Why Nada Surf Is Great

Written today on their myspace blog:

hello friends,

we hope this note finds you very well. as you may have noticed, a new nada surf record is coming out in february. it's called lucky, and we're very happy with how it turned out. in typical last-minute style, we put the finishing touches on it literally the day before mastering and just three days before we got in the van to start our most recent tour (thank you to everyone who came out—from philly to chicago to charlottesville, we had a great time, met quality people, and hopefully made some new fans). we got back to brooklyn a few days ago but i'm actually typing this in the dominican republic, on day one (of four) of my first legitimate, not day-off-from-tour-full-of-guilt-if-i'm-not-in-my-hotel-room-working-on-a-song vacation in 14 years! i didn't bring a guitar, a tape recorder or even a notebook. i actually had to borrow a pen to fill out my landing card!

the reason i'm writing is that we're putting together the album art and part of it revolves around the title. we've tended to have titles in the past that embraced the up-and-down nature of life, particularly because, like most people, those are the sorts of lives that we've been living. but remembering to be purely grateful has been taking on more and more importance of late, paticularly after the last few years in which we've all experienced some real challenges in our personal lives. we are lucky to be alive, to do something we love, to have people around us that we adore, to still have hope in ever-increasingly distressing times, to be members of a species that can live long, to have music and books and movies and experiences that enrich our lives and that give us endless new angles on how to best navigate easy and trying days. having any positivity at all feels more and more like something to embrace and to celebrate.

If you would be kind enough to share with us what you feel grateful for, what you think about when you take stock of your life, we could include it in some of the text that will be part of the album art. if you want to take the time, please email us whatever you like , whatever comes to mind with regards to the word lucky, that is so general and yet so specific to each of us in a different way. the address is:

l u c k y @ n a d a s u r f . c o m (without any spaces)

we'll read all your messages and will excerpt some of them to use in the album's booklet. we'll only be able to use a small percentage of what comes in, but we'd love to get as much as possible. if there are enough submissions, we might post them all in a page on our website sometime (leaving out any personal information about you of course). i'm writing this in english, but if you speak another language, then feel free to write in that language too. we just want to get some real thoughts from the people that make everything that we do possible.

thank you so much for contributing and helping us with this project. we're lucky to know you.

all the best,

matthew (and daniel and ira)