Listening to We’re About 9, Beyonce and Ani Difranco as we fly down the highway in Connecticut. The world is lush and green and vibrant – and everything fit in one car. I think we left our pillows behind, but everything else worked, and really we could’ve squeezed the pillows in.
It was good to have the band-solidarity night of “who’s snore is whose?” but from here on out – I think it’s time for earplugs at night. The gig tonight was kind of delicious, though not 100%. As always with the bar gigs, there are moments when you just want to kill some central group that is louder than you can ever imagine being (even though you’ve got the mic) and at times watching videos with loud soundtracks. I almost got pissed enough to say something (and maybe I’d be a lot further along in my career if I made it more of a habit to attack people) but generally had my own problems with distortion coming through the mains through the first set.
Once I realized what was happening I was ADDITIONALLY pissed at myself for not noting the problem earlier and fixing it. I’d heard some distortion but my head had immediately gone to problems that I COULDN’T solve so I didn’t look at it through the lens of problems that I COULD solve. Later on, especially with a favourite sound guy in the audience, I was kind of mortified. It wasn’t a blown speaker (surely that was the case – I mean, it’s not coming through the OTHER speaker that way, is it? [it was]) it wasn’t a damaged microphone (wasn’t I having a similar issue with one of these mics, and isn’t it only on the vocals? [maybe, but not quite the same – and of course because the vocals were the hottest thing in the mix!]) – near the end of the first set I’d formulated a different theory of what was awry (gain staging in the ONE place where nothing lights up if you overdrive it) and sure enough, in between sets I solved the problem and the last two sets we sounded as good as we’ve ever sounded in that room. I was just really pissed at myself for fucking up the first set…
Sigh. Anywho – we played our hearts out, had a good time and won some new fans, introduced Rowan to a lot of old fans – and then headed back to our friend Dave’s house to crash. He had texted us a bunch of last-minute instructions that were invaluable as we exhaustedly stumbled into his beautiful house – quite literally cause we were THAT tired – we came up the uneven (it’s not finished!) path thankful of the (just installed) little faerie lights and we went downstairs and tumbled into bed. Tis a very, very good night.
