So it has been about six months since dirty tactics has done any touring or played any shows. This has been the longest time we've taken off in the past three years. A lot of that was just based on the reality of a lot of things. We had run ourselves into the ground touring enough months out of the year that we could barely afford to keep our lives going at home. I suppose that is the archetype of any full time touring band, but with Jeff throwing in the towel on that kind of lifestyle, we found ourselves in the middle of an eight week summer tour, broken down yet again, in debt, and just plain over it. needless to say, that tour ended pretty ugly and we sat in our respective houses after that wondering how we were going to make it to Florida to play the fest with no drummer and no money. Luckily, after that tour, I had moved into a new house, which since then has been coined titan house. we started to have shows in the basement. a few blocks away, later that summer, our friends the Menzingers moved in. a few blocks over as well, is our buddy Keith, who played drums in Bigwig. the combination of such factors started to build a clique around south Philly and we were lucky enough to have Keith fill in for us at the fest and borrow a van from his job to get down there and back.

So here we are now, six months later, with a whole batch of songs about the past couple years. a lot, if not all, of the songs deal with that "grey area" we've been in and dealing with being stuck in it for so long. not sure what will happen with the record yet. We don't have enough money to put it out/mix it, but we wanted to share the songs as they are being finished with anyone who would like to listen. I'm sure it will see the light of day. We will be posting a rough mix of a song with every dispatch we do, so here's the first of them.

"Baltimore" is a song I wrote almost two years ago now and it describes a situation I found myself in. I had just come back from tour and only had a little over two weeks off before we left for the rest of the summer to go on tour with Cobra Skulls. at the time, I had been doing medical studies whenever I was home to make enough money to keep going. this particular study was in Baltimore and lasted 14 days. during that time, I had been back and forth on the phone with an ex-girlfriend from that area and between the studies and touring, it was just impossible to be anywhere for an extended period of time. so I guess this song deals with that as well as the guilt of being in there, not having the guts to tell her i was in there, and eventually going out of my way to see her the day I had to leave and realizing it was just never going to work, even though it might have, if I wasn't in a band and didn't need to money so bad.

Download "Baltimore" here.