My top 15 albums of 2009.

If you don't know this.  I LOVE music.  I am always listening to it or playing it.  A TON of albums came out in 2009 and I picked up or downloaded a chunk of them.  I should honestly do a top 20 because there are so many albums I feel I am leaving out. They are somewhat in order, but naming albums that I love is almost like parents saying which kid is their favorite.  I am not a music critic by any means... but here i go... EDIT so i tried doing a top 10 and couldn't do it so I had to change it to a top 15...

1 After Midnight Project - Lets Build Something to Break I discovered this band on Warped Tour this year... absolutely amazing live show. The songs are well written and I can say hands down this was my favorite album of '09  If you haven't heard AMP they are like a slightly heavier version of Jimmy Eat World.

2. Jay-Z - The Blueprint 3 I like hip hop and rap. I don't love it.  But damnit, I love this album.  I think it's honestly the only rap album I own besides old school Beastie Boys and Dr. Dre albums that I can listen to all the way through.  Kanye West, No ID, and Timbaland produced the majority of the tunes and really kept the album fresh.  The songs have good structure to them and are very enjoyable on many levels.   

3. New Found Glory - No Without a Fight I was honestly worried about this album.  Their last full length, Coming Home, sucked. But thankfully NFG left the major label, signed with Epitaph, and got Mark Hoppus from Blink 182 to produce this album.  What I like about this album was it was a return to their early 90s pop-punk roots, but at the same time had some of the most mature song writing they have ever done.  I also enjoyed they are letting guitarist Chad Gilbert, who used to sing in Shai Hallud, sing more backups.

4. Kelly Clarkson - All I Ever Wanted I am a huge Kelly Clarkson fan.  I think she is the only American Idol that is worth a damn.  This album showed a lot of growth from her last album and was back to a poppier feel than My December, which was a downer of an album.  Good mix of pop and rock songs on this album.  She co-wrote a handful of the tunes on it and even produced a track or two. 

5. Lamb of God - Wrath It's LoG, do i really need to say anything more?  These guys are pretty much the kings of current heavy metal.  Wrath was a solid album. It had a lot more energy than Sacrament and I was very happy for that. It was straight forward kick you in the ass metal album.  I got to see them around Derby this year and it was a fantastic show.   

6. For The Fallen Dreams - Relentless I have yet to see this band live and I will hopefully do so in 2010.  My friend Mike Barnes turned me on to them because they are a lot like Parkway Drive whom I am a major fan of.  This album along with their first album Changes has been on constant repeat while driving around.  

7. Gallows - Great Britain Gallows are probably the last real punk band left besides Rancid. I have seen them live a few times and it is always a hell of a show.  The lead singer Frank Carter spends more time in the crowd than he does on stage.  The songs are a bit less sporadic than Orchestra of Wolves.  They go out on a limb and are more experimental on this album.  Some slower jams.  

8. Between The Buried and Me - The Great Misdirect BTBAM are pretty much what would happen if you crossed Pink Floyd and a death metal band.  Every album gets more and more epic.  This album starts out with some of the heaviest songs they have written but then by the ending of the album breaks down into a lot of mellow atmospheric music.  I really like how the vocals are mixed on this album  I should be checking this band out live in January when they come to Headliners.

9. A Day To Remember - Homesick ADTR are the pop punk of hardcore. I love them. Many people hate them.  I think they write super catchy tunes. The songwriting is great.  I think they balance the moshing, screaming, hardcore with the sing-songy, catchy, punky tunes better than any of the other bands out there trying to do it.   I got to see them on Warped Tour this summer.  They were good, but not as good as they are on album, but I kind of expected that.

10. Dashboard Confessional - After The Ending This was an interesting DC album.  They are really trying to rediscover themselves on it.  A lot of critics bashed them for that.  I think its cool that they are trying a lot of different styles.  They have a good mix of rock. pop. folk, and even some dance/pop tunes on the album.  I downloaded the version that had the extra disc with all the songs redone acoustic, that is the best way to listen to it.

