Our stage at the Wayfaring Buckeye in Columbus, OH. 
Rolling into Columbus, OH we’re pleasantly surprised to find our friend Brandon in town! Last we heard he was out exploring the world with his wife – but he’s right back where we met him in one of our favourite towns!
I’m in a very doggy world of Love right now. After our show in New Albany, IN, we were taken home by a couple of fans, now friends, whose basic intro to
their home was “it’s a small house, and we’ve got four dogs… but it’s not like how it sounds”. And it’s not. When we got back to the house (before midnight! This is wonderful! I must be getting old!!!) you wouldn’t have known the dogs existed except for a strange, occasional *slurping* sound behind one of the walls – and it wasn’t until something snuffled me the next morning that the dogs made their presence known.
After the most polite dog-awakening I’ve ever had (Chauncy? Had sort of “whiskered” my face… no cold nose, no broadside lick… just an… approach, a little snortle, and the touch of fuzz on my cheek) I slowly focused to the fact that there were a number of large dogs all lined up in front of me. Not lined up IN FRONT, per se, but in a nice orderly line to GET to me. It was like they were all prepared to take turns in sampling the New. Well, I scroffled them one by one and tried to keep them from turning their attentions to the pseudo-still unconscious other 2/3s of ilyAIMY, but Chauncy especially was not to be put off and kind of clamboured over to first Heather and then Kristen before our hosts managed to re-corral everyone and lead them off.
Mostly.
Chauncy (if that IS her real name) is pretty recalcitrant and though not whiny or yappy, through a process of simply sitting down and being BIG in a way that made Gandhi and MLK seem raucous stuck it out and refused to leave the room. Eventually our host’s kid (who’s got to be outweighed by Chauncy by a good couple of pounds) sort of at least dragged her a couple of feet across the floor and pointed successfully away from us, but that was as far as she got. As I type, one mammal drifts past me in a characteristic doggy eternal optimism to see if the food dish has magically refilled itself… another dog is sitting outside in the mist and Chauncy maintains her vigil in the hope of belly rubs – which I had given her until I realized I couldn’t drink coffee and give vigorous skritchings at the same time. A slight scalding and a swift evaluation of my priorities and this dog had to take a backseat to the morning brew.
Sitting around with our friends around the fire, cooking hot dogs and smores in the backyard of the Wayfaring Buckeye in Columbus, OH. Had a funny conversation with one old friend who looked around said “you probably don’t get to do this much, do you?” – like the idea that we didn’t get to just relax and hangout much – he went on to say “I mean, I’m sure your Lives aren’t ALWAYS as glamourous as they seem”… sigh… is there glamour?!?!!? Coot Crabtree and I sharing a new-found Love of the amazing Sharon Lane as we all perform together as part of the Bloomington Songwriter Showcase at the Player’s Pub in Bloomington, IN. As a songwriter showcase we couldn’t invite Kristen up on the stage with us at Player’s Pub in Bloomington, IN – but that means she got to do some soul captcha. That’s Chris Wolf playing a tune on a very cool aluminium-top Martin. Highly questionable humour filtered through GENIUS. That’s Chris Wolf!
Kristen and Heather are still horizontal, if not actually asleep, and other than the whir of the fan, there’s no sounds here in Jacksonville, IN other than the ticking of dog claws across hardwood floors and the occasional doggy snore as Chauncy apparently falls asleep with her eyes open.
Today’s a day off and it’s been a nice way to start it. It’s been a long couple of days.
Sunday’s show at the Wayfaring Buckeye was beautiful and filled with friends and after the show we stayed up way too late around the campfire.
Mmm…. Doggie Style pet salon and White River Lubricants… two great tastes… driving into the country surrounding Bloomington, IN for a house concert we weren’t really sure what to expect. The roads got windy, the world got hilly and there’s naught but cornrows and cows – fortunately there was a sign!! Before the house concert there was an awesome jam, which lead to some incongruity re: fiddle bows and cello bows and ebows and knives. – the house concert in Bloomington, IN took place in a friend’s beautifully UNIQUE house. That’s one of the bathrooms there – wide and airy… I’d imagine feeling kind of LONESOME on that commode! Good thing for fishes!
