Heyheyhey . . . .and welcome to Robby's Lobby circa 2013 !!! A wish for a very, very happy new year goes out to all of you this issue, I'm typing this to you well after midnight on 12/21/12, so I guess the Mayanﾊcalendarﾊmakers just ran out of rocks for more pages and the whole "end of the world" scenario joins the ranks of the Y2K bug and that wacky homeless lady in Buffalo that daily counted down the moments to the end of the world to us through the late 90s .... and personally i believe that's a good thing, there's all sorts of awesome things coming up in 2013 and I'm glad we're all here to celebrate them together !

Goo Goo Dolls new album will be out in April with a first single being released in February here in the US and then on the web as a tease for a scheduled late spring release ! We're nearly finished with tracking, we've moved to obsessing over minute details and mixing the songs to pull together our 10th full length release since 1986 ! We've been having a pretty low key year for live shows (and that's all about to change with the new album release), doing a couple performances a month all over the US, last ,month we did a private show for a big computer component company on a golf course at a resort in Kona, Hawaii. We decided to take advantage of being halfway around the planet from our home in New York State and take our 10 month old little girl to see her Ojiichan and Obaachan in Tokyo so in a flash a mini adventure was born from this awesome gig in paradise.

We landed in Hawaii (after a 17 hour series of flights) a couple of days early, rented a car and drove through the lava rock landscape to our our hotel, we immediately got a Poki bowl and relaxed for the evening on the lanai outside our room. We awoke early with the baby, loaded her (and the pile of stuff that follows a new baby around) in the car to go check out Volcano State Park, and set out on our journey up the mountain, (nearly 5000 feet above sea level) we wound around the mountain and checked out laval flows, lava tubes and of course the steaming summit and steam holes that boil beneath the island, a pretty amazing start to our trip. The band had a great gig in Hawaii, it's always great to get together to play while we're in a non touring cycle, i look forward to doing more shows and playing the new album and GGDs favorites for you all again.

After a quick 7 hours in the air we landed at Narita Airport and made our way to our favorite hotel in downtown and enjoyed our first of many Japanese Curry meals we had during our stay in Japan ( by the way, I LOVE CURRY !). The trip was largely filled with visiting family in Japan w/ the baby, but we also managed to take a trip to Hakone Yumoto and have a great night in a Hot Spring hotel with an amazing traditional Japanese Seafood meal of Sashimi and many other delicious dishes. We saw a photo on the way in of theﾊEmperorﾊand his wife arriving for a stay at the hotel a few years prior, made us feel pretty special, it was a great hotel with great staff and many nice restaurants and shops on theﾊpremises. ﾊBecause of my tattoos (and the policy of no tattoos in the public bath) my wife and I rented a Kashikiri-Buro, and it was just AWESOME ! We enjoyed a nice hot bath and some fruit milk afterwards, it's one of the most relaxing things I could ever hope to do, we were also treated to hearing some old men doing karaoke to AKB48 in the hotel lounge ! The next morning we sampled many sweet bean cakes and walked around the tiny town of Hakone enjoying a crisp fall day in Japan.

We made our way back to Tokyo in time for a pretty exciting moment while shopping at our favorite Tokyu Hands department store, as we waited in line to buy some gifts for family back in the US we were startled by some movement of the floor and swinging signs above our heads, my Japanese is not so good, but I understood right away we were having a pretty serious Earthquake moment. After the ground stopped shaking we ran down the stairs from the 7th floor of the store (the elevators and escalators all shut down), across the train bridge and back to our hotel to find Obachan with our still sleeping baby ! Through all of the excitement Hana managed to sleep through a 7.3 Earthquake, I'm pretty proud of our little girl !

We also took some time later that week to meet with our new friends Pinky Doodle Poodle ( a rock band from Tokyo releasing a Springtime album on our Good Charamel records label) and with them headed to see our dear friends Shonen Knife (Osaka) for their annual Tokyo "Space Christmas" show in Shibuya. It was an awesome One Man Show that featured rarely played material from their 30 year career, we had a great time and after the show and took some pictures with PDP, Shonen Knife and some new friends we met at the show that evening !

After a very, very, very long trip back to Buffalo, NY from Tokyo Justin Rose and I began mixing the PDP album at GCR Audio and we got back to work obsessing over GGDs tracks as the deadline to turn in the masters for manufacturing draws near ! It's all about to get very exciting, I'm so glad you can stop here and check in on the action, feel free to visitﾊwww.robbyslobby.comﾊto get to my social networking sites and some more details/info on the goings as they come up !

Happy 2013 to you all, and we'll talk very soon !

Peace

Robby