jul 06, 03:37 AM

  What have we been up to?

  What have we been up to?

  (Originally posted on Nick's Blog at www.dreamofsleeping.com)

  What's up friends, just wanted to come on here and say hello! We fully plan on utilizing this webpage more in the future but as you may have noticed it has been a bit slow as far as posts and updates are concerned. 
  
  One of our main goals with The Dreamer and the Sleeper has been to keep things as stress free as possible so we can continue to LOVE what we are doing for a long time to come. Sometimes this means doing some unconventional things as far as... I guess you could call it, the music "business" aspect of the band is concerned. It is probably considered strange by most to record a second album, release it, and immediately drop off the face of the planet for a few weeks haha. 
  
  But this is sort of what we have done. It may not have been the best thing to do as far as getting word out about the album. But after writing, recording, mixing, mastering, self releasing, and just working on an album in general for over a year and a half it has been a great break for us to sort of put the album out of our minds for a few weeks. 
  
  As well as being band mates we are also great friends, so it has been really cool to just kick it and not have to worry about the recording we needed to get done that day. We can go down to the bar with our friends and not spend the entire time talking about the bridge of a certain song or the drum tracks on another song... And I'm sure our friends greatly appreciate that! We can go out and just drink and be merry as friends!
  
  The time away from Autumn in the Evening has also given us some time to start jamming with our good friend Ray Junior on our live show. Ray is an amazing bassist and we have worked on projects musically with him since long before D&S so it has been awesome sort of relearning the songs with him for the live show. They sound 1,000 times better with him than they ever did before!
  
  With all this being said I think both me and Easton's brains are starting to itch again. I personally have purposely not worked on any songs since we released AitE because I wanted a fresh look at them when I came back to them, and at this point these songs are practically burning a hole in my head! The break has left us both super excited to continue to work on 'Autumn in the Evening' songs to improve them live, rework the 'Fireworks' songs with Ray Ray's RIDICULOUS bass lines to play live, and probably our favorite thing to do: work on writing and demoing new songs for whatever may come in the future. We will begin to give the promotion for Autumn in the Evening the time it deserves as well, as we haven't sent out any press kit's with new songs on them yet!
  
  Over the past weekend we actually started working on something new that we are having a lot of fun with. For now I will keep what this little project is quiet simply because it is in the very beginning stages and if it doesn't come to fruition I would hate for people to be disappointed! But if this project turns out right you will be getting something super fun as a surprise really soon!!!
  
  So be on the look out in the near future! This website should begin to have more and more updates in the coming weeks and months!!!
  
  Peace yall