It’s a nice, slow day. For the moment. We’ll get on the road soon, and then race to Wilmington, and then look for an internet connection, and then work furiously till we sound check at the Soap Box, and then we’ll play our little hearts out… et cetera. But for the moment, it’s sweet, sweet slowness.
We’ve been in Raleigh for the last couple of days, getting into town on Wednesday night and going to see Monster House with our friends Katy and Trevor. Let it be known that that movie is genuinely freaky, creepy, and kind of terrifying in a special, animated kind of way. You should just be aware of that. You shouldn’t REALLY be aware of the fact (but I’m going to tell you anyways) that it was then kind of nerve-wracking to drive past any two-storey home with two windows on top, because I kept imagining that it would FUCKING EAT ME!!!
Ahem.
In any case, it was great to have some late-night talk time with Katy. She’s one of my favourite people, and we haven’t had a lot of time to talk recently. I spent the night circling the kitchen island, expounding on people and adventures that she’d only vaguely heard of in passing in quick and hurried conversations, or through the Journal, whatever. I sometimes worry about my stories, about talking on the phone. I know I mention just about everything worth mentioning in the Journal already, and I hate to be redundant.
Don’t matter. Talking to people in the kitchen at 2 in the morning while pacing and circling and whirling and maybe swiping a cookie or two, that’s the best thing in the world, really.
Thursday morning… ha… what am I talking about? Thursday AFTERNOON found Heather and I waking up with Tigger the Lovely, happy and above all MOIST dog and with his Love we found strength to attack the day.
I had to be sockless for the beginning though – as Tigger had found my socks and decided that he needed to lick them. Thoroughly. My feet and footly accessories have spent a lot of time under the tongue of this beast over the last couple of days. I fear it points to some strange psychological thing deep in that mammal’s mind.
On the way back to the car I spotted this five-lined skink. We chased him around a tree, back and forth (I have lots of pictures of a vaguely blue blur) and then found…
A female broadhead skink! Wahooza! Thank you Sara for the informative identify-a-lizard o’ NC website! Below – cool fuzzy things on a log. Have not a clue what they were. I wanted them to follow our movements though, and make little trilling noises.
We got out that night to play at Oliver Twist’s, a very cool tapas bar (thanks Chris, for introducing me to the concept, I appeared very suave and knowledgable) in North Raleigh. The place was beautifully draped in exciting fabrics and romantically candle-lit. A good Bose sound system wrapped the package in a level of class that Peavy just can’t touch.
We played their singer/songwriter night, (which will be broadcast on “the River” 100.3FM, I think – on Sunday night) and had an exceptionally professional feeling night. The host liked us enough to ask us to play an additional song, the owner of the place bought a CD from us, and I felt like we were working the room really well. Like, after our set, we split off and wandered and shook hands and collected business cards – Sara and Katy even overheard their next-table-neighbours talking about “now see, that’s the way it’s DONE”. A wondrous moment occured when Katy pointed to a guy with a snowy white beard wandering through the bar and got really excited that Santa Claus was there. She got wide-eyed and beautiful. The only downside of the night was that Santa Claus was VERY rude to Katy’s dad. Enter my lexicon, the “fuck you shrug”. So sad.
The next morning, we were sad to leave our haven (Sara and Katy left a day early to beat us to Wilmington), but glad to move to our next one – our friend Jamie (Shit! Forgot to call Rowan about Jamie! **makes phone call**) is actually in Northern Virginia for the weekend, but is letting us have her place for the night, and it’s kind of been really relaxing to just have absolutely no-one around for the last couple of hours.
With the exception of a gig, of course. Last night we played at the Six String’s new location at Helio’s Coffee. Very cool place, decent little Fender sound system. We saw a bunch of people we weren’t expecting to see, and missed a couple of people that we were hoping to see… in general, I felt like we made a pretty good showing of ourselves what with pretty much packing the place on very short notice. It sort of de-packed for the second set, but I was still very pleased with the number of people who stuck with us through most of the show. A lot of cool, tiny coincidences bringing friends of friends into the coffeeshop, people who were told to come see us by multiple, independant sources… I really feel like we’re hitting some sort of fanbase critical mass, where maybe, just maybe, really positive things could happen very, very soon.
I keep my fingers crossed, except for when I’m playing, and even then I try to cross my toes. it’s why I forget lyrics.
We were charming, we were quick, we were playful. We did NOT rant for 5 minutes about the names of cats. We’d been listening to old recordings of ourselves, listening to stretches of never-ending banter. This inspired us to avoid repeating past mistakes.
We ended up hanging out in after the show for over an hour, just talking to people. Met a couple of guys who I could commune over Transformers and Robotech with )thanks Trevor – I got sooo much cred last night!) and it was good to be able to really get into a little Love fest with someone over Soundwave’s voice. Silly. I know. But I Loved it.
In any case, that’s the rapid catch up. Heather’s almost out of the bathroom, and we’ve got to get on the road. Maybe I’ll have some time to do some decent storytelling in a little bit.
