Sunset // ARIZONA from Young Francis on Vimeo.

The embedded video on The Printed Blog is the premiere of a new format, and of an Arizona song never before heard, performed on a rooftop in San Francisco, mixed with a clip of our show at Slim’s that night.  What follows is the story of how the vonderful vurld of bwogs inspired this performance….

Do you know what “bwog” stands for? Be With Our Greatness. It is an invitation to join in the greatness of one’s personal enterprise or opinion. Many people have bwogs today, and some grow from wittle bwogs into gweat big bwogs. Bwogs shape the way news is disseminated, and often times, bwogs that cover music can make or break a young band’s career.

Arizona is one such young band. Even though our career really comes from our ability to make interesting music and stay together without comitting murder or suicide within the band, in this day and age, we will sink or swim without the support of bwoggers who find something special in either an mp3 or live show that said bwogger might happen upon. Most wecently, we had the great opportunity to headline a night a POPAsheville, a festival in Asheville North Carolina that endeavors to provide an alternative to the “soulless orgy”* of other well known regional-themed festivals. POPA is an orgy with a soul… like a group of best platonic friends getting together and, whoops! a few tequila shots later…

I digress. While we were playing our show, we apparently turned on one of the coolest cats bumming around the bwogosphere, a chill dude by the name of Dave Allen who has been instrumental in fostering the evolution of the music industry, from many angles, for many decades. As a musician and, now, as a bwogman curating the fantastic Pampelmoose blog, Dave is dialed into the white blood cell count of the blood running through the veins of the modern music scene. So when Dave told us we were perhaps the most interesting and refreshing rock band he had seen play live in a long time (we didn’t even have to lick his naughty parts first!), we were very very relieved.

Arizona had started out very confidently in the recording studio, where we can pretty much do whatever comes to mind, but the live show has always been a struggle, when it comes to confidence. In this industry, we have seen so many mind-bogglingly bad live (and studio) bands be lavished with praise that we just had no idea how what we were doing was coming across. The bands we’ve toured with, like Band of Horses or The Slip, are also some of the best live acts in the scene so… we’ve been kinda shy! However, about 6 months ago, we really started to settle into a groove live, and we found something strange… every night of our last tour, folks would say “damn your live show is SO much better than your album, you have to make a live album so people can hear what you’re really about” - or if we were playing for an audience that saw us earlier on tour, they’d say “damn, we love your record but we were hoping it would get more of your live sound.” - Yes they really always do start of a sentence with ‘damn’ btw. Anyway, we didn’t know whether or not to believe it, so when the bass player of one of the rockingest bands ever gave us his endorsement, we knew that we had really started to develop something exciting that was routinely making people happy and refreshed feeling.

Shortly after seeing the show, Dave bwogged about us on pampelmoose.com - and shortly after that, an exceptionally beautiful and talented young lady named Whitney friended us on Myspace. “Sweet, this Dave Allen bwog thing is definitely going to get us more listeners!” we thought, “and they are going to be hotties!” Well, this actually did prove true, we have met several hotties and patotties through Dave’s post, but we also found a new business connection and - more importantly - an inspiration for how to evolve our interaction with music business and the bwogosphere.

It turns out Whitney is the music and photo editor for the up-and-coming and much bwogged about “The Printed Blog” (I guess they call it a ‘blog’ to be funny or ironic or something, come on dudes, it’s called a ‘bwog’), one of the most innovative organizations to develop during a time when both bwogging and printed news are becoming less interesting and enticing to consumers. The Printed Blog collects the best and freshest bwog posts from around the bwogosphere and offers them in a convenient-to-print format, with subsequent issues being distributed through conventional newstands. When Whitney told us about this exciting new organization, we knew we had to try to contribute in some way.

And thus an idea was born - maybe we could offer really cool bwogs a really cool custom service - we’d create personalized film content that showed off our sound, bundled with a ’single’ that was exclusively premiered by the bwog. With The Printed Blog, we decided to finally perform our song “Sunset” - and this is the first time it will ever be shown to the public. This one project spawned a custom performance package for pampelmoose.com - It just makes us think… we should probably still try to make awesome studio records, but we really are having a blast making singles and video content and working on a smaller and more personalized scale. We hope we can make fun packages for many others for many other bwogs… just ask us, we’ll make you something sweet.

Of course - none of this content creation on this particular tour would have been possible without the keen eye, loving spirit, exceptional vision and unwavering support of one of Arizona’s best friends, Cyril Besnard (the Young Francis), a phenomenal director/editor from France who was kind enough to tour with us in 2009.