11. Converge - Axe to Fail Holy crap.  Converge FINALLY figured out how to produce an album.  This album shows of how creative and talented this band is.  Heavy and rifftastic.  The drums and bass sound huge.  They finally came out with an album that captures this band's live show.


12. Rancid - Let the Dominoes Fall As I mentioned earlier Rancid is one of the only real punk bands left.  They are an interesting band.  I tend to only enjoy every other album.  This was one of the good albums.  It seemed to be a throwback to ...And Out Come the Wolves.  They lost their original drummer, Brett Reed and picked up the Used's Branden Steineckert and he was a great fit to the band.  Lots of good tunes that will become staples in their live set on this album.


13. Born of Osiris - A Higher Place I liked A Higher Place because it was a lot less produced than the album before, A New Reign.  The songs are a lot more melodic and not a chopped up as they were on their first album.  This is a young band who will keep putting out great albums.  I look forward to more from them in the future.

14. Company of Theives - Ordinary Riches My good friend and fellow musician, Justin Lewis, turned me on to this band.  They are like if Catpower took uppers.  Very poppy indy rock tunes.  The lead singer Genevieve Schatz has a really cool raspy voice. I got to see them at a Waterfront Wednesday show and they put on a great live show.  They even did a Smashing Pumpkins cover.

15. Set Your Goals - This Will Be The Death of Us I was not a huge fan of this band live.  Mainly because they have six members... and for the music they are making that's like two or three too many.   I loved this album though.  A lot angrier than their first album.  A whole lot more substance too.  They also had some great guest vocalist.  My favorite was the song they did with Haley Williams for Paramore.  Way better production on this album too.  Hopefully their live show will improve.  

Goodbye 2009, hello 2010

First off, I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season.  I was able to go home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas this year and actually spend more than one day at home.  It was so great to be around family and see some old friends.  Very relaxing.  This is the first Christmas in YEARS that I went home and didn't end up sick.  I used to always get sick around the holidays because I worked retail and my body would just give in after working so may hours in a week and dealing with the stress of shoppers.

So there are only four days left till the end of the year.  I thought I would write about a lot of the stuff that happened to me, good or bad, so this will probably be a pretty long post.  

2009 started calm.  I rang in New Years with my girlfriend at the time, Kelly.  We had a quiet night at home watching movies.  The end of January the store I worked at Willis Music moved from the Oxmoor Center to Huntington Place over on Hurstbourne.  This was a great move because it tripled our space.  I also was able to change positions from being the assistant manager to being the instrument repairman., which has been my dream job for years.  February was also a quiet month.  Kelly and I celebrated Valentines and our one year anniversary, things were going good... or so I thought.

March rolls around.  The beginning of the month I come home one day from work, and I notice things missing, there was usually two piles of mail on the table, there was now only one.  Things were out of place a hair.  Kelly isn't home, but I figure she was visiting her trashy family out in the south end which she loved to do.  I go into the bedroom, and thats when I notice all her stuff is gone.  She had moved out while I was at work... yes, she packed up all her shit and left.  I try calling, texting, emailing, etc. to get in touch with her and I can't  She doesn't return my calls for almost a full week.  We finally talk and I pretty much tell her to go to hell.  I have no interest in being with a coward.  I spent most of March and April dealing with the breakup.  I was more hurt on how she left and not that she left.  

May rolls around.  I get to spend Mothers Day in jail.  I was pulled over that evening for expired tags.  I didn't realize they were expired because the truck was in my fathers name so they expired back in February when his birthday was.  The reason I was arrested was for a warrant I had.  Back in early 2000 or 2001, I ran a stop light and got into an argument with a cop.  I went to court for it, but apparently did not pay all the fines and what not, so there was a warrant I didn't know about.  So I got to spend 16 hours in jail.  Thankfully I have some of the best friends in the world who bailed me out.  My friend Courtney made about a million phones calls to take care of me and made sure work and other people were notified and my close friend Dan drove down from Ohio to pay my 1000 dollar bail.  May was also me celebrating my 30th birthday.  Most people are down when they turn the big 3-0 but I was honestly happy.  The reason why I was so happy was the fact that when I was in my mid 20s I didn't think I would make it to 30.  I was so messed up with drinking and whatnot I figured I would be dead or in jail.   I took a few days off and spent time with my family and had a great party at Bearno's by the Bridge that Sunday.  

