We've released our new album, Aquarium, online today!  You can download it for free right here:

http://www.youmeandiowa.com/aquarium

We're trying an experiment.  Let's see how much we can spread this around!  Here's the title track off of our new album, Aquarium. 

http://bit.ly/185AIx

Dear Friends,

The time has come for us to say goodbye. You Me & Iowa will officially dissolve after our final performance at Spaceland on October 3, 2009.

We have enjoyed six wonderful years of shared experience with you, our faithful listeners, and we feel we’ve reached a point where we need to explore new musical territory that cannot be achieved as the ensemble, You Me & Iowa.

All we can say is, thank you all so much for your love, support and enthusiasm over the years. We’ve had the time of our lives writing, traveling and performing our songs together, fueled by the energy of our friends and fans. The band is parting ways on very good terms. We are all close friends and still look forward to playing music together in some form or another.

Aquarium, You Me & Iowa’s final release, will be released at our final show, and will also be digitally available for free on our website, www.youmeandiowa.com, through our label, Scrimshaw Jazz, (www.scrimshawjazz.com), and eventually through other online distributors like iTunes. The album is a collection of ten songs we wrote and performed over the past two years that display a much wider musical range than anything we’ve released to date. In the true independent spirit, Aquarium was completely self-recorded, mixed and produced.

We will keep in touch with you all to let you know about our future musical endeavors. If you are in the Los Angeles area, please join us for our swan song party at Spaceland, on October 3. It will be your last chance to see You Me & Iowa live. Ever. It promises to be a night to remember.

Thank you all, again.

Sincerely,

You Me & Iowa
Tony Benedetti
Andrew Carroll
Tizoc Estrada
Ryan Julio
Ryan Ross

Hey guys,

We've had to cancel the Santa Barbara and Hermosa beach shows on the 12th and the 13th.  We apologize profusely, and please stay tuned for new show info.

We decided to record a cover of "Wild Things", made famous by The Troggs, in a spare day right after getting back from our West Coast tour.  Sign up for free on our website to download it -- it's on our Freebies page.

Go wish our bassist Ryan Julio a birthday wish or two!  He does enjoy fine alcohols and cheeses, as evidenced on his blog:  http://www.youmeandiowa.com/fermentationmastication.

... we are emerging briefly from our hardcore writing and recording mode for a breath of fresh air.  We have been hard at work finishing writing the last batch of songs for the new album, and are tweaking and fine tuning sounds for our demo versions of them.  We recently moved into a new studio with some better recording capabilities, and are now hard at work recording our newest stuff.

But as a breath of fresh air from all that studio stuff, we're emerging out of our cave to play a July 9th show at The Hotel Cafe with our good friends The Damselles (and the TC4).  So come on out around 9PM, and enjoy some live music and drinks.  It's also my birthday that night, so plan on a rowdy show.  

-RR

For the first time in about a week of being on the road, I've got a spare moment to write a bit about what we're up to.  Our Northern California tour started off with a Los Angeles show at the Silverlake Lounge, after which we found ourselves up in Fresno.  We began at a bar called The Crossroads, which proved to be a bit of an odd beginning to our tour.  Feeling like the only people in our 20's in the town, we most definitely played a rocking set to the late night folks of the older blues-rock lovin' crowd.  

Sacramento followed the day after, which was quite a bit of fun.  We got there in the mid-afternoon, walked around downtown, and headed to a music festival that was happening in the park.  We had a great show at Old Ironsides, which was a nautical themed bar right near the heart of Sacramento.

Saturday we journeyed to The Phoenix Theater, where we had frequented on previous trips north.  We played some new songs for the Petaluma crowd, including Howling At Summer:




Sunday was our show at The Stork Club in Oakland.  We were preceded by some very experimental bands, so we decided to debut some of our more experimental material, which I think went quite well.  

Monday we traveled back to a place very familiar to me, Santa Cruz.  Having grown up in the mountains nearby, I have some very fond memories of the place.  Getting to the venue we were to be playing at, The Crow's Nest, we were informed that we were to play for 3 hours.  Pulling out all the stops, we played pretty much every song we had for one of the most epic sets we've ever played.  Exhausting but very rewarding.

Tuesday we had off, so we traveled to We Fly By Night's rehearsal studio in San Francisco to work on some new material.  I believe the San Francisco atmosphere helped us to craft a brand new song idea, and I'm looking forward to developing it further.

Today we finally sat down and got some of our planning done for the upcoming months.  How we're going to record this new album, etc.  Got some good news today too, so we've all been extra excited about the months ahead.

Tomorrow we trek to Modesto, and then back home to our beds.  It's been a good tour.

Ryan

Now you can play our song "Margaret Mourning" in a Guitar Hero type game on JamLegend.  
Warning: It's really, really hard on the LEGENDARY difficulty level.  I couldn't make it past the first 30 seconds.

Margaret Mourning on JamLegend

We went in the studio a couple months ago and performed some of our new songs live, and you can check them out now at the Luxury Wafers website.

Video's below: