Where have I been?

It has been a good while since I have updated this site (or any of my other sites for that matter).  I have been laying low throughout the fall, playing a few shows in town, working on some new material and trying to figure out how I would like to present this project in the future.  I began writing and playing out with these songs in April of 2009, it beginning as something to do while Mild Winter was taking a break.  Since then Mild Winter has pretty much stayed on break, only playing from time to time, so I continued to write new songs under my own name (which isn’t a very good stage name, since Schlabach isn’t the easiest to pronounce or remember).  I have enjoyed traveling and playing shows with my good friend John Hostetter, we got stuck in two blizzards and did a summer tour during a heatwave.  I am really proud of the two EPs that I recorded with John, Jason Summer and my wife, Melanie.  During this past fall I realized that I wanted this project to take a new shape, that the songs I have been writing need something more to be presented at their best.   After discussing it with Jason, who has played pedal steel with me at most of my Harrisonburg shows for the past year, we decided to ask Nicklaus Combs to play drums with us.  Nicklaus and I have been friends for a long time. We have been in multiple bands together including: Mild Winter, Highways and Oceanshores, The Cobras and a number of others that aren’t worth bringing up so I am really excited to have Nik joining Jason and I! We have been hard at work learning songs and getting ready to play shows this winter.  We still have a fair amount of back catalog and new songs to learn, but cut us some slack we are practicing in an unheated warehouse and it has been too cold to practice more than an hour at a time. 
That long update to basically say that we are working on revamping the system. We are going to be louder, we are going to be playing shows, writing new songs and recording new music as soon as we are ready.  We will likely come up with a name that isn’t “Ben Schlabach” but it will likely be just as hard to remember and pronounce as “Schlabach” so no one will really notice the difference. 
Our first show as a full band (minus a bass player, that is still TBA) is at the Blue Nile Thursday December 16th, followed by my mothers Birthday on the 17th, and then we will be traveling to Roanoke on Saturday the 18th for a show at the Bazaar.  If you are around Harrisonburg or Roanoke come by and say hello, we would love to see all our friends!