June rolls around and I was able to go full time at the repair shop.  That was such a great feeling.  Before that I was working part time repair, and part time Willis sales help.  I was honestly doing a terrible job at both because I couldn't really focus on doing my job correctly.  

July tends to be one of my favorite months because its when the Warped Tour usually happens.  This is my favorite day of summer.  I get to see TONS of bands that I like and I usually discover a few new bands too.  I went with Courtney and Robin this year and it was a blast.  

August and September were slower months. That is quite ok too.  I am sure we played some good shows.  I play in a cover band called ROCKTIMUS PRIME and we usually play out a couple times a month.  I am also in a band called For Lack Of A Better Name, or FLOABN, that spent the year playing every Sunday at Bearno's by the Bridge.  So even in slower months I still had a lot going on with work and music.

October my boy Hunter got married to his beautiful wife Megan.  I was lucky enough to be in the wedding and I was so stoked about that.  I also played a show that very night.  It was a ton of fun playing Saint's Skybar in a tux!  

November was not a fun month in the beginning.  I came down with the flu and was sick for about a week solid.  I also had my truck broken in to.  They popped the lock on the drivers side door so now my truck is rigged where I can only get in and out of the passenger's door.  They stole my stereo faceplace and my iPod.  I still am pretty upset about that.  Fuck people who steal stuff.  The month ended good with a wonderful thanksgiving with my family.  

December was a solid month too.  This is the first year in 15 years that I have not worked retail.  I was actually able to enjoy the holidays for a chance, take some time off and see some friends and family. ROCKTIMUS PRIME always puts on a solid Christmas show too.  We decorate the stage and just have an all around good time.   If you have been reading this blog you know that my Granda Betty passed away just a few weeks before Christmas.  That made Christmas a bit more rough than normal, but we got the family together and had a fantastic time. 

Lots of good things happened this year... I am trying to focus more on those than the bad.  I made some great new friends like Katy and Sarah S.  I also got a lot closer to some friends like Jaime and Jenny. I also got in touch with some amazing old friends like Steph and Melody.  I am going on 4 years sober.  I still have an amazing family that loves me.  So yeah, lots of crappy stuff but lots of great stuff too.  I will be back in a few days to write my New Year's Resolutions out.  I am planning on lots of positive changes.  I might also write out a list of my top 10 or 15 albums of 2009....  Thanks for reading :) 

Grandma Betty

My Grandma Betty passed away this Monday.  It came as quite a shock to me.  She had diabetes, but I didn't think she was deathly ill with it.  I got a call and an email from my mother Monday morning around 9:30 saying that Betty was in the hospital since Thursday night and that she had an infection the doctors could not figure out.  Latter that very day I got a phone call a little after noon and it again was my mother telling me my Grandmother had passed away.  I was in shock.  As the day went on I got more and more upset about it.  Mainly upset that I didn't get to spend too much time with her.  While growing up she either was living in North Carolina or Texas so she wasn't that close to me.

Betty Hunt was an amazing soul.  She was VERY religious.  Something that I am really not, but I can totally respect it in other people.  She never looked down upon me for the stupid stuff I did, and never forced her religion upon me. Just shared stories with me on how God helped her out.  I dig that.  She reminded me of a big kid in her older age, like she had an innocence to her.  One of the last few times I remember seeing her was in Ohio at my folks house last summer I believe? Her diabetes was not doing too well.  She loved sweets, so she was eating these frozen sugar free popcicles that we used to eat as a kid and I just found it the cutest thing ever.

So to celebrate her life I am going to buy some sugar free popcicles this week and eat them in honor of my wonderful Grandma Betty...   I love you Betty Hunt.  

Worst. Security. EVER!

