Saigon Kick guitarist Jason Bieler has checked in with the following update:

"After seeing countless 'I'll show you how to play 'Love Is On The Way'' YouTube videos, 98% of which are - to put it kindly - less than accurate, I wanted to give you guitarists the correct chords for the verses. By no means is this rocket science guitar playing but I am shocked at how many folks get tripped up by it. Other than the finger stretch, it is fairly straight forward. So from this day forward you can feel free to woo the woman or man of your dreams with the extra confidence gained by the love conjuring witchcraft of the C# minor 9 chord."

Bieler recently spoke with BraveWords scribe Carl Begai about the band's reunion tour and future plans. An excerpt from the story is available below:

“It’s gone really well considering the potential for epic disaster,” says Bieler. “It’s gone far better than we anticipated. We’ve been very, very selective about what we’ve done – and I think we spoke about this before – because we didn’t want to do one of those Will Work For Food kind of tours. We did seven shows in these cool markets, and the response from people who are really passionate about the band… it really exceeded everyone’s expectations. And I think because we’ve been staying in really nice hotels and not seeing each other, there’s no friction (laughs).”

Call it a case of being older and wiser, maybe?

“Nobody’s got the energy for those kinds of fights anymore. Strangely enough, Matt and I have been getting along better than we ever have. I think you just get to a point in life where the negative stuff just isn’t worth fighting about. In the early days of Saigon Kick, anybody who didn’t see my point of view had to be doing it on purpose as an attack. There was no other way I could wrap my brain around why someone could not see my logic. As you get older and hopefully a little bit more mature you realize that different people on the planet have a different opinion of things, right or wrong. I learned not to take differences of opinion quite so personally. Yeah, Matt and I have been getting along much, much better, and I think a little bit of maturity on both our parts didn’t hurt.”

Saigon Kick’s volatile history had some fans holding their breaths waiting for news of the band’s reunion going to hell, but the quartet wrapped up 2013 as a complete unit with something resembling a plan for this year. Bieler says keeping things small scale with a ‘baby steps’ approach was the best thing they could have done, and it paid off.

“I think because we were really careful not to say ‘Okay, this is the We’re Visiting Every Venue On Earth Tour 2013/14? we were able to take the commitment in small chunks. Obviously everybody in the band has busy lives and other things going on, so we could really only do it for the sake of enjoying it. We didn’t go out there saying ‘Please fund our nine million dollar DVD project’, we made sure we didn’t have any of that baggage. We had to make sure we felt like doing it and it’s been fun. The most impressive thing to me is that we didn’t realize how important some of this music is to some of these people. That’s been the exciting and refreshing thing, discovering that. It’s encouraging meeting people and hearing why a certain song or album is important to them.”

With the band being active and primed to keep things moving forward, it’s easy to forget that the classic Saigon Kick line-up with Matt Kramer up front hadn’t played together for 20 years. Dusting off the old songs for the tour rehearsals were a big part of the healing process, which had the potential to be a harrowing, nerve-wracking process or as comfortable as slipping on a favourite pair of shoes.

“I have to say it was both of those things,” Bieler admits. “It was a little bit like getting your sea legs; some of it felt very strangely familiar. I think the most important thing from my perspective, because I can’t speak for everybody, is that you don’t want to try to do anything. You want to be who you are and do what you do, so you don’t necessarily want to suddenly be wearing tight pants and doing jumping kicks off amps and making a mockery of yourself, nor do you want to be 15 or 80 years old. We’re not old, but we’re older, so we feel more comfortable in our skin. When you hit that point you lose all the pretense of ‘Do I look cool?’ or ‘Is this what the hip kids are doing?’ We’re able to concentrate more on the music, and it was almost like new territory. We can sit back and be who we are, and not worry about the extra baggage.”

Click here for the complete story.