Ever since this whole wizard rock thing started and I've been blessed to meet incredible people and travel to a ton of new places, I've wanted to make music with as many people as possible. There are so many talented musicians in this community and I'm so happy to call them my friends. I'm also pretty freaking ecstatic to call one of them my boyfriend.

Matt and I have worked on music together before. Back when he was recording his newest full-length album, Demons at the Helm, I contributed some harmonies and backup vocals to a few songs that needed something. At that point, I think we realized that we compliment each other's musical styles and talents pretty well, and we've been tossing around ideas for a collaboration project ever since. We both wanted a reason to write cute, nerdy music that isn't necessarily about Harry Potter. I also wanted an excuse to play ukulele in a band, so I'm going to be playing it on pretty much every song while Matt plays acoustic guitar.

Today, we posted the first two songs for our new side project, a band called Armoured Bearcub. If you get the reference, you'll be happy to know that one of the songs we've posted is based on an event in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, specifically, The Subtle Knife. In "Lee Scoresby's Last Stand", Matt sings from Lee's perspective and I'm singing as his hare dæmon, Hester. We're very excited for people to hear this song.

The other song we posted is a bit less heavy. "Let's Get Our Masters Degrees In Love" focuses on a lighthearted account of our reasons for not continuing our education past a Bachelor's Degree (at least, not yet).

Since we've already had a complaint about our decision to host this music on MySpace until we make some music videos for YouTube or finish a full album and put it on iTunes, I just set up a Facebook page for the band. On there, you can get all kinds of updates on what we've been working on, including future music videos that we'll be putting on YouTube and a forum where you can have discussions about our music! We're still waiting for them to verify the page so we can post our music on there though, so if you want to hear it, you'll have to go to MySpace for a few minutes. I'm sorry.

We'd love for you guys to follow the MySpace and the Facebook page, and we can't wait to get more songs finished so we can share them with you on those pages! You can find them here:

http://www.myspace.com/armouredbearcub
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Armoured-Bearcub/147876982864

Please let us know what you think about the music on those pages! Like I said, we can't wait for you guys to hear this stuff and we're so excited to write more songs and work on music videos for them. Yaayyy!