Yesterday was a busy day for me.  It started out with a trip to the funeral home in the morning.  A close friend lost his father last weekend and the funeral was yesterday.  After stopping by the funeral home I ran a few errands around Louisville before meeting up with my friend Mike and heading up to Covington to see one of my favorite bands of all time, Dillinger Escape Plan.

Mike had to run a few errands after work so we were running a bit late to the show.  It was at the Mad Hatter.  It is an interesting club because it used to be a strip club and they didn't do too much remodeling to make it a music venue.  We should have missed the first band, or two, but there was another band added to the bill and the show started late so we had to sit through. I don't remember the name of the first band, but they were awful.  They had amazingly bad hair, the singer wanted to be Davey Havok from AFI and their music was just lame.   The second band we saw, Fake Problems, were ok.  I think I would like Fake Problems on CD, I didn't care too much for them live.  The lead singer was really funny and had a lot of charisma.  They sounded like a mix between The Briggs and Against Me! but heavily watered down versions of those bands.

Finally, what I had been waiting for all night.  Dillinger Escape Plan.  Only way I can explain their music is chaos. If you listen to them on album it sounds a lot like noise at times, but the thing is, you go see them live and they play it note for note.  The best part is, while they are playing this break neck tempo music note for note they are thrashing around and pretty much breaking stuff the whole time.  A great example last night was Jeff Tuttle, one of the guitarist, has a part in a song where he doesn't play. So Tuttle runs into the crowd along the wall, grabs a tall table, and drags it into the pit.  Both guitarist Ben Weinman, and vocalist Greg Pucatio were jumping around off of ego boxes and amps while hitting the PA cabinets that were hanging from the ceiling.  They played two new songs last night.  They opened with one of them, it was cool, a typical DEP song.  The second new song blew my mind.  It started out with a typical Dillinger sound then it morphed into this really cool melodic groove, its slowed down for a bit in the middle and then picked it back up even heavier than the intro.  The new drummer, Billy Rymer, was incredible.  He was some kid they found in some no name band, but the dude slays.

Thursday was the headliner.  I am not a huge fan, they are good and I respect them as musicians, but I just never got in to them.  I owned their first two albums and they have a few moments on them.  They pretty much embody the term Screamo.  They were a lot better live than I thought they would be, but you just can not follow an act like Dillinger Escape plan.  The lead singer Geoff Rickley puts on a pretty solid show.  The band sounded really thin though, like the guitars were really tiny sounding compared to the bands before them.  I got to hear a handful of songs off their album Full Collapse, which was the only album I really dig of theirs.

This is where the trouble began last night.  I think maybe 3 or 4 people max were kicked out during DEP, which is about right for a Dillinger show.   The crowd thinned out a bit during Thursday so me and my buddy Mike scooted a bit closer to the stage.  They only had a few security guards working.  One by the door, another near the bar, and the guy that was up in the pit area.  Well, the guy up near the pit must have had a bad day.  He was basically throwing people out for no good reason.  We left about halfway through Thursday and he had thrown out about 6 people.  Basically if he didn't like how they were moshing or if they bumped in to him he tossed them. How they were throwing kids out was totally lame too.  There was a cop there sitting up at a post kinda looking over the crowd,  there was no reason at all for one of Covington's finest to be at the show.  It was pointless.  The security guard would grab someone he was unhappy with, the cop would leave his post and the security guard would pass him off to the piggy and he would escort the kid out of the building.  Well kids started getting feisty because the security guard and the officer were total jackoffs.  The cop got to the point where he was more or less choking kids out with his billy club to carry them out to the parking lot.  This is where I ended up taking a shot from the billy club in the arm.  The cop was dragging out some kid that was flailing his arms and the asshole officer and the stupid kid fall in to me and I take the ball end of the billy club in the shoulder.  I have never been a fan of police and last night makes me hate them even more.  How were they protecting and serving anyone in this bar?  These kids were just moshing and having a good time.  There were no fights, just kids getting crazy listening to music they love.

Overall, it was a great night, Dillinger put on an amazing show as always so I was very happy.  My arm is pretty damn sore today, It's a little bit discolored from where I took the hit.  But I guess it was worth it to see a rocking show.

Titles and towns

The title of the blog.


