Letter From a Thief by Chevelle

Album: Sci-Fi Crimes (2009)

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Songfacts®:

Chevelle debuted this Sci-Fi Crimes track on April 9, 2009 at a concert in Atlanta, Georgia.
Frontman Pete Loeffler described this to The Pulse of Radio as a "sort of an old-school Smashing Pumpkins vibe rock song."
This song is about a personal experience for the band when their equipment was stolen in Dallas. They recovered just over half of it, including Loeffler's prized red PRS guitar, which was returned by a man in California to PRS after he learned it was the frontman's. Drummer Sam Loeffler told the USA publication Muen Magazine about the incident:

"We recovered about half of it or maybe a little bit more. The stuff that came through was from people who said 'Hey, I know who this belongs to.' and they called somebody and let them know. It worked out really well. There are two sides to it. There were a lot of people who wrote to us and said 'You guys are a bunch of pansies. Open up your wallets and buy some new gear. You guys are millionaires.' That is not true and even if it were true, it is still personal items that we have done all these records with. They have sentimental value and no matter how much money someone has, it doesn't give people the right to steal from them. That's ignorant and that's how people hide behind the internet.

The good news is that some things did show up in pawn shops, eBay and people let us know. We were able to either get the cops to get it back for us or we were able to buy it back, which is fine too. We are an established rock band; we have insurance to help us pay for those things. We lost $130,000, it's a lot of money, it's a lot of money to me that's for sure. Even still, we were grateful to get back the pieces that we got back. There were a couple of pieces that were really important to us. One of them was this original red Paul Reed Smith guitar that we did Point #1 and Wonder What's Next with it and we had, had it on the road. It was the first nice guitar that Pete had ever bought and we bought it used for $900. We had gone in half on it and it was a really important piece to us. We got it back and a couple other guitars that were really important to us. It was really cool."

Comments: 1

Bill from FloridaBecause the word thief? I dunno... what about “left wing”? What about the drug problem and the elite? I think it means something else, unless he said specifically this was about having gear stolen. Seems more sophisticated than that.

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