House of Heroes Undead Vlog

If you’re looking for relevant, fascinating, current, and well-shot video footage of the band House of Heroes…may I suggest looking elsewhere.

If, however, you are looking for shaky, distorted, outdated, boring footage of the band House of Heroes, then you hit the shaky, distorted, outdated, boring video footage jackpot!

It’s not a literal house.

This week on the blog, come play along with me as I dig up some footage from my band touring days, complete with the first time I met and hung out with one of my now-best-chums, Josh Dun! (And don’t forget to check out Josh’s new band, Twenty One Pilots).

…Or go watch Breaking Bad on DVR. That’s probably what I would do in your position.

But if you’re still interested, here ya go:

Play on,
Dustin

PS Hank dies.

 

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The Friday Five: Best House of Heroes Music Videos

Those of you that have had the fortune/misfortune of following my escapades will know that I toured with a band called House of Heroes for a while. In addition to being some ridiculously talented musicians, some great friends, and all-around good dudes, these guys have put out some pretty good rock music videos over the years. You can (and should) buy all of their media that you can get your hands on at iTunes, and their rarities/B-sides album that comes out in a couple weeks. Am I biased? Absolutely. But don’t let that take away from the hard work and awesomeness that’s gone in to their body of work. Anyway here are House of Heroes’ Top Five  music videos for this week’s Friday Five. Share and enjoy. Visit thehouseofheroes.com for their info and updates.

5) — Song: Ten Months, Album: Ten Months.
Okay so technically this music video comes from House of Heroes’ precursor band, No Tagbacks. But it’s all the same guys bringing the noise and it still holds up. There’s also something to be said about having a career as musicians that predates HD television. That’s what 14 years of touring and playing together looks like.

4) —Song: In the Valley of the Dying Sun, Album: The End is Not the End.
Unconventionally catchy is the phrase that pops into my mind every time I hear this single, but the music video does a good job of highlighting the story behind the lyrics, showing the depth that a lot of modern musical acts lack in their writing.

 

Vocal About Backgrounds (Part One of Many or Maybe Just This One)

Lyric videos are sweet, here’s a lyric video that I  made  found on the internet, using technology. You may be wondering: What makes this lyric video special — besides the fact that it’s one of the songs I sang background vocals on for the new House of Heroes album? Nothing. That is the only special thing about it.

Because Americans are lazy, and usually overweight, I’ve embedded this lyric video (only because I couldn’t link to the cheeseburger that you actually want):

There’s an official, people-filled version of this music video as well, but I’m not posting that version because I think it distracts from the background vocals. Background vocals where I was intentionally asked to sing, not like my usual musical requests which typically vary in range from “please stop” to “stop” to “Denny’s doesn’t have a karaoke night, you need to leave.”

The album, called Cold. Hard. Want., by House of Heroes (feat. Dustin Heveron), releases July 10th. If Carson Daly were still a thing, he would say that the album “drops” on July 10th, to try and sound hip/relevant. Then he’d say some snappy one-liner about the album, something like “Hey, do you have any change I can borrow for cab fare?” Carson Daly had (and maybe still has, I haven’t checked) a talk show on at 1:30 in the morning — its primary competition in that timeslot is the night’s second repeat showing of the Shake-Weight infomercial and a blue screen that plays the Emergency-Broadcast System beep on a nonstop loop. It’s an ideal show for people who fell asleep while Late Night with Jimmy Fallon was on and still haven’t woken up to change the channel, or people who’ve masturbated too furiously for their forearms to have enough strength left to operate their TV remote. People Magazine once praised it as “a show that is on television.” House of Heroes will be on tour this summer, you should go to their webbed-sites for more information, and buy their album when it comes out in July. If you want to buy only the tracks that have my BGVs on them, I don’t blame you, and I will post some sort of list on my webbing-site that tells you which ones have them. I’ll also call them and ask if they’ll release a version of the CD that only has tracks I sang background on, to save you the trouble of having to ask them yourself. Currently there are no plans for them to sell a T-shirt with my likeness on it.

I read a blog post about 27 tips on how to make your blog more accessible to people, and it says you should end posts with a question to the reader. I’m not doing a very good job of following its advice so far.

Cheers,
Dustin

30 in 30, Day 15: House of House Music

For today’s post, I’m dropping (do cool people still say “dropping” or is it just me and Carson Daly?) another remix I created — this one is of the House of Heroes string intro (started out at about 30 seconds long) from their album, The End is Not The End. They actually had me make this to use as a set intro, but it never ended up seeing the light of day (aside from background music in the HoH vlogs I made whilst out on the road with them). Enjoy it. Or don’t. I won’t lose sleep over it (probably just because I don’t have much sleep to lose to begin with).

Wher’ Da Gold At?

Tour factoids so far (Day 4):

+Somehow, everyone has contracted the same non-sickness.  None of us are actually sick, but we all seem to be passing around the sniffles to one another…it’s more odd than debilitating.

+We had our first day off today, which is always a mixed blessing — it’s nice to have some extra free time, but by the same token, we’re on the road in order to play shows, and having a day where we’re not playing shows almost feels like a waste.  Still nice to recuperate though.

+Mike Herrera’s (lead singer/bassist for MxPx) side project, Tumbledown, is following our tour routing almost exactly, but just a day behind where we are.  Weird.

+Kind of disappointed at the overall number of shawties we’ve encountered thus far, but it’s still early in the tour so I’m hoping that changes as we ramp up into towns where we draw better.

+Purchased a crapload of music today: the new Muse, the new Thrice, and the very old yet brand new Beatles songs.

+A minimum of drinks have been spilled in the van, which is good because spilt drinks are the number one cause of lingering bad smells in the van.  And when you have a couple of 8+ hour drives coming up, the last thing you want is to have to endure those drives in stank.

+Watched The Vampire Diaries pilot on my computer today via the free iTunes sampler.  No lie, it’s pretty bad.  The chicks are passably hot though, and it’s about vampires, so it’ll probably run for 10 years because people are idiots.

+Still pretty unimpressed with how the VMAs went down — finally saw a full replay today instead of just the Taylor/Kanye part, and aside from Muse and Jay-Z’s performances, I really could’ve done without it.  The VMAs are the number one reason foreign countries hate America, I’m sure of it.

Those are all the major stories so far, nothing too out of the ordinary.  Some sidenotes include a list of pretty inhospitable southerners (I thought “y’all” were supposed to be nice to visitors?), a homeless man who was trying to sell us a t-shirt that he clearly found laying around to “help the children,” and the outlandish desire to punctuate all of our sentences with “where da gold at?”

Oh and I’ve already read almost 2,000 pages worth of books at this point.  ‘Cause knowledge is power.

Cheers,

Dustin

P.S. They love us in St. Louis.  Of course, compared to the Rams, we’ve been a lot kinder to that town.

P.P.S. Where da gold at? Give me da gold.