I have gotten a few questions of where I cam up with the name for this site.  The title of this blog, Chadville, comes from a saying that I tend to say a good amount: "That's a sad day in Chadville"  It's used when something negative happens like I am supposed to hang out with someone and they have to cancel or I have a bad day.  I will also say "It was a pretty good day in Chadville" when good things happen too.  I will also add "town" to the end of some some friends names like "How's it going in Courtneytown?" for an example.  I guess it's a chadism.  I have other random saying that I tend to say, I will probably mention them as they come up in life.  Because of growing up in a lot of different places I tend to say things funny.  I don't have a distinct accent, but over the years it has become more of a southern accent I guess? Which brings us up to our next topic...

Where is my Hometown?


This is a question I have been debating a lot lately.  I was born in Buffalo, NY.  I lived there till I was maybe 3 or 4 years old.  From New York my family moved to Cookeville, TN (pretty much the only city between Nashville and Knoxville, and from what I can remember a  real shithole) and I lived there till the end of 5th grade.  After Tennessee  we moved to Hamilton, OH (about 20 minutes north of Cincinnati) where we lived till my senior year of high school.  After Ohio we moved to Louisville, KY... where I have been ever since.  After living in Louisville about 2 and a half years my parents, and at the time my sister too, moved back to Ohio.  I stayed in Louisville.

I don't feel I can claim Buffalo as my hometown because I honestly do not have any memories of living there, I do still have a good amount of family there.  I would never claim Cookeville as my hometown because I have no ties to that place.  I don't talk to any of the people I grew up around, not that they were bad people... we just lost touch over the years.  I lived in Ohio for around six years.  My parents still live there and I am still in contact with a handful of friend that I grew up around.  I have been in Louisville for all of my adult life, as of writing this blog I have lived here 12 years.  Only family I have here is my sister, but I have TONS of friends that might as well be family.  I guess at this point in my life I would claim Ohio as my hometown and Louisville as my current place of resident.  In a few years when I am more settled down and hopefully live in a house and not an apartment I will probably claim Louisville as my hometown.

My first blog....

So I have decided to start blogging. All the cool kids are doing it right? I am going to use this blog as an outlet for all kinds of stuff. Here are some things about me and things to expect from this blog:

1. I am a nerd, so there will be some tech talk. From products I own and love to stuff I would like to see companies make.

2. I am a lover of all things music.  I play bass guitar in a few bands around Louisville.  I also play a little bit of guitar and mandolin.  I love listening to music, my musical tastes are all over the board too... from Kelly Clarkson to Bloodbath.   I love musical gear.  I will probably talk about my equipment woes on here and talk about gear I would love to own.

3. I like sports, but I am new to it. I have recently discovered I love football. So I will probably talk about the Bengals and the Bills on here, as well as UofL, UC, and even UK.

4. I tend to over analyze most things. From very little minute details to really big things like religion and politics. I don't expect everyone to agree with the things I am saying, and I also don't feel the need to argue most of this stuff, again this blog is going to be a release for me.

5. I am a recovering addict. At the time of writing this I am going on four years sober. That is a huge thing for me so I am sure it will get brought up in this here blog.

6. I have wonderful friends and family. I am sure stories of them will be told. Names will be changed to protect the innocent on occasion.

7. I have a very cool job. I work as an instrument repairman for Cook Instrument Repair. I get to work on guitars and other musical equipment so I am sure there will be times when I am either gushing over something cool I am fixing or complaining about how crazy tough a job is.

8. I am single and I live on my own. Stupid bachelor stories do happen to me, if you're lucky, I might share some of them.

9. I moved a lot growing up. I lived in four different states and a lot of different houses. As of late I have been in the same apartment for almost 4 years. I really think that is the longest I have ever lived in the same building.

10. I can be pretty lazy, I was trying to come up with ten things and I couldn't. SO yeah, I am lazy and thats what number 10 is about.

I don't know how often I will post to this. Probably just on Sundays because they tend to be laid back days for me. I might like it and post more... who knows...

Thanks to anyone and everyone who reads this.