Category: Blogs

This week, we flew our longtime friend, Keith Brinkley in from San Jose to track bass on 3 of our new songs. Keith is a total badass and played in a number of bands with Dennis when he lived in the Bay area. As expected, Keith absolutely crushed it and provided some much needed low end awesomeness to our new tunes “Sorry, Not Sorry”, “Can’t Get it Right”, and “End Transmission”.

In addition to that, we filmed our music video for “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”. It’s been a very interesting learning process to say the very least. Dennis and I just purchased a Panasonic GH5 camera and some Litebox soft boxes, and we filmed, lighted, acted in and edited the video entirely by ourselves (actually, I lied. Charlie Waymire, helped a ton with the editing too, and showed us how to do color correction. He’s super talented and we hate him). We’re trying to be 100 percent self-sufficient /self contained in this day and age of DIY, because we’re tired of paying for things to be done wrong, and frankly…we’re poor. How do you think we stay so thin?

The most fun, aside from the recording process of course, was building our Christmas set. We painted Dennis’s entire living room, decorated the set with Christmas stuff, and completely constructed a badass fireplace from scratch using a cardboard box, paint, parchment paper and Christmas lights. Thank you Youtube! At the end of the day, we probably could have purchased an actual working fireplace with the amount of time, money and effort we put into building that damn thing, but hey…we’re richer in experience. All I know is that shit is staying up year round now. Anyhow, we can’t wait for you guys to see it; it was way too much fun to do!

The holidays are here, and Batfarm are doing what we do best: working! We’re excited to announce that we have completed our version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”.  We went more for a classic approach (inspired more by the original Meet Me in St. Louis “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” versus any of the other “not as cool” versions). As per usual, we recorded part of the tune at Batfarm Studios (a.k.a. Dennis’s bedroom), and then we tracked vocals at Ultimate Studios with Charlie Waymire. We think Judy Garland would be proud.

Up next on the agenda is filming a Batfarm Christmas music video to accompany the song, and it will pay homage to the cheesy 60’s/70’s Christmas specials of yore. We are slowly but surely beefing up our arts and crafts kit and keeping Joann’s Fabrics afloat with all of our ridiculous set building and shenanigans. 

It’s been a pretty busy week! Obviously, we did the whole Thanksgiving thing (except for Dennis, who instead ate frozen pizza and worked on our new Christmas song). I also put the final vocals on our song, “Snake” with Charlie Waymire at Ultimate Studios, and we re-amped the bass. It sounds heavy as hell! We will start mixing in the next few days, so one step closer to finishing our long awaited EP, hooray! Den and I also headed to Arizona to see his fam, get a break from the craziness of LA and of course get some of that sweet ass Fry’s fried chicken. As soon as we get back, we will start producing up “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” for you guys. Have you ever heard the original from Judy Garland in “Meet Me In St. Louis”? It’s the saddest happy song I’ve ever heard. We hope to also bring that tragic beauty in our version. Something tells me that that won’t be a problem. We can’t wait to spread some creepy holiday cheer to you all.

So you guys have probably been seeing a lot of our silly posts and videos regarding the date Nov 13th, and wondering what the hell that’s all about. Well, part of it is the fact that Dennis and I just really love making dumb shit, and the other part is that we’re also going to be releasing our new single and video for our cover of Sneaker Pimps’s Dz6 Undergrounddz on November 13th! At the present moment, Dennis is cutting out lettering for our DzGood Morning Batfarmdz segment (more on that later), which we will be putting at the end of our music video. There really is something amazing about watching a grown man with dreadlocks intently designing and cutting letters out of construction paper. God, I love this band. Now, he’s going to make uscookies. This is just great.

All kidding aside, Den and I have been putting in some serious hours into the business side of Batfarm (because a band is a business—more than you know). We just purchased an amazing Panasonic GH5 camera so we can create more professional content for you all. Big thanks by the way to our awesome photographer friend, Anabel Dflux for giving Alexx a crash course in photography. We’ve also been doing a bunch of what we call Dzbats and craftsdz for our promos, which has included making bat cookies, bat ornaments and various other ridiculous things. Dennis has also been
learning how to do stop motion animation and how to make green screen videos, so be prepared for more wacky antics from your Batfarm buddies.

