Hello, MD readers! Well, a lot has happened since the last time I had a chance to check in. It all began when I left my home in Boston, Massachusetts on August 2. I flew into Regina, Saskatchewan (Canada, for those of you who have never heard of it) for what was a week of rehearsals before we drove to the East Coast and began the Canadian Summer Slaughter tour. This was a festival tour, headlined by Necrophagist. Those guys are amazing, I can’t say enough good things about that band.

We had a blast on the Summer Slaughter tour. But before we met up for it we made a pit stop in Montreal to film a music video for our first single off The Incurable Tragedy, “Time Immemorial.” It should be released in the next couple weeks. After the Canadian run we entered the US for a handful of headlining shows down the West Coast. After this we began a thirty-two-hour drive from San Diego back to Regina because we had about ten days off before we were to meet up with Iced Earth in Detroit and do a full US tour with them. Everything was going as planned until we got news from our band leader, Tim Roth, that he wasn’t going to be able to do the Iced Earth tour. After frantically scrambling around and exhausting every possible option, the band decided it would be best to honor our commitments and fly in a replacement guitarist, Sean Maier, who the label hooked us up with. None of us had ever met him before.

We had only five days before we were supposed to be in Detroit. It was impossible to get Sean into Canada to rehearse with us before we left, so we ended up driving to Minnesota and picking him up at the airport the day before a headlining show. Justin (our rhythm guitarist) spent the whole night and next morning with Sean rehearsing parts for the big gig. Advertisement

The band was extremely nervous at this point. We’d never played without Tim before, and here we were relying on this guy to be able to walk on stage without ever having played with us. Well, needless to say we did it, and it worked. It was unbelievable, and we now knew we could definitely get through the tour. So we met up with Iced Earth and ripped it up with them for two weeks before we went off and did two weeks of our own headlining dates, only to meet back up with Iced Earth for another two weeks and do the rest of the country. We even had a quick stop in Monterrey, Mexico, to play one show and then fly directly to Colorado, where we could meet back up with our bus. That was an exhausting trip–but awesome and worth every minute of it.

Now the tours are over for a little while, so I’m getting ready to go home and begin teaching again. I can’t wait. Any interested students in the Boston area should contact me through the Into Eternity myspace page.

I recently filmed some drum videos of me playing along to a couple of tracks off our new album. You can check those out here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z–j-gOuTng and www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHKTo9rXH0I or by searching Steve Bolognese Drum Video (FUNERAL HYMN…) or Steve Bolognese Drum Video (TIME IMMEMORIAL). Advertisement

Until next time, keep the sheds alive!

Steve

For more on Steve Bolognese, go to www.myspace.com/officialintoeternity.