…And Here We Are Again!0

Wow! Here it is! My first new official website in three years! It feels like it’s been an eternity since the last one I put up back in the fall of 2007. A site that was, to put it mildly, overly bogged down what what I thought – at the time – was a marvelous little stylized Flash front end. Thanks to that setup, I didn’t really do much updating to that particular design (hardly even any news save for a music release or two), spending most of my time on Facebook, ReverbNation and, as of late, Twitter.

Strange that I went three years without updating that format. If you think about it, the extent to which I updated that site mirrors quite closely how active I was in music during that period of time – particularly when you factor in that I was until then updating my website’s look nearly every year! That was, as it turns out, not just because of my incessant need to always be working on something creative, but because I was releasing new material almost every year since 2001. Here we are, almost six years after my last full album (not counting its remastering and re-release last year) and I haven’t really said or done much.

Sure, I released a single and a b-side last year, called “The Patient” – along with its accompanying video – and as you can see I’m about to release another 4-song EP later this Fall, but for someone who was throwing out new material on a semi-annual basis up until 2005, it’s actually rather staggering to see how little I’ve done.

That’s not for lack of trying, however. If you’ve been following along for the past 5 years you’ll already be familiar with the fact that I had a recording contract throughout 2007 to 2008 that never amounted to anything, and I’ve started my own record label and production company – Joint Custody Productions – with my soon-to-be wife Emily Steele. This all after moving to Nashville from Northern New York in 2006.

With the determination to do it all on your own, you find yourself often-times swamped with work, taking steps back – almost more often at first than you take just the littlest baby steps forward – and before you know it you’ve actually committed yourself to several projects, with the intention to add much more soon thereafter! Throw a wedding that you’ve been planning for the better part of a year in there, along with a typical 40-hour-a-week job, and trust me, your head will spin!

And that’s why – for the most part – I wanted to completely overhaul this website. The previous one focused more or less just on my music. In three years, I’ve grown beyond that. In some ways I actually deal with concerns every day that I might be past music entirely and on to other things. Of course… that all changes the next day when I get a song idea, or see our friends The Tokyo Pop Stars fly through a blistering set of original tunes (pinging my jealousy radar), or hearing my friend and drummer Andrew Brown talk about the next band he’s going to go see live, or hear new material from The Killers or The Arcade Fire. Perhaps the music will never be out of me – it just won’t always be coming out of me and into your ears as quickly as it used to.

Fear not – I still have dreams of starting a band and I do still have many tunes waiting in the wings for recording and releasing over the next year or two, (with some music videos thrown in), but I have other things on my agenda as well. You know… those projects that seem to have attached themselves to me in the years since my last website format went up.

For starters, I am currently part of a comedy troupe here in Nashville with Emily Steele and Tim Todd – a joint partnership between our company and his Red Parasol Entertainment – called Common Sense for Dummys. We did some live shows last year, and have been working on filming our short sketch-comedy pilot for YouTube and local TV release next year, developing lots of material and throwing some behind-the-scenes Excess and Audio Podcasts in for good measure! I never thought the acting bug would hit me, but I enjoy it! I enjoy even more immensely watching my writing come to life through the work of other actors as well.

Speaking of writing, that brings to mind two more projects. The first is called Gracie Sez Hai – a podcast that features the spirit of a dead cat leaving voicemail messages for her former Owner which detail her afterlife misadventures, ultimately (some would say “inadvertently”) poking fun at pop culture, politics and just about anything else I can think of to lampoon. It sounds extremely weird… and in truth it actually very much is! But the opportunity to play around with words, thoughts, jokes, and to just tell weird stories through the voice of a cat (yes… I do all the voices at this time) has been, oddly enough, an absolute blast!

The other writing project I’m working on is a science fiction epic entitled Dreadwind. I can’t say much about where it’s going or what it’s about right now, but at this time I’m writing it as a screenplay… either in the format of a television pilot or a feature film. I haven’t determined what yet. I have other “television format” concepts I’m working on as well.

And those are just a few of the things I’m currently working on. I have a lot more – including attempting to get a business up and running – up my sleeve, but I’m going to wait on detailing them until I either have something more concrete, or the excitement from the wedding dies down (which should be by the end of October, in theory).

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you keep on doing so! Please be sure to keep up with things in the Ender Bowen Universe by checking out the ReverbNation and Facebook sites, joining the mail list (via the sign-up box below to the right) and generally just dropping in to say “hi”! I’ll be working my butt off trying to do the same!

Take Care!

Ender Bowen