Yo da Man-do, Fernando

We’re so proud to announce that we have a new official band mascot, Fernando Von Candlestick. He hails from a long line of Von Candlesticks, and his superpower is adorability. If he’s ever in a sticky situation, all he has to do is pull down his mod-tastic sunglasses, and he instantly melts hearts with his big, puppy dog eyes. However, he’s really just a big softie, and he’s more afraid of you than you are of him. Bats just get a bad rap, man.

Fernando was actually designed by Dennis, who also does all the BF posters, as well as stop motion, graphics, green screen and more. He’s just a super talented guy, and we hate him.

Fernando however, wasn’t created overnight. We knew we needed to have a bat representing us because, well…Batfarm. Dennis originally did a sketch of a super cute bat that had the most adorable Hello Kitty-esque eyes, but we decided that Fernando also needed some sick shades to match ours. He also dons a suit, and a sly smile that must mean trouble. In essence, he is all that is Batfarm…Eau de Bat.

Fernando will be appearing on a bunch of our BF merch items, and maybe even in a comic book! You never know…

What are your thoughts? Is he bat ass or is he bat ass? More importantly…would you rock a Fernando shirt?

Dear Diary,

This week, I tracked some vocals on a new one called “Snake”. Has there ever been anyone in your life that just made your blood absolutely boil at the mere mention of their name? Yep, it’s about someone like that (haha).

I’m not saying that this song was written from life, buuuuut I’m not saying it wasn’t either…muhahaha. Moral of the story: never piss off a musician. Especially a songwriter.

Anyhow, it was a pretty positive session. We tracked vocals for about 5 hours, and I knocked out probably 90% of the song, aside from a few harmonies and doubles, which is always awesome. I think what contributed to the session’s success was the fact that Dennis also brought a desk cycle to the studio, so I was able to get in a few miles in between takes and open up my voice. You know what they say…you gotta commit to be fit! If you haven’t tried a desk cycle musicians, get one on Amazon and bring it to your session. You can warm up your voice and burn some calories. Why the hell haven’t I been doing this for years?! Anyway, I digress.

We’re really liking the performances so far (Charlie just sent us a rough mix). It’s a perfect mixture of anger and sex; just how we like it!

Needless to say after all that tracking, I went to bed around 8:30 that night. No Family Guy or anything for me; I slept like the dead.

Later this week, we will be designing some shirts and other merch. Hit us up here or on social media if you have any merch ideas—spatulas, salt and pepper shakers, anything! We’re ridiculous, you’re ridiculous…let’s do this!

Hey bat buddies! Alexx here. Just writing in to give you a brief synopsis as to what we’ve been up to this past year with Batfarm. As some of you know, Dennis and I have actually been writing music together on and off for almost ten years. It was never really our intention to have a band originally; we were just approached a few years back to write a song for a horror movie, and we both thought, “Hey, we make some really messed up music together…this could really be something.”

Anyhow, we kept writing music together just to see if we could maybe license it, but then we ended up creating this whole “darkedelic” sound. It just made sense to put it all on the same record. We went through a few name changes before we finally settled on Batfarm. Our first EVER live show together as Batfarm was actually in December of last year at the world famous Viper Room after many years of just being a studio project. Since then, we’ve been creating like crazy (music, videos, silly content because we’re a bunch of goobers).

We’re currently in the studio with our good buddy, Charlie Waymire, who is helping to produce and engineer our first EP. Charlie has been one of the few people in our lives who we feel really gets us and lets us do our thing. He routinely puts up with our puns and dad jokes, our perfectionism, our little idiosyncrasies that would drive most people nuts. So…thank you Charlie. As of right now, we have 2 completely mixed songs: a real “banger” (as the kids would call it), “Get Out” a very heartfelt, emotive song called “Need Someone”. We absolutely can’t wait to show it to you all. Rant over. Good night and good luck.