Matt and I have been working on our personal websites a lot recently, (look forward to a new layout for this one!) and we’re now happy to announce that our collaborative side project, Armoured Bearcub, now has its own site! We opened preorders for our new t-shirt (featuring the adorable bears you’ll see at the top of the site) and we’re now offering you the chance to buy a bear pouch completely homemade by me. You can find it at ArmouredBearcub.com. We’ll be selling both of these things on tour this fall as well. These items will eventually be for sale on this website in addition to some new Lauren Fairweather t-shirts! Get excited.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a new music video for my song, “Outside World”. I was really happy with the recording when I released “I’m Saying Nothing” last year, and now I finally have a video to go along with it. Here it is!

Click here to join the comment conversation!

Fall tour details will be announced soon, but to hold you over, here’s a list of places we’re going and when. Let Matt know if you can help us find a venue in any of the TBA locations!

This fall, I’ll be going on tour with The Whomping Willows, Justin Finch-Fletchley, and Armoured Bearcub (my nerdy side project with Matt Maggiacomo). We’re working it around the Memphis Comic and Fantasy Convention, where we’ll be performing. Details will be announced on this website soon. For now, if you’d like to see where we’ll be and when, and maybe even help us to find a venue near you, click here.

I’m not sure if all of you have heard of my friend Esther Earl, but she’s a wonderful, brilliant, brave 16-year-old girl who lost her fight with cancer early yesterday morning. She’s been an inspiration to the Harry Potter fandom and nerdfightaria, and we’re all missing her very much. Matt, Justin, and I raise money on each of our tours and this time around, our cause will be Friends of Esther. This is a fund that helps her family to cover her medical expenses over the years and we will have a jar on our merch table for voluntary donations to their cause.

For more information on Esther and her family, click here. If you’d like to donate to Friends of Esther now, click here.

We just confirmed details for our New Jersey show near the end of tour! Pass it around if you know anyone else who’s been waiting to hear where this show will be!

July 22 – New Jersey – 5:30pm
Old Bridge Public Library
1 Old Bridge Municipal Plaza
(Rt. 516 and Cottrell Road)
Old Bridge, NJ 08857
Free and ALL AGES!
with ALL CAPS, The Whomping Willows, JFF, The Parselmouths, and monday+tuesday of fiveawesomegirls
Click here to RSVP on Facebook!

Tour’s been awesome so far. Hope to see you guys on the road and thank you to everyone who’s come to a show up until now!

Our new Armoured Bearcub album, The White Album, is now on iTunes! We’ve been playing these songs live on tour this summer, and the audiences have loved them. We’re super excited to see what everyone else thinks as well! Leave us a review if you’d like. Click here to check it out!

Also, we are now playing a show in Decatur, Georgia! Here are the details:

July 19 – Decatur, GA – 5:30pm
DeKalb County Public Library – Decatur Branch
215 Sycamore Street
Decatur, GA 30030
FREE, ALL AGES
with ALL CAPS, The Whomping Willows, JFF, The Parselmouths, and monday+tuesday of fiveawesomegirls
Click here to RSVP on Facebook!

We’ve confirmed the details for our Seattle/Bellevue tour date! Here are the details:

July 3 – Bellevue WA – 6:30pm
Lewis Creek Park Visitors Center
5808 Lakemont Blvd.
Bellevue, WA 98009
ALL AGES
$10 admission
with ALL CAPS, The Whomping Willows, JFF, The Parselmouths, and monday+tuesday of fiveawesomegirls
Click here to RSVP on Facebook

Also, last week when we were passing through Indianapolis on tour, we stopped to have lunch with John Green and played him our new Armoured Bearcub song about Paper Towns. The results were pretty hilarious.

See you guys on the road!

Matt and I have been planning to release an album as part of our new band, Armoured Bearcub, for a while now. We’re about to leave for tour tomorrow, and we are happy to announce that the album is finished and will be sold at all of our shows this summer!

The White Album is our first Armoured Bearcub album. You probably know that Matt and I often draw inspiration from the Harry Potter books as members of wizard rock bands; our new band aims to draw inspiration from everywhere else as well. On this album, you will find songs inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Paper Towns, The Hunger Games, His Dark Materials, The O.C., Harry Potter, The Bible / The Da Vinci Code, and our own lives. Here is the tracklist!

