BIRTHDAY P-P-PARTY!

It’s Elisabeth’s birthday on Sunday and you’re invited!

When: Sunday, May 16, from 5-8pm (Berlin time) (11am-2pm Eastern time, for instance)

Where: https://www.twitch.tv/songband

What: Songband live stream birthday party! We’re going to play some tunes, probably a lot of them. You can chat with us and interact in other ways, too! We’d be so happy to see you there. It’s free!

We’ve been doing twice-weekly streams for a little over a month now, sometimes with piano and guitar and vocals, sometimes with accordion and banjo instrumentals. It’s always a lot of fun playing our tunes and meeting new people. There’s a lot going on on Twitch - you can make requests, chat with us and with other people watching us, do various digital things we barely understand, give us tips (we do understand this! <3). “Follow” us (click on the heart icon), and you’ll get a notification when we’re going live. We’re still finding our way with all the tech (we think of it as Twitch homework), but it’s coming along.

As always, we’re pretty proud of our song list. And we love to play together.

It would be great to see some old friends in this new virtual space!

2020 World Detour, part 2 (late summer)

Hey there friends, family, and other folks!

Because of corona, we still haven't been out gigging in public. Instead, like so many others, we've turned to technology to try and bridge the gap. Unfortunately, we're not the most techknowledgey people.

After some attempts at streaming, we admitted defeat. We decided that Lis's slow internet was our enemy. We may return to the fight again, but in the meantime, we recorded some videos. Apparently, everything has to be a video now (thanks, MTV). We got some requests, and are happy to have been able to fulfill those (you can find them on our YouTube - like and subscribe, yo!).

We even somehow managed to appear in the stream of our friend Randy Miller, helping out on the Ballad of the Persistent Virus.

We also made a new friend, because we haven't seen much of our real friends lately. She joined Ethan for a rendition of Speak Low by Kurt Weill, who once lived in Berlin. Maybe in the very room we recorded in - who's to say?! (Please don't look it up - we like the mystery.)

We finally looked at our website on a smart phone, and noticed it looked all messed up there, so we tweaked it so maybe it looks (slightly) better on a phone now.

Oh, and we've got a job. We go out on walks at night and make recordings of bats for science. We're trying to find where they're living so that those places can be protected. They're fascinating little critters! We haven't incorporated them into our music making yet, but this guy has:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/arts/music/bats-field-works-ultrasonic.html

Please stay in touch - we miss you all!

- Elisabeth and Ethan

2020 World Detour

Hello friends and strangers!

Interesting times we're in right now, wouldn't you say?

Before the Great Social Distancing, Songband had a few things going on.  We'd been playing banjo/accordion instrumentals every Thursday at Café Nullpunkt since August.  In February we played our first Sunday brunch at the Ritz.  Since last summer, we'd played the occasional Saturday night with piano, guitar, and vocals at the Waldorf-Astoria Langbar.  Things were moving in a good direction generally, and we were busy and motivated.   But now all the gigs are cancelled because of Miss Rona, COVID-19.  So what to do?

We're continuing to learn new songs.  That's not going to stop.  (If you think about the statistics of how many songs there are and what percentage of those we know, it's really shameful.  We probably know less than half of them!)

We're going to be working on some new promo material in hopes that in the future we might get gigs again someday.  We've got a lot of songs to share, see?

And in the short term, we're trying to figure out this whole social media and live streaming thing that all the other kids seem to know about.  It's not so easy; we're not very good at computers.  But our first attempts (this past Thursday) were informative.  After a bumpy start, we successfully did a 36-minute livestream on our YouTube channel, and a one-song test on Facebook.  We plan to do some more next Thursday in place of our usual gig at Café Nullpunkt.  Keep an eye out for that.

We also set up a couple ways for people to donate to us, for anyone who wants to support the music. We want you to be able to do what you want in life. If that thing you want is to give us money, here's how:

(best for a recurring donation in Euros €, also works for USD $): Patreon/Songband

(best for USD $): Paypal.me/KingElisabeth

(best for Euros €): Paypal.me/Songband

Thanks for all the support over the years.  It's been fun hearing from you guys recently over the social media. We're happy to be your Songband!

Stay home, stay healthy.

Love forever,

Elisabeth and Ethan