It’s interesting to blog every week and not know if anyone is actually reading them. Haha, I guess I’m just writing to satisfy my own desire to write, so it doesn’t really matter… although it would be nice to see a comment from someone on the bottom of one of my blog postings Anyway, on to an update, what’s new in the world of Living Illusion you ask? Well here it is:

We’ve finished writing all but the last few songs for the new album (’bout time if you ask me) which means the whole writing process should be wrapped up within the next month or so. From there we will start rehearsing and re-working the songs we have been writing for the past year to get them ready for the high end recording studio and for playing live this summer. The plan is to do a western Canada tour this summer/fall whether the new album is released or not.

It will be a much needed change for us to get out there and play live again, being stuck in a room writing every week is taking its toll and it’s time we hit the stage. Based on the many requests we’ve had to come out and play we intend on hitting up lots of places from BC all the way to Manitoba. If you have any where that you want us to come play drop me and email and I will try my best to get the band there.

In other news, Jason is gone to Mexico for a week, and then next week I’m going to California for 5 days. Other than that, I got a new Black Berry, took the Guitar in to get Setup for D Standard Tuning (Drop C), and all of my expensive gear is still sitting in the closet collecting dust you know, the usual. Haha.

And with that, I’m done, have a good weekend.

Shane Lamotte
shane@livingillusion.com
http://www.livingillusion.com/wordpress/

Like the title says, it’s back to the drawing board… not that we haven’t been there for a good part of the last year, but after receiving the much awaited feedback from our producer friends it has become quite clear what the next step in the evolution with our music will be. The comments we received were great, with a majority of the suggestions being things we had already known about. These were things that we had intended on tackling in the next phase of the recording process; although, as we have been informed, this is not the case, and we need to work on these things now.

So where does this leave us? It’s simple: keep writing and recording, but in a new way. The plan from this point out is to basically take all of the feedback we have received and re-work a group of songs to reflect it, all the while continuing to record new ideas and working directly with Terry Tran through the writing process. I’m not going to bore you and go into the details of all the ideas and suggestions, but I will say that getting these songs up to snuff is going to take a lot of hard work, time and energy… all of which will benefit our music greatly.

And that’s about it for this week in LI. Not a lot happened, although we did check out a Cold Driven concert (which I think I might write a review for later this week). As always Jay and I are getting together multiple times a week to work on new material and we will keep at it until the album is done and we are ready to hit the road again for a tour.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day,
Cheers!

Shane Lamotte
shane@livingillusion.com
http://www.livingillusion.com/wordpress/

I’ve decided that I am going to start doing weekly Living Illusion updates. This of course is assuming that there is something to be kept up to date on, but essentially, any time there is something to talk about that relates to the band, I’m going to write a blog post for it (Let’s see how long I can keep it up for, I’m hoping permanently). So what’s new this week in LI…

Well, Jay and I finished writing another track last weekend (guitars, bass and drums) and we will hopefully finish the vocals this week. There isn’t really a title for the song… come to think of it; most of the songs we work on don’t have a name, other than the date they were recorded on (i.e. Dec 3-07). Although we do give them a name once we’ve added Lyrics and Vocals. Anyway… the song is currently named Time Shift… for now.

Also, something that’s kind of interesting is the fact that over 1 million people in the last week have heard a 10 second intro song that we did. This of course is because Phillip Defranco at www.PhillyD.tv has decided to use our cover of his theme song on all of his new video posts. It’s really strange how the universe works, I can’t get 10,000 people to come to www.LivingIllusion.com and listen to our songs, but we can make a Cover of a YouTube video intro theme song and get millions of people listening. Totally crazy, but totally cool in my opinion.

Special thanks to Phil for doing that for us. He even left a little quote on his YouTube video for us: “Thanks to Living Illusion for reworking my intro song. It rocks, love you guys.” – Phillip Defranco – www.PhillyD.tv – The Phillip Defranco Show. (Sweeeeeet) [Here’s the video from the first time Phil used our Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zehcxuh3jrM)

Terry and Real, our producers/programmers/engineers for the upcoming album, are getting together this week to listen over our first batch of songs (they were supposed to meet last week but it got postponed), so we’re still waiting to hear back from them with their thoughts and recommendations. It will be cool to see where they can take the songs, and it will be refreshing to get some new perspectives. I can’t wait!

Beyond that there isn’t a whole lot else that is going on, other than the fact that later this week I’m going to go hang out with the boys from Cold Driven at their show in Edmonton on Thursday Mar 13th, 2008 at the Urban Lounge. Feel free to come on down and rock out.

And with that, I’m spent.

Shane Lamotte
shane@livingillusion.com
www.livingillusion.com

Alright, well I have been trying to do a redesign on the whole Living Illusion site but have decided to hold off on that until the new album is released. It would be stupid on my part to design the new site with out keeping the album artwork for our next album in mind… and since there is currently no album art, starting on the website would be a waste of time. So here we are at the new blog website I have created for the band.

Why have I made a Blog website for the band? Well the plan is to integrate a proper blog site and the band website together, but like I said above that has to wait until the new album is closer to being released sometime this summer. In the mean time I realized how much easier it would be to post updates etc for the band if we had a blog site, so low and behold here it is. Yah it may not be as fancy as I like, but it does the trick and it also allows me to RSS feed my blogs to other sources (Facebook, Myspace, etc).

And with that I wonder if there is really anything I can say about the band. Basically, our two producer friends are getting together tonight to go through ten of our best tracks and give us the run down, as in, they pick the best of the best to record high end style. If they choose all 10 then awesome, if they choose 5 then great, if they say go back to the drawing board, well then that may be a problem, LOL.

I’ll keep you all posted. As always, keep smilling!

Shane Lamotte
shane@livingillusion.com

Seeing as it has been over four months since the last update I figured it was high time I got my act in gear and posted some news. So where are things at you ask? After a mini-hiatus from writing and recording we’ve finally gotten back on schedule working on the next LI album. The break wasn’t really by choice, with our old recording studio temporarily shutting down and all, but we have been doing our best to keep things moving forward none the less.

As opposed to just sitting around and waiting to find another studio for us to write and record at we decided to be pro-active and buy our own recording gear. For the last couple months we have been saving money, paying back debts, and building our own studio. Which happily I can say, we just finished last month. God damn is it nice to no longer have book time or wait to get in, we can now record whenever we want, 24/7. Even though we’ve only had it up and running for a couple weeks, we have already recorded a handful of new songs.

The whole thing cost over three grand and is worth every penny. The rig consists of an mBox 2, Line 6 POD, M-Audio Midi Controller, BX5A Monitors, Intel Core 2 Quad (1 Terabyte of HD Space), 20in LCD Monitor, and a PreSonus FP10 aka FirePOD. The software that we are running is ProTools LE and Cubase 4, both with BFD. The computer is amazingly fast. Special thanks to Terri Tran and Real Cardinal for all there help pulling it together, you guys rock!

So there you have it, that’s what we have been up to; building a Studio of our own. Now that that is done and over with we can finally get back to working on the new album, the plan is to release the album some time this year followed by a tour of Western Canada.

Shane Lamotte
Living Illusion
shane@livingillusion.com

I figure it’s been far to long since an update on Living Illusion so here it is. Things have slowed down quite a bit with the live show and recording aspects of the band since the summer… and because of this, I’ve decided to buy my own studio in order to get things moving forward in full force again. The recording gear will not only help move things along quickly but it will also give us the convenience of recording new music on whatever, whenever we please.

In addition, I will be posting video blogs to track the progress of recording and share thoughts on the process. I think it will be good to have constant video content posted, other than just text and audio. The video bloging is just one of the many future additions to the website which also include a possible sleek re-design.

With all that said, we’re still in the process of finishing the second album. Things are going… slowly… but it will be awesome to finish. For the production of the album we hope we will be working with Terry Tran and Real Cardinal (Search them on Myspace if you’re interested to see who they are and who they have worked).

For some thing new and exciting, you can check out our You Tube page http://www.youtube.com/livingillusion and watch 5 new videos, including a backstage look at the Econoline Crush show.

So leave a comment, send me an email shane@livingillusion.com and just plain keep in touch.

Hope all is well in your neck of the woods.

Thanks for the support!

Shane Lamotte
shane@livingillusion.com
http://www.livingillusion.com/wordpress/

I can’t beleive that this year has gone by so fast, it’s already half way through July and the summer is in full swing. How’s your 2007 been going? Anything new and exciting? I think to the outside world it seems like this year has been going a lot slower for the band than usual, but I assure you that is not the case.

After the many email requests in the last couple weeks for an update on what’s been going on with Living Illusion, I figured it was time to sit down and write. So, here I go. Initially about a year ago I wanted to have our 2nd album done by the end of May 2007… Well, that didn’t happen. Wishful thinking more than any thing else I guess.

Now it’s July, and essentially here’s where everything stands: We have currently written and recorded rough cuts for 15 new songs. Of these 15 we will be picking 10 tracks that will make it to the final cut. The songs for the final cut will all be Re-Recorded & Produced to ensure we get the sound quailty we’re looking for.

At this point, our CD Release Date is going to be some where in the Fall/Winter 2007 (so note going to happen). Once we get the CD done, we’re going to be getting some music videos together along with a Western Canada tour to get the new music out there. Hopefully we’ll be in your area so you can come and check us out.

As we have been working on the new album non stop we haven’t really gotten out to play many live shows this year. With that said we do have a couple shows that we will be playing August long weekend.

