Wednesday, October 12, 2011

The Patrick Lew Band - 10 Years of Rebelling, Chaos, and Taiwanese Man Blues!

Patrick Lew Band. The 100% Truth.

1) band name: Patrick Lew's Band


2) formation date: May 2001


3) years active: 2000s, 2010s


4) web address to use as a link that can be seen by all users:
http://www.myspace.com/patricklewsband
http://www.reverbnation.com/patricklewsband
http://www.facebook.com/patricklewband

5) preferred genre classification: Grunge, Garage Punk, Alternative Rock, Hard Rock

6) home state (or country if not U.S.): Antioch, California, USA

7) band members:
Patrick Lew - Guitar, Bass, Electronics, Lead Vocals
Faith Marie - Drums, Percussion

8) Discography:
1st album: Psychotic Love (2002) --!!! OUT OF PRINT !!!--
2nd album: Revenge (2006) --!!! OUT OF PRINT !!!--
3rd album: Curb Your Wild Life (2009)
4th album: Let It Rise And Against (2009)
5th album: Murder Bay (2011)
FOREWORDI am just an Asian guy who loves and is passionate about music and was lucky enough to survive many struggles in life and enjoy what I love doing and making, regardless of what other people thought. My relationship with the music and through the Internet is to maintain a friendship with listeners & fans of PLB and encourage constructively with other bands to share the music we make to everybody where ever we're at around the world, whether I'm in San Francisco or you're somewhere in Liverpool or Tokyo. The Internet should be used as a musical weapon to get ourselves out there, heard, exposed, and maybe even some prospects along the way! While I don't play gigs very often, based on many different factors such as a lack of a band to play guitar and sing in as one of the major pitfalls along with other limitations. I take pleasure in jamming with friends in the Bay Area in garage bands. That's what I been doing since I was 13 during the end of the 90's! While I am often at home, I mainly play my guitar figuring out how to write new music and record them on my laptop. One of my intentions as an artist is to write good songs, and improve myself not only as a musician but also a human being!
Band History:
Patrick Lew (guitar, vocals) met Faith Marie (born Faith Lambright) (drums) in 2006 on a free dating website online. While Marie came from a subtle yet relatively turbulent and dysfunctional personal and family background, Lew's childhood was thrown into turmoil when his beloved grandfather passed away when he was four, and his family endured many moments of being financially and socially challenged as an Asian American family. In his youth, Lew was a "somewhat" outsider in school and experienced countless struggles and conflict within the social-network online and in real-life. Lew was also highly creatively inclined and artistic as a child, drawing comic books and developing a love for 60's British rock such as The Beatles and late 80's/early 90's hard rock in the process. Eventually, Seattle grunge (Nirvana and Pearl Jam) and contemporary punk rock worked his way into his interest in music and whilst attending Rooftop Middle School, he began playing guitar at the age of thirteen and met his childhood friend and schoolmate Tommy Loi at his summer recreational day camp at Cumberland Church in San Francisco.

Together, Lew and Loi began jamming aimlessly on their own brand of garage punk music in Lew's house near the tail end of the 1990s called Goldenweasel, and Lew enrolled in a few music courses at a local guitar store. Lew also met a couple of popular punk bands and musicians such as Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 and the band AFI while furthering his interest in punk rock and seeing live music locally. Lew attended Raoul Wallenberg High School, and began playing guitar and jamming freelance with several garage bands like Samurai Sorcerers, often including Nocturnal Rock Turtles lead guitarist George "Eddie" Blackburn.

Although most of Lew's high school band pursuits as a musician, guitar player, and artist were mainly a freelance hobby, Lew intended to take his music very seriously as an independent artist. During his times jamming aimlessly freelance with friends in garage bands miming the post-hardcore and punk rock they grew up witnessing on MTV and the mass media, Lew also created a one-man band called the Patrick Lew Band which was his musical outlet for his own songwriting ideas on record when not playing in other bands
locally for whatever purpose.

Through keyboardist and friend Zack Huang while attending a community college, Lew met close friend and drummer Dave Arceo, who had an intense passion for music and art, which meant that he, like Lew, felt alienated from the atypical superficial, bland, and not-so-interesting types of people from the masses and the Bay Area. Arceo, like Lew, also were considered outsiders within the community and social-network and felt "left out" of the status quo. Lew, Arceo, and Huang decided to form a post-hardcore band called the Band of Asians, with Arceo on drums, Huang on keyboards, and Lew on rhythm guitar. Lead guitar duties were handled by Eddie Blackburn temporarily, and subsequently by their schoolmate Cory Gaitan. The Band of Asians landed a few gigs locally and recorded a small output of musical ideas and instrumentals in a local recording studio (which caused Lew a credit card debt). Alongside a rotating cast of freelance garage bands in which Lew jammed and played his guitar in, and a rotating cast of Bandalism and band members, the bands Lew played in went through many band name changes as it did with whom he was playing guitar with or the ideas he had musically on record as a musician. As Band of Asians didn't put enough effort to further their music and pursuits as a local Bay Area band, mainly because of personal and creative differences, the Band of Asians decided to part ways and embark on solo careers.

Deeply devastated by the outcome of the events and years of adolescent turmoil, Lew pondered his musical future as an artist. Relocating his family to Antioch, California, a suburban Bay Area town about 45 miles Northeast of San Francisco in the Contra Costa County, and took his college education more seriously. Transferring into the California State University, East Bay, and spent most of 2008 in seclusion tinkering in his newly assembled home recording studio digitally creating new rock & roll music alone and posting his demo recordings of song ideas online. Two years earlier, Lew met his close friend and future spouse Faith Marie on a free dating website online and went on a couple of blind dates in the Bay Area. Only to be separated once again, because of Lew's personal crisis with music critics, transitory moments in life, alongside Marie's dysfunctional relationships with former boyfriends when she re-located back to Texas.

Lew began taking his music alone more seriously by 2008, his solo project the Patrick Lew Band and some other freelance jam sessions with friends. With the help of musical entrepreneurship Lew self-taught himself how to do, Lew began posting his music online alone as the Patrick Lew Band and seeing where the prospects take him. And suddenly, Lew's close friend Faith Marie came back into the picture and Lew and Marie solidified their friendship through social-network website Facebook and as a couple long-distance. Lew recorded 20 or 30 tracks or song ideas in his home recording studio. That became, "Let It Rise And Against" the demo album in its original form. Published on Valentines Day 2010 digitally online via iTunes and other mp3 stores.

In 2010, Lew and Marie began living together in Lubbock, Texas, as Lew sacrificed his college education and local friends and family to be with her respectively. However, the interracial and happy couple were oppressed by much of Lew's social-network online and in real-life and the social-media imposed claims and gossip about Marie which were fallaciously damaging and atrocious. Much of 2010, Lew and Marie's relationship were on the rocks partly because of the social-network that resented, judged, or oppressed them via Facebook and in real-life. However, the couple has since reconciled and took steps to filter out these unfortunate people in their social-network and keep their relationship strong and healthy. Also, Lew spent sporadic moments making new punk rock music in the studio.

Currently, the band Shanghai Kiss is working sporadically on new music as an Internet collaboration punk rock project between Lew and Marie at this very moment. Lew is also working on his music solo, and freelance jamming with others in the Bay Area in garage bands. Lew just recently published his album "Murder Bay" on his Partrick Lew Band website. Stay tuned for more music, more "dear diary" moments on Facebook, and more extreme and ultimate rock & roll from the rebellious Asian punk rocker named Patrick Lew!

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