I am going on tour with…
One of the coolest things about doing Unsilent Night has always been reuniting acts that I love to play one last show. Terminal and As Cities Burn reunions were literally priceless to me. The other cool thing about Unsilent Night though, is and always will be, introducing brand new bands to the music scene. In the past we have brought bands to Texas for the first time like Breathe Carolina, The Medic Droid, The Word Alive, and tons more. That being said, we are starting our 2012 promotion for Unsilent Night a little backwards. We want to put a heavy focus on up and coming artists that deserve some extra love. These are not necessarily brand new artists, but they are definitely “Up & Coming” artists that deserve more attention. Today at 5pm we announced the first few artists for Unsilent Night 2012. Below is a list and a little bit of information about them. Please check out these artists, get familiar, and hold yourself over with some new music before we get to the headliners :)
CRIZZLY (San Antonio, TX - DJ)
• FB Link: https://www.facebook.com/iamcrizzly
• Video Link: http://youtu.be/iiaHuLYYmX0
BIG CHOCOLATE (Huntington Beach, California / Minden, NV - DJ)
• FB Link: https://www.facebook.com/bigchocolateofficial
• Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o10k-fd8v2Y
GOLDHOUSE (Chicago, IL - Electronic / Dance)
• FB Link: https://www.facebook.com/IAMGOLDHOUSE
• Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YhjsgumnY
TOMMY NOBLE (Central Coast, CA - DJ)
• FB Link: https://www.facebook.com/tommynoblemusic
• Video Link: http://youtu.be/erjCqmzMrQc
ADESTRIA (San Diego, CA - Post Hardcore / Electronica / Metal)
• FB Link: https://www.facebook.com/adestriamusic
• Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdw3ZTk7E00
THROUGH ARTERIES (San Antonio, TX - Post Hardcore / Electronica / Rock)
• FB Link: https://www.facebook.com/througharteries
• Video Link: http://youtu.be/-rY533Yzj0E
MOD SUN (Bloomington, MN - Hippy Hop)
• FB Link: https://www.facebook.com/friendbase
• Video Link: http://youtu.be/1RTt5Xs8DOc
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Between 2004 and 2006 I had the closest, most awesome, group of friends in the world. My best girl friends came over to my apartment every day, I lived with my best friend, and we couldn’t get our other best friends to leave. We did everything together. It was seriously the best time of my life.
In 2007 and 2008 I had a girlfriend that I lived with and saw my friends less and less. I still had a close group of friends that was always around but it definitely wasn’t the same.
In 2009 my world came crashing down when that girl left me and all of my friends were there for me. It wasn’t necessarily the same friends I had in 2004-2006, but it definitely started to feel like that again. I was piecing my life back together. I had friends around me 24/7 and life was great, the only thing missing for me was a girlfriend.
In 2010, I got a girlfriend. We hit it off so well that within a few days, without even realizing it, we were already living together. The harder that relationship got, the further I drifted from my friends and eventually, when things got really bad, I felt completely alone.
We broke up in 2011 and I started, once again, trying to piece my life together. It has taken a lot more this time to win some of my friends back. I’ve also shut myself off a lot from developing close relationships.
At this time, I would say I have a very solid group of dudes that I work with and hangout with that has been consistent. Some of them have been in my life as long as 10 years and some as recently as a few months. However, I’m still finding it hard to find those good and reliable and consistent girl best friends in my life. I’m also finding it hard to let any female in general truly get close to me.
There is no point to this except to type it out and get it off my mind so I can sleep.
Thanks for reading.
Feel free to leave me feedback in my ask, I would really appreciate it. I am going crazy.
I need new people in my life.
So it’s a new year and I really want to start it off right. I have been working so much today and preparing for an extremely busy year. I really want to try to keep up with my Tumblr for once and keep everyone in the loop with what’s going on.
Most of my day today was spent setting up www.evolvemm.com. I had a great meeting with Mouth Of The South today. Best dudes.
Anyway… keep up with me.
twitter.com/mikeziemer
facebook.com/mikeziemer
Hi, my name is Mike. I am 26 years old, and if half of what I am finding out lately is true, I might finally be growing up. This world is full of deception and distraction. These things always pull our focus off of what truly matters in life and try to put it on things that just waste our time. If this is something I can learn now, before I reach any level of real success, I could be saving my own life.
You hear rappers talking about money and drugs and all the alcohol they could want and all this flashy stuff. I guess they never grew up learning that all of that fades quicker than you can imagine. Sure money is a great thing, if it’s serving a greater purpose. It’s not wrong to have things, but these things can’t have you. It’s fine to have a girl, have money, have some expensive things, but the second all of those run your life, you are just a hollow man chasing more emptiness.
