May 21st, 2007.

I Love being in the studio – I Love being in the centre of us and hearing everything that we’ve pushed out of ourselves into signal and microphone grill, watching the LEDs count up and out to forever. It’s one of the most satisfying feelings I know. It’s better than hanging a show, it’s way better than opening the box of CDs, because by then you’re kind of worried that you did something wrong. This is before the fear of concrete, before the permanance of typos and poor colour correction… long before someone is looking at the artwork and saying “well, that’s cool – but did you mean for THAT to be pink?”

I’ve passed on a lot of the direction to Sharif, as he has some really concrete ideas as to what he wants done. Past a certain point, I’m probably going to be proud of anything we put out as long as it sounds like us, and it would take a LOT of…. something, I don’t know what, to make it NOT sound like us. I think I have trouble hearing the recording vs the performance, and I’m so in Love with the way we’ve performed in these recordings and the spirit that’s been captured that I’m having a lot of trouble being critical of the recording. I’m glad I’ve got plenty of other ears to pick the product apart.

Yeah, they get grumpy if you get too close. It was a beautiful night, too early for mosquitoes and just late enough for bats.
Before our show in at the West Side Cafe, my friend Emily and I wandered Frederick and encountered ducklets and gooselets and their protective parents. Variously I was quacked at and hissed at but generally attempted to keep my distance to something not too intrusive.
Oh, I hope not.
Amber Rubarth at the West Side Cafe playing with us as the last musical acts at Fredericks finest venue. Ex-venue. It’s sad to see it go.
Rowan and I got caught in a vicious rainstorm after doing some grocery shopping. Even though we were caught wet and steamy in the car, unable to leave till the rain abated, we’re STILL not a couple!

After a weekend’s worth of sunshine and playing hard, I think we’re all pretty exhausted. It reminds me of coming back to Glovia after a weekend full of gigs – and being reminded that I’ve got a full work week ahead of me… Sunburn on my nose makes wiping it all the worse, and my allergies make me want to point a gun to my head.

By now we’re almost finished, we’ve been polishing the mixes of everything, and now we’re on to the very last song: Drift. I Love the feeling of layered construction as an engineer sketches in a mix. Listening it to piece by piece, layering in the instruments. The guitar and my voice at first, and then a drum, Heather’s voice. this song doesn’t truly take form until the piano falls into place – which is something I’ve been horribly aware of while playing as a duo recently. The strength of that line gives this beautiful power to the whole rhythm, and it’s blue balls to miss it and heaven to hear it. Matt has captured a depth to my voice that I forgot I had, and Sharif’s piano dances underneath everything. I think that for me at least, Drift is becoming the star of the CD.

Friday night we played at College Perk to a packed house and an enthusiastic house. Ze College Perk room of Love. Jeff, Heather, Rowan and I got there at 4 in the afternoon to set up and sound check… unfortunately, the weather was iffy enough that we ended up pushing everything indoors. I kept second-guessing my decision through the entire night, and I kind of wish there’d been one good downpour at some point: God saying “rob, you were right!” or something – but in the end I have to just hope my judgment was correct. It was cold outside and there was a sprinkle or two, but people were cramped inside and we couldn’t get TOO loud.

But the Perk filled out and was soon vibrating with friends and fans – adding Jeff and his sound equipment went a long way to making Perk a lot more performance friendly, and we even had people dancing and clapping to Hands by the end of the night. It boiled.

Nomad at College Perk on Friday night. Having Ash back him up is a perfect combination – a good sort of tribal hiphop sound.
West Mary at College Perk on Friday night. Their punkgrass filled the Perk with southern verve and I can only hope that our friends Loved them as much as I do. They almost fill the hole that the Violent Femmes left in my heart… not that anyone really COULD fill that hole, but they spread something soothing on the ragged edges.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
After the College Perk show in College Park, Maryland – we devolved into an aerial assault of quickly cobbled paper airplanes and ninja moves. Our paper-fu planes were leet… or something… with more 3s..

