Jake Ewald of Modern Baseball Debuts New Solo Song

Slaughter Beach Dog

Jake Ewald of Modern Baseball has released a new song called “Building the Ark” under the moniker Slaughter Beach, Dog. You can stream that below. He also talked with Fader about the future of Modern Baseball and his upcoming EP Motorcycle.jpg:

We had a talk a few months before it happened — I don’t know if we’ve told anyone this. We all sat down and said, “We’re getting really tired. This is kind of crazy. We should slow down soon.” And then we did that European tour where we announced at the last-minute that [co-frontman Brendan Lukens] wasn’t going to come. When we made the decision to slow down, we already had a lot of tours booked. We were like, oh yeah we can make it through all of this, we’ll be fine. But then as we started to be confronted with those tours we realized we didn’t know if we were going to be able to go through with all of them. We were so burnt out, and ready to be done with it for a little while.

Read More “Jake Ewald of Modern Baseball Debuts New Solo Song”

Modern Baseball Are Taking a Break, Cancel Tour

Modern Baseball

Modern Baseball have canceled all their upcoming tour dates and are taking a break from the band for a while:

Hey everybody, Jake here. As much as it pains me to say this, we have decided to cancel our upcoming U.S. tour dates and festival appearances to take a break from Modern Baseball for a little while. If you already bought tickets for the tour, refunds will be available at point of purchase.

Over the past few months the band has become an immense source of anxiety for me, and it wasn’t until I opened up to Sean, Ian, and Brendan about it that we realized we were all feeling the same way. The project we started as a source of joy and positive expression had become something that was slowly eating away at our mental health and our friendships. We have been championing the importance of mental health for a while now, and we recently realized that it would be wrong for us to ignore our own health any longer. Please know that we don’t take a tour cancellation lightly, and under any other circumstances we would not even consider it an option, but in this instance we have to put our health and friendships first. You’ve supported us unconditionally throughout this crazy ride and we could never thank you enough. We never really learned how to do this whole “rock band” thing the right way, but you kept coming to the shows and talking to us and assuring us that we’d figure it out sooner or later. We could not have done any of this without you. Be honest with those you love and don’t be afraid to lean on them when you need to. Odds are they’ll need to lean on you pretty soon too.

The Modern Baseball Movement

Modern Baseball

David Anthony, writing for The A.V. Club, about Modern Baseball:

“We would hear horror stories from fans,” said Lukens. “The easier ones would be like, ‘I got kicked in the face.’ Then there’s the more intense ones like, ‘I put my drink down and now I’m feeling odd,’ or, ‘I was crowdsurfing and guys pulled me down and started groping me.’ We realized that it was as much on us, as it is on everyone else, to make everyone safe and make sure all these venues are safe and accommodating.” These new policies have not only added more work for Lukens and Holt, but they’ve led each member of the band to look inward and find ways to become better allies to the non-white, non-male people at their shows.

This is a really fascinating article, even for someone that’s admittedly not a huge fan of the band. Not sure what’s going on with the typography choices for links though.