The shows that we have booked are as follows:

On Friday August 3rd we will be playing in St Paul AB. We’re going back to one of our favorite small albertan towns to play at The Loft. These guys know how to party and we always have a great time.

On Saturday August 4th we will be playing in Edson AB at, and I quote, “the largest permanent beer garden structure we know to exist anywhere”. We’re going to be playing for over 272 Baseball teams with roughly 20 players a team (you do the math). It’s gonna be one of our biggest and best shows to date. We’re the only live entertainment for the night and the show is open to any one old enough to get into the Beer Gardens.

Feel free to come on out and rock with us.

And as always drop me a line any time, keep in touch, and I hope your having a great summer (or winter if you live in Australia).

Shane Lamotte
shane@livingillusion.com

I just got off the phone with a concert promoter in Edmonton and it is official, Living Illusion is going to be opening for Econoline Crush. The show will be at the Starlite Room in Edmonton, Alberta on April 16th, 2007. I can’t even begin to explain how excited I am for this show; it’s going to be awesome!

For those of you who don’t know, Econoline Crush is an industrial alternative rock band from Vancouver, Canada formed in 1992. They have a Gold Record and are most known for their singles “Make It Right”, “All That You Are” & “You Don’t Know What Its Like”. They were also featured on the Much Music compilation album Big Shiny Tunes.

So with that said, if you live in or around Edmonton, Alberta I would suggest you make your way out and come see this show, hell if you don’t live in or around Edmonton I suggest you come out to this show, it’s going to rock! You’ll get to hear some new Living Illusion tunes and rock out to some of Canada’s best bands.

Econoline Crush with Living Illusion at the Starlite Room in Edmonton, Alberta on April 16th, 2007. Call Ticket Master for tickets: 780-451-8000.

Now that that’s out of the way, in other news, so far we have completed tracking roughly 10 tracks for our upcoming album, another 3 – 4 tracks and we will be finished pre-production. After that we’ll be kicking things into double time and using all of the best equipment available to re-record all the songs and get an amazing high-end sound. This next album is going to be amazing.

That’s all for now, but hey, don’t be a stranger! Drop me an email some time and say hi. I respond to all my emails and enjoy connecting with people.

Sincerely,

Shane Lamotte
shane@livingillusion.com

Watch the interview here:
http://www.citytv.com/edmonton/yourcity_40717.aspx

It feels like just yesterday it was the beginning of the New Year, hard to believe that we’re already a month and a half into 2007. None the less, the band has been hard at it in the studio recording new material and getting ready for the release of our 2nd album coming out this summer. With over 9 new songs recorded and bunch more on the way, this year is turning out to be very gratifying and successful even though we havent been out touring.

Synchronicity also happens to be on our side this year and it’s already showing up in the form of a Television interview with Edmonton’s CityTV (a CHUM Network). Because of our efforts over the last few years we have been fortunate enough to catch the eye of a local broadcaster whom decided to do a piece on us and on what it takes to be an independent band trying to cut and album and make it in the music industry.

The interview took place at our recording studio in Edmonton and gives a great look at the ‘behind the scenes’, from the challenges and difficulties to the time spent getting all the pieces together. The segment will be awesome and will also show a sneak peek at some of our new material that’s in the works.

The story is going to be running on Thursday, February 15th 2007, on Edmontons CityTV at 6:30PM during the “yourCity” show.

Also, as a side note, if you dont get CityTV in your area I will be posting the interview on the Living Illusion website in the following weeks to come.

And add yourself as a friend to our myspace page at:
http://www.myspace.com/livingillusion

Keep on Rockin!

Sincerely,

Shane Lamotte
shane@livingillusion.com

As the year of 2006 is slowly coming to an end I figured, why not reminisce a little about the last 365 days and maybe even give you a little early holiday present, Living Illusion style

In the last year, we played over 24 shows, spanning across 1500 kilometers, meeting tons of other bands and getting to know some great fans. Our first album (self-titled) received independent radio airplay across Canada and even made it to the top of some of the hard rock charts. It has been an amazing time for the band and we wouldn’t change it for the world.

With that said, I have got a present for you! Last week after a writing/recording session the band and I decided it was time to go through all of our concert footage and find some really good live videos to post on the site. We went through about 6 hours of footage and found our favorite segments to share. I know that some of you have never had an opportunity to see us play live, so hopefully these will help you share in the experience of being there.

Press below to check out the footage now:
http://www.youtube.com/livingillusion

Also, as a side note, in the following weeks we will be hitting the studio to get moving on pre-production for our next album. The majority of it has already been written and now it’s time to start recording. It’s very exciting to be getting back into the studio to cut a 2nd album!

Be sure to check out the new videos and drop me an email to tell me what you think. Thanks again for all the support.

Keep on Rockin!

Shane Lamotte
shane@livingillusion.com