1. In Which Buffy Slays Edward (Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Twilight by Stephenie Meyer)
2. Peeing In A Bottle (Paper Towns by John Green)
3. We’re On Fire (The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins)
4. Lee Scoresby’s Last Stand (His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman)
5. The Ballad of Seth and Summer (The O.C.)
6. Nargles In the Mistletoe (Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling)
7. A Born Again Christian Upon Reading The Da Vinci Code (The Bible / The Da Vinci Code)
8. Let’s Get Our Master’s Degrees In Love

We’ll be selling it at all of our live shows for $8 in the form of digital download cards. You’ll only be able to use the code on this card once, so you shouldn’t give it out to your friends. You will also be able to download a digital copy online from iTunes and Amazon in a few weeks. Let me know if you find it on there before I update the ‘Store’ page to reflect that it can be purchased online!

I can’t wait to get on the road and find out what you guys think about the new album! We’ll be playing some of the songs live each night, and we hope to add more music videos to our YouTube channel soon!

Yesterday, I graduated from college and I’m currently getting all ready to finish moving to Rhode Island and preparing to leave for tour in less than two weeks. This is one of the projects I am starting now and hoping to finish when I get home in August.

Recently, I’ve been working on making my various social networking websites a bit more personal. In a fiveawesomegirls video a few weeks back, I asked for suggestions of ideas for an overall design I can make, and a lot of people thought I should do a sky with clouds and a sun to go with my last name (and a dumb childhood nickname one of my teachers gave me, Cumulus). After a few days of work, I came up with this.

I did the YouTube layout first because it only required custom graphics and a simple image map code. I’m a bit clueless when it comes to anything-but-html coding. When I first put together this website, I picked an existing theme I liked and customized it to make it my own with the hope that eventually I’ll be able to figure out how to do my own custom layout with image navigation.

With this new design, I’m hoping to come up with a layout that would look similar on both this website and my new tour tumblr. Do any of you guys have experience with coding for both Wordpress and Tumblr? Ideally, I’d like to learn to do this myself, but it might be easier if someone who knows how to do this could get me started with something basic that matches (with a few differences in how the page is laid out). That way, I can create custom graphics to fit each and go from there, with help as I need it. Would any of you guys be willing to work with me on this?

I just found out that two boxes of ‘is it plugged in? EP’ are going to be delivered next Tuesday! This means that if you want to have a copy of my new electric EP mailed to you before I leave for tour, you should preorder it by 10am Eastern time on Thursday, May 27th. You can still order it online after that, but I will not be able to mail out any copies of the EP or any buttons ordered after the preorder period until early August because I will be away on tour (hard copies of all other CDs will still be delivered promptly because they are shipped out through an automated service). I’ll also be selling them at all of my shows this summer.

Click here to preorder my new EP before Thursday, May 27th at 10am Eastern time, and click here to find out where I’m playing shows this summer.

Also, we now have the details for our show in New Orleans this summer! I’m excited because I haven’t been there since Phoenix Rising, my first Harry Potter conference in 2007. Hope to see you there!

July 12 – New Orleans – 7pm
Aurora Tennis and Swim Club – Ball Room
5244 General Meyer Avenue
New Orleans LA 70131
Admission: $10, all ages
with ALL CAPS, The Whomping Willows, JFF, The Parselmouths, and monday+tuesday of fiveawesomegirls
Click here to RSVP on Facebook!

Three new shows for summer tour have been confirmed, and I’m super excited about them! Here are of all the details!

June 12 – Verona, WI – 1:30pm
Verona Public Library
500 Silent Street
Verona WI 53593
FREE, ALL AGES
With The Whomping Willows, JFF, and The Nifflers.
Click here to RSVP on Facebook!

June 29 – Manhattan, KS – 6pm
Midwest NerdFest 2010
Kansas State University
Student Union – Main Ballroom
Manhattan KS
$10 admission, all ages
with ALL CAPS, The Whomping Willows, JFF, The Parselmouths, The Remus Lupins, Tonks and the Aurors, and Skyway Flyer.
Click here to RSVP on Facebook!

July 11 – Dallas TX – 7pm
The Prophet Bar
2548 ELM ST
DALLAS TX 75226
$10 admission, all ages!
with ALL CAPS, The Whomping Willows, JFF, The Parselmouths, and monday+tuesday of fiveawesomegirls
Click here to RSVP on Facebook!