Nomad ( John Thayer ) opened the night, and I think he benefited a lot from the upgraded sound as well – he certainly had one of the best nights I’d ever heard. His voice continues to get cooler and cooler as he approaches his reggae wail and his playing, looping, and the sounds he was creating – fucking awesome. We’d invited West Mary up from North Carolina to be the second act of the night and they delivered everything I’d hoped – an onslaught of imagery and bass and drilling guitar lines. The Bens speak pretty strongly to my Indie roots (hard-rocking bleeding-heart saw-edged DIY Indie, NOT new-millennium, girls’-pants-wearing, atonal-wish-I-had-a-Brit-accent-singin’ Indie) and I was so proud to drag them before my people and make them perform for my amusement.

It was a good, good night.

After Heather and Rowan had left for the night, me and a couple of friends and late-night Perkian regulars hung out till 2 in the morning, maybe 3, contentedly throwing paper airplanes at one another. It was a wonderful wind-down, especially compared to too many gigs spent trying to get paid and avoiding the drunks and just being so exhausted that all I want to do is fight my way home.

Saturday morning, the sun came too soon. I was up far too late and up far too early and the bright sunshine and brilliant pageantry of the Maryland Faerie Festival was at first far too much for my besieged senses to handle. Slowly I realized that this was simply one of the coolest things I’ve ever been to – I used to really enjoy Renaissance Festivals. There’s the music and the sense that it’s the first crisp of autumn, the costumes and the attention to detail and the beauty and the whimsy, but slowly the Ren Fests have become more and more generic, with artisans copying one another, the costumes becoming more a statement of Goth chic breast-enhancement than of gentler, more subtle aesthetics. I’ve grown tired of hearing the same old versions of the same ancient songs, and the festivals as a whole have grown dependant on alcohol and insults and a meat-market atmosphere that I’m just too (ha!) jaded for.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
A unicorn for Katy.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
One of the other fey guests and the Maryland Folk Festival: a Horned Owl looked rather dubious at us. He was more majestic when the wind wasn’t blowing, but he had some comical moments in the breeze. I Loved the way he rarely if ever closed both eyes at the same time, always making sure we were never up to no good.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
A maypole being slowly wrapped and danced aboot at the Maryland Faerie Festival – they worked so very hard…. and then it rained. Ah, capricious beests be they weather faeries.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
One of my favourite things at the Maryland Faerie Festival was this turtle beast – covered in trinkets and glitter, trailing children and its keeper. I was in Love the moment I saw it, even though its keeper kept whacking me with her wings. I’m sure it was unintentional. On the right you can see the puppetteer crawling out from underneath the beast, much to the alarm of the children who’d been pursuing it. You know kids, you can only chase the magic so far…
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
The Green Men go forth like man-sized ents and bless the stalls at the Maryland Faerie Festival in Upper Marlboro, MD.
Scott Wiecksel is a name I’m going to screw up, so don’t quote me on that just yet. He and his songstress partner performing the Ogre Song at the Maryland Faerie Festival. They were both scowly AND growly and ALSO a whole lot of fun. He’s also a visual artist and we talked graphics and printing and effects processors. I think I made a friend!
I can’t completely express my joy at being joined by Chessie the Chesapeake Bay Monster at the Maryland Faerie Festival. I think I fell in Love, or perhaps my grin was so wide that my brain was seeing direct sunshine for the first time in years and the resulting euphoria was too much for me to handle. She prefers the term “serpent” rather than “monster”, and upon actual introductions I could certainly see why. Nothing monstrous about her, all sinew and serpenty serpent indeed.
I was worried when I met this Barre Owl – I was worried that I’d been mishearing all these years and that there was no such thing as a Barn Owl… fortunately they are two different and distinct creatures. Unfortunately, all of these creatures had something wrong with them making them unreleasable even after rehabilitation. Being struck by cars is apparently the thing in our area – the beastie above was blinded after being struck by a car – others were missing parts of claws or wings.
Heather and my friend Jade eating good things like faire sushi and ice cream. I was busy finding seed beads and fake pearls on the ground and bestowing them as gifts upon the beautiful.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

And so the Faerie Festival is focused on the whimsical side, the magic, the glitter and glamour. there’s something to be said for that. I rapidly fell in Love with the whole affair. There was traditional music, and then more progressive auditory flights of fancy. there were a couple of stalls selling the same old same old, but there were a LOT of really good artists creating things a little too odd or a little too creepy or a little too different to be found at the more typical festivals. All in all, the two days we spent at the Faerie Festival came together to be one of the favourite weekends known to rob.