True comfort comes in the form of family, friends, God, achieving success, doing good for others, and leaving your positive impact. If you make all the money in the world and never use it for a purpose, you’ve wasted all your success. If you’ve been alive for 70 years but never made a difference, you never once lived.
I could go on for hours expressing everything going on in my mind, this is only about 1% of my thought process, I’d love to talk to any of you about everything I am going through and have been through.
I will tell you one thing, if I ever achieve the success I am chasing, I will make the biggest difference possible in the lives of as many people as possible. This wont be a wasted life.
One day we will look back and say this is where it all began.
We’ve all done it. We’ve all been judgmental. We’ve all made the jokes. We’ve all felt “better” than other people because of their misfortunes and their failures. But the truth is that everyone struggles. No one is perfect. It makes me sad that our society feels it necessary to make jokes about the struggles people go through. Some of them have a true sickness. Sex, Drugs, Rock N Roll… it’s been around for years and years and some people can handle the ride, and others wreck. They wreck their lives, they wreck their family’s lives, they hurt their family, they hurt their friends, and they hurt their fans.
That being said… the jokes about Jonny Craig were funny the first time around, but after meeting the guy at Warped and talking to him about things like this, it bums me out to see him going that route again. Some people have serious struggles and rather than making jokes, these people need our support. Everyone is someone’s brother, son, cousin, whatever. You wouldn’t want people talking about your family like that.
Think about making a difference in someone’s life, not making someone’s life the punchline of your jokes. We all fail. We all fall. We are all human.
Tell me what’s sexier than a man with a beard that loves his puppy? COME ON!
Sitting in a Denton coffee shop at 3:30am definitely brings me back to the year and a half I spent living here and going to college. It’s definitely an inspirational thing, in the weirdest of ways. The reason I only spent a year and a half here is because I had to make a decision between doing what everyone else in the world is told to do (going to college and getting a degree) and following my dreams. The decision stressed me out for weeks and as lame as it sounds, it was a Panic! at the Disco song that finally pushed me over the edge to follow my heart.
Back in 2005 when I was still in college, Panic! at the Disco was just releasing their first album and I found myself listening to the words “stop stalling making a name for yourself” over and over and trying to fight what I felt that meant to me. Most people wouldn’t view college as “stalling,” infact, most people would likely look at college as a catalyst to success. You graduate high school, you go to college, you get a degree, you get a job… right? Well I guess in my case I am an exception.
From a very early age I was taught work ethic. If I wanted a CD, a video game, even just lame stuff like candy, I had to earn it. When I was in middle school, I washed cars in my neighborhood, did yardwork for neighbors, and every other thing I could think of to make money. I learned very young that if you want something, you’ve got to earn it. By the time I was in high school, I was dying to get a real job. I started at your typical “waste of time” jobs like Haagen-Daz Ice Cream, Braums, and Hollister. These jobs only made me want to work harder and learn more. Junior year of high school I was the top student in my Computer Aided Drafting class and was promised a PAID internship my senior year of high school. This ruled. Not only did I get to go make $10 an hour sitting on a computer and creating people’s houses, but I got out of school at lunch… SWEET LIFE! But then I was handed a band’s demo.
I guess it’s time to rewind a little bit and explain to you why a band would hand me a demo in the first place. Having to explain this these days seems silly, I’ve probably been handed thousands of CDs since 2004, however, for the sake of properly telling this story, I am going to give you my background. Like I said earlier, my entire life I grew up knowing if I wanted something I had to earn it. My love for music that grew upon moving to Texas was very costly, so I did what any semi-intelligent 16 year old would do: I found out how to get FREE CDs and FREE concert tickets. I started writing for online magazines (webzines much like Absolutepunk.net) and used this as a legit excuse to get these free concert tickets and CDs. By the time I was 18 years old, I had interviewed every band from Fall Out Boy and Brand New to Anti-Flag and MXPX. I actually interviewed Pete Wentz 3 times between 2003 and 2004 just to keep finding out what was new with the band… can you say FAN BOY?!
