this was a bulletin.

I guess a blog wasn't good enough, and no one still really knows what's going on. And I'm going to type this out and try not to be as dramatic as possible, but seeing as the situation is rather dramatic, I might as well be dramatic.

If you're to talk to us about what happened, you're going to get four different stories based on whomever you chose to talk to.

Here's what happened, really.

June 5th, a Friday, about a week ago, I went over to my good friend Garret's house to write a song. Start a side project. It was going to be nothing more, ships was going to keep happening because it's something that I love(d), everyone else in the band loved, it was our lives for the past year. I had no intention of going there and making this my new priority in music, and we were just going to do it on the side. Just garret and I. No one else. Honest.

That same night, two of our members (guess which ones) decided to get wasted with some friends. This doesn't matter, at all. Really, it's not a big deal in the vast scheme of things. But if you've been following this band at all the past year, you know that we're not about that. Our songs are about not doing that, losing our friends to it, because I mean..it may not be a big deal at all. But to us, it sort of was. It was something that we as a band decided we weren't going to do. All of our friends that were our friends a year ago started doing it all the time, and we all stopped hanging out. Shit happens. We moved on, wrote songs about it, that was Merchant Ships.

Jack and I both felt like we couldn't keep playing songs about not doing that stuff if half the band was going to anyways. That would make our songs hypocritical and stupid and just not worth the time.

Now, it may seem like the reason we broke up is because of them drinking, it's not.

The song Garret and I wrote was much, much better than anything Merchant Ships had ever done..than we could ever do, as a band. It excited me, and all I wanted to do anymore was that band. When I found out about what they did, and that ships was basically pointless to keep playing the same songs, all I thought about was how badly I wanted to do the other band.

In no way do I want to make Jack out to look like a douchebag. To keep things short and impersonal, he's been through a lot with alcohol. From losing best friends to it, and losing his family to it, it's a bigger deal to him than to us, I guess. So ships was basically dead in his eyes as well. I told him about the song Garret and I wrote and that I wanted him to sing on it, be a part of the project because, honestly, ships just couldn't happen anymore.

We had our first practice a week ago, last Tuesday, and everything was so much tighter, together, than Ships ever was. Garret is such an amazing drummer, so much different than anything Jack and I had ever been involved with together, and they flowed so nicely with everything I was doing on guitar. Merchant Ships seemed pointless, yet again.

SO.
Last Friday, before our show that we were supposed to play in Vevay, Indiana, we had a practice. And both Dwayne and Michael couldn't remember their parts. and I'm not saying that to make them out to be bad musicians, cause really, Michael is my best friend and an amazing guitarist, really. It's just that, when you're in a band, and you say that it's all you care about, and that it's what you want to do, you'd just assume that you'd know how to play your parts, despite whether or not it's been two weeks since you've practiced last or two days. You remember it. It was stressful sitting down there listening to the noise that was coming out of the basement, I'm not going to lie. and neither Jack or I wanted to drive five hours south to be embarrassed in front of a bunch of people. So we told them at the end of the practice that Merchant Ships was ending and we started a new band.

The reason we'd waited so long to tell them wasn't because we're assholes and wanted to keep secrets. It's because we didn't want them to get mad and lose our best friends in the whole world. We didn't want what ended up happening to happen.

We're all really bummed about it. Seriously. And we didn't want it to be that way, but us moving on is the best thing for us. Michael has joined the Exploration with our friend Kyle Wayne, and Jack and I are doing Midwest Pen Pals with Garret. and they're both better bands than ships ever was, musically. Now, that may just be an opinion, but if you listen to both, I'm sure you'll agree.

Now, I'm typing all of this out, because I wanted everyone to know about what's happening. We didn't do this to "fuck over our friends" or anything like that. If anything, we feel fucked over that what happened happened and that this had to end. In the end, we're all fucked over.

It's not even about the drinking. Really, it's not. Don't think that we broke up because of that, because that would be a stupid reason to end a band. It contributed to it, but really, it's because of what we can be producing, and weren't. If you're our friend, or fan, you'll understand this. You'll understand that we want to be putting out the best music we possibly can, and with Merchant Ships, that just wasn't happening.

We love Dwayne. We love Michael. Michael has been really cool this past weekend, but it seems Dwayne has been going around making everyone feel sorry for him. This isn't Dwayne's fault that we broke up. It's not our fault. We're trying to be his friend and he just keeps pushing us away, making it impossible. We want to hang out with him, we want things to be ok. But he refuses to let it be that way. And from what I've heard and have seen on myspace, he's been making it seem like we just fucked him over and didn't care at all.

So before you go saying that we fucked over our friends, that we don't care, that we're just being assholes because we wanted to be in a better band, know what you're talking about. We want to all be friends. But in the end, Merchant Ships can't work out because of what happened. But friendships can.

So I guess on a final note, anyone who refuses to support us with what we're doing now because of this situation, or thinks that we're fucking Dwayne and Michael over, or that we're trying to fuck anyone else over, don't bother listening to us. You weren't ever our friends in the first place if you can't be our friends now. You don't know how we feel, or what's going on, even with all of that that I just took the time to type out. Our "best friends/best friend bands" are being assholes because of this, and I just wanted to let everyone know the truth.

That we were fucked over.
We started a new band.
It was better.
It only makes logical sense to pursue the better band.
If you can't understand that, then I'm sorry.

Merchant Ships was fun. We had a good time. But it's time to move on, and we PROMISE that everything we put out from now on will be better than what we could have, had we kept going with ships.

Music up soon for our new bands.
We love you.

Cabana house on Friday. we'll all be there hanging out, hopefully getting along.

Love always,
Nick/Merchant Ships

we're conceiving children faster than we're dying, it's a time of good feeling

but i have the FEELING it's all about to change.

the wind is blowing, smoke is rising,

tomahawk tomahawk tomahawk

shows

daac sucked. cabana ruled. we have more coming up that hopefully will be cool. we're gonna write some more starting tomorrow, cause we want to release a full length at the end of fall/beginning of winter.

Also,
everything we've released is on our myspace blog, and you can find the entire bummer times demo on myspace + last.fm so, check that out i guess, if you don't wanna just download it.

oh man. sorry about the delay. bummer times is go. we're writing a full length.

maybe we should get a tumblr?

nah.

we stole a make me part.

remember that time you did it with that one girl in the subway station?

I have no idea how anyone else feels about this, but I'm really nervous.
I'm anxious and I have no idea what anyone is going to think of what we've been writing. I mean, hopefully people will like it and stuff, you know? But whenever you try progressing in a band to make your sound better you never know if it's gotten better or worse and how people are going to take it. We've been working really hard on these three new songs, trying to make them better than what we've released before, but trying to keep the same style of music and, like, it's hard. I don't know. I didn't want to turn this post into me rambling about how I feel about the new songs so I'm not going to, just keep in mind that they'll be on our myspace on May 9th, which is our first show back in Grand Rapids, and if you can make it out that'd be cool. Also I've never posted on anything like this so I hope I did it right. Don't want my creds in the scene to go down the drain, amirite. -_-


-nick

uhmmm

lol? www.myspace.com/warrioroftenderness


ps. "good beans, julie" is going to rule.

snowing finally put some kind of music up.

fucking A!

i hope thai food is good, i'm getting some tonight.