The winners of the No Label Needed contest and series presented by Scion were Minnesota’s Iron Thrones. As the band receive insight and instruction on the music industry from music industry professionals while recording an EP at the Machine Shop, they’re blogging about it every step of the way. Stay tuned to No Label Needed and Metal Insider to get their side of the story.
“No Label Needed” Trip – Day 5
This morning, I woke up to find Pete sleeping on the couch. Apparently, last night he tried to get into his & Curt’s room (where Curt was already asleep) and the key didn’t work. Rather than knocking on the door for a long time, he just gave up and slept on the not-entirely-comfortable couch, with no blanket or pillows. Adam called Curt, but he didn’t answer. Apparently, he never received the call. He also claims that the door wasn’t locked. Strange…
We went back to the food court where we’d eaten Subway the day before, and found a fair amount of business-type people there, all wearing the same outfits. Apparently, you’re expected to wear an upsetting button-down and ugly khaki’s or suit pants when dining in the $5 food court in Lincoln Harbor. Be sure to take note if you’re ever in the area, unless you want to attract a lot of strange stares. Which we did, of course. One guy asked if we were a band, and if we were from Minnesota. I didn’t know our accents were so obvious, but apparently we just scream Minnesotan.
I grabbed a “Gyro” (the quotes should sufficiently express my feelings towards said sandwich), while Pete and Adam got fresh-made omelets with coffee and what at one point were hashed browns, but ended up as solid bricks of oil. Tasty, to be sure, although it melted gnarly holes in the styrofoam “plates” in which they were served. Curt decided not to eat, as he’d finished the second half of his Subway sandwich the night before and doesn’t really eat much in the morning.
Because it was so close (across the street), we checked out what appeared to be some sort of deli from the outside, as evidenced by the “boar’s head meats” sign. It turned out to be a decent convenient store, combined with a fresh-cut sandwich shop, not dissimilar to a place in Minnesota called Von Hanson’s Meats.
After checking out the shop, we went back to the hotel to relax and figure out what we were going to do about traveling to New York City on Friday. After much deliberation, we made the official decision to completely “wing it”. During the conversation, we got a call from Marc: apparently, we were being hooked up with continental breakfast tickets! We went downstairs right away to investigate this, and it turned out to be completely true. We were 1/3 of the way towards affording food! While we were down there, I went completely rogue and ruined our plans for “winging it” by asking the nice front desk guy what the hell we should do. Thank fucking crap I asked, because it turned out we needed to take 3 different forms of transportation just to get there!
With maps in hand, we went back to the deli and got some sandwiches, which turned out to be absolutely fantastic. The dudes running it are awesome, and actually knew about the studio we’ll be recording at (although inexplicably by a different name). I discovered and consumed a bottle of some sort of australian drink comprised entirely out of apple and mango juice, with no preservatives or water or anything. It was super-sweet, and super-sweet. Curt got some cranberry juice to help his stomach (he’s still feeling tired and shitty, likely from all of the less-than-stellar food we’ve been eating).
After the sandwich shop, I got another call from Marc in which we discussed possibly doing some ustream/justin.tv/whatever webstream messaging whateverthehell awesome sessions on the official No Label Needed site which as of now is pretty dead. In addition, these blogs might end up on there as well! Hopefully they’re entertaining enough to actually interest people. Well, YOU people actually. Weird!
Stomachs full and evening approaching, Adam and Pete went in search of a better liquor store. A couple of hours later, they regaled me with an epic tale of going to four different stores in several miles, only to find bitter disappointment at each establishment. They eventually gave up and bought some not-great beers (“bitter disappointment” would be a quite fitting name for one of them, actually…) and headed back, getting lost a couple of times in the process. All-in-all, a 30-block-long string of dissatisfaction. Boourns, Weehawken, boourns. Not much of an area for fine spirits.
At the end of the night, after a brief crazy Britney Spears Dance Party courtesy of some random guy’s shared iTunes library (which we filmed, so stay tuned for that), I started a Flickr photo album for the Contest Trip. We’ll try to be better getting more photos of things and people other than ourselves hence-forth, I promise. Or at least I’ll try. Buh.
Cheers,
-steve.h
