June 25th, 2019
Sorry, this is one of those photo-laden catch-up posts. Be strong. You’ll make it. First-off, Tuesday morning we woke up for our last morning at Steve’s boathouse. I went upstairs during my thorough idiot-check and regretted we hadn’t spent more of our indoors time in the little nook upstairs.
Steve only had the house through (checks watch) TODAY so literally this is the last time ANY of us will be staying here. T’was very, very good while it lasted!
Whut whut? CRT TV!!! Farewell deck! Only one postcard from the Concert Window show – it’s getting mailed TODAY in the little blue box next door to Wild Honey Cafe – we came back here every morning for coffee cause we COULD!
Tuesday night…
From Westport, MA we drove over to our friend Neale’s house and met up with Matt Nakoa who’s Neale’s long-term house guest. We went on a long, sweaty walk and generally enjoyed ourselves… got a little bit but fortunately not by anything pictured below.
Meep! You know, guitars and the Marx Brothers. Matt leads us into the wilderness. A denizen of the wild!!! Snake! Frog!
Wednesday – June 26th, 2019.
We spent the day bumming around the house, fooling with camera gear, practicing for tomorrow’s show at the Burren, and eventually getting ourselves together to go and play Laura and Jonny’s coffeehouse, the Serendipity Cafe, over in Maynard, MA.
It’s a great day even