Happy New Year!

Wow, it's hard to believe that it's already 2009! We hope that your holidays were absolutely amazing and that the new year is already off to an incredible start for you!

It's been a very, very exciting time for us here in the Sleeping At Last camp! 2008 was a really great year for us! We went on several US tours that turned out to be the best ones yet, we had the privilege of sharing the stage with many gifted guest string players across the country and in between, we had lots of great time to write and craft the songs that will be featured on our next album!

To top it all off, we had a truly wonderful set of holidays too. Dan spent his Christmas with family in Maui, Hawaii and (obviously) had an amazing, relaxing, beach-y kind of Christmas! And Ryan spent his Christmas at home in Wheaton, IL. with family and had a really fun, relaxing, snow-y kind of Christmas! In addition to an incredible holiday in Maui, Dan proposed to his long-time girlfriend, Therese on top of a gorgeous volcano called Haleakala! AND back on the home-front, a week before Christmas, Ryan proposed to his long-time girlfriend, Cayt on top of one of Chicago's amazing skyscrapers!! Needless to say, we are both so very excited for our engagements and are honored that both of our fiancees said "Yes."

All this to say, 2008 wrapped up beautifully for us and we are so incredibly excited about 2009! We just recently nailed down dates to begin recording and mixing and we can't wait! We'll be recording here in the lovely city of Chicago and we plan to mix out in Seattle. And we've got our wonderfully talented team of engineers, string players, album cover artist, and mixing engineer all locked down and we are so looking forward to beginning the recording process again! It has already been so much fun to create this album and we cannot wait for it be completed and released! We plan on a late Summer 2009 release date. We are also in the beginning process of laying out our plans to tour in support of the new album, directly after it's release!

We'll be writing with lots more updates and news in the upcoming weeks. Thanks so much for reading and we hope that your year is truly amazing!

Love,
Ryan & Dan - Sleeping At Last

P.S. In honor of the new year, instead of our usual "list of things we love right now," we decided that it would be fun for us to write out our best of 2008 lists! We'd LOVE to hear your best of lists as well, so be sure to post 'em in the comments. Here goes...

DAN:

Albums:
1. Bon Iver - "For Emma, Forever Ago"
2. Vampire Weekend - Self Titled
3. Fleet Foxes - Self Titled
4. Sigur Ros - "Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust"
5. Elbow - "The Seldom Seen Kid"

Movies:
1. WALL-E
2. Slumdog Millionaire
3. Kung Fu Panda
4. Dark Knight
5. Man On Wire

Video Games
1. Braid
2. Rock Band 2
3. Ninja Gaiden 2

RYAN:

Albums:
1. Fleet Foxes - Self Titled
2. Jon Foreman - "Limbs and Branches"
3. Brooke Waggoner - "Heal for the Honey"

Movies:
1. WALL-E
2. Be Kind Rewind
3. Dark Knight
4. Prince Caspian
5. Slumdog Millionaire

Video Games:
1. Castle Crashers
2. Braid
3. Scrabble (iPhone)
4. Mario Kart Wii