Monday night’s show case at Player’s Pub was awesome – we were grouped up with some of the finest performers I’ve ever shared a stage with – Coot Crabtree and Chris Wolf and Sharon Lane were each stunning writers and combined with us made for a powerfully eclectic lineup of people that also just seemed to get along well. Before half the night was through we were jumping in on one another’s songs in a way that belied having just met… I feel in most “Nashville circles” (songwriters in the “round”, where 3 – 5 writers are all lined and one person plays after the other) when this happens, for as much as it looks really off-the-cuff its generally a sign of the performers knowing one another at LEAST by reputation – but in this case it was just a very swiftly-formed trust that I really appreciated. There was something about both Coot and Chris’ music that I found really intuitive and easy to play off of (of course, they’d chosen wisely and didn’t write anything in 11…)
Tuesday’s house concert – well – it upped the feeling of community from the previous night and kicked it up to 11. A jam ahead of the show got me realizing that Bloomington really is home to some really exquisite writers. The more I travel the more I realize that there really IS no end to our chosen art form (making the endlessly derivative sounds that I hear so often at festivals and on radio stations all the more unbearable) and the best of us are often just playing locally, never to be seen on a broader stage. Our performance was charming and powerful (I think!) and though by the end of the night I was feeling the stress of the lack of sound system, our audience was attentive and CLOSE and made our job easy. Incredible people that made me want to set the guitar down and listen to THEM instead.
The beautiful house that it was our HONOUR to fill with music – and below the full moon that we were under! Our friend Artem Bank posted a beautiful shot of the full moon the same night and there was a little bit of joy to be found in the fact that friends who were hundreds of miles were looking up at the same gorgeous sky…
Our host is a woman that’s probably got 15 or maybe even 25 years on me who sparkled, nimble climbing over couches to get to hidden niches in the house she’d designed. She works with archeological projects in South America and South East Asia and what artwork that was hanging in (and indeed WAS) the house that wasn’t HERS reflected a decidedly bohemian, world-spanning Life. A beautiful, willowy woman who I got to chatting with is visiting from Italy where she’s a lawyer helping define policy for third-world nation agriculture. She’s charming and funny and… “oh, I’m also a physician and a dancer”… in my head : “And played by Audrey Hepburn in her prime!” These were not the people I expected to be meeting out in rural Indiana…
Last night at Wick’s Live in New Albany was back to the bar-gig grind, but made much easier by having the same marvelous soundguy we’d had last time we were in town : Nate makes our Lives really easy, makes us sound even better than we are, and Loves mixing us. It shows. The pizza’s great and we had actually 4 or 5 tables there for the music. In a smaller room it would’ve looked impressive. Unfortunately, after our own audience had filtered down some (we’re awesome – but are we three-hours-on-hard-chairs-in-a-bar awesome? – most people find us TWO-hours-on-hard-chairs-in-a-bar awesome and I’m okay with that) all three of us sort of hit a fatigue wall. I think we’d played HARD and STRONG for the last three nights with five hour drives every day, little sleep… the bar had opened the outside walls to let the sultry air in, the pizza was beginning to digest AND the audience synergy had gone from 11 to about a 3 – yeah, we ran HARD and STRONG – right into a wall of fatigue! We played slow for a little while and then finished strong with perhaps the best version of Old Love we’ve ever played … I don’t remember the last time I was so grateful to have a short drive after a show. Yay for subtly dog-filled heavens / havens in Southern Indiana. [Kentuckiana]
As part of Heather’s upcoming Heather disc, I got to spatter her with paint and take pictures. T’was quite enjoyable! (July 1st in Bloomington, IN)