By the time senior year rolled around and I was 18 years old, word started going around school that I had “connections” in the music industry because of interviewing bands, reviewing CDs, etc. I’m pretty sure a decent amount of girls and band guys became my friends for various reasons including free concert tickets and listening to their demos. I honestly didn’t notice it much because my entire high school experience was mostly spent hanging out with the same 5 or 6 people I still call my best friends to this day. On one random day, my girlfriend at the time Jackie, suggested that I talk to this band I knew called The Perfect Ending (who later became I, The Passenger) about managing their band. Did I REALLY know how to manage a band? Not really… but I was determined to figure it out and get my start. I met with the band, watched them practice, talked to their parents, and we all decided I would help them out. I was just stoked to love something local, so here’s where it all began…
When The Perfect Ending handed me their CD I had no idea that my life was about to change. I had worked on promoting all my best friends’ bands for battles and talent shows and shows at bars, but I never really managed any of them, to be honest, I don’t think my best friends took me too seriously back then, which is fine because they all STILL support me 1000000% to this day. So how did receiving this CD change my life? One of the biggest problems for all-ages bands back in 2004 was… WHERE DO WE PLAY? Seriously… there were very few venues that gave a shit about a band that couldn’t draw people at their bar besides The Door back then. When I was looking for shows for The Perfect Ending I called around and decided I would borrow $500 from one of the band members parents to rent a place called the Plano Centre. I had never done a show before but I knew the cost and knew a free sound guy and I knew we could get a lot of our friends to shows if we did it in the suburbs and not at a shitty Dallas bar.
In early 2004, I booked the Plano Centre, threw some bands on it, enlisted the help of friends and local industry friends that knew me from interviews and such, and put on my first concert. In the middle of all of this I came to the decision that I wanted to switch my major from Architecture to Business and switch schools from Texas Tech to UNT. This decision is why I am where I am today. I decided that I was doing something here with music, I was helping bands, I was giving my friends and other people music in their backyard, and I couldn’t walk away from that, I had to do more shows. My second show was in July 2004 and I decided to go to two stages and make it a mini-festival. I have not stopped since that day.
So if getting that CD from The Perfect Ending changed my career path, college, and goals in life… what does Panic! at the Disco have to do with anything? In the fall of 2005 I was struggling majorly with depression, dealing with living across the apartment complex from an ex-girlfriend that taught me heartbreak for the first time, and the rising success of what would ultimately become Third String Productions and everything that has happened since then. The pressure of making my shows bigger and better each month and the pressure of passing my classes was not a good combination. All of this mixed with the normal things that you deal with in college was becoming too much to juggle. I was also helping grow a company called Buzz Oven and had recently been interviewed for a cover story called “The MySpace Generation” by Business Week. Things seemed right for change and with the words “stop stalling make a name for yourself” repeating 24/7 in my head and being surrounded by the right group of people that could help take Third String Productions to the next level, I told my parents I was dropping out of college or “taking time off” as I called it then, and was going to focus 100% on Third String Productions. Lucky for me, they were supportive but made it clear if I did this I was on my own for as long as I wasn’t in college. I had to pay rent, car payments, insurance, everything.
I was taking the biggest chance of my life.
It is now 2011, I have been putting on concerts for almost 8 years now. I have started and run two clothing companies, multiple booking agencies, managed dozens of bands, put on hundreds of shows, started a social media marketing company that has worked with dozens of brands including On The Border, Live Nation, and more, and to be honest… I still don’t know EXACTLY what I want to do with my life, I just know it involves music and changing the world… making a difference.
Every time I step outside of my day to day routine my mind races. Staying up all night at a coffee shop with a laptop is the most dangerous thing I can do. I can wake up a concert promoter and go to bed wanting to be a doctor… that’s just how my brain works. Lucky for everyone that follows and supports me, I can honestly tell you I will NEVER stop working with music. I will always listen to your band’s demo, I will always offer up advice, I will always take risks, and I will always reach my goals. I am driven by far more than what could hold me back and the fact that I can wake up every day and love my life because I feel so blessed to do what I am doing, is reason enough to smile.
All of that being said (if you have even read this far)… there are a lot of changes going on. There are a lot of reasons it is now 4am and I am jacked up on my third coffee of the night sitting next to my best friend Chase and working the night away. A lot is changing. We are evolving, we are growing, we are expanding, we are changing. EVERYTHING I do has a reason and a purpose behind it. The stage I stand on that all of you gave me will be used for more good than you can imagine. We are going to change the world and that’s not just talk. It starts with our community and it will spread like wildfire. Life is too short to not leave your mark while you can. If what you are doing is not what you love, don’t do it. If what you are doing is not POSITIVELY helping the world around you, don’t do it. The world will not stop changing, technology will not stop evolving, we have to adapt to change and turn it into fuel for positive growth as humans.
I am blessed to be where I am today, I could have never done it alone and I will never pretend that I have done it alone. Things are changing, it’s time to grow up and it’s time to make a bigger impact. I got the fire under me to quit school and make something of myself, now I have the fire to make something even better out of myself. I hope you will all continue following this journey and be a part of it. We will never turn down help from someone with passion and drive that wants to do this for the right reason.
I will leave you with my favorite Steve Jobs quote that I ask myself everyday “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do, what I’m about to do, today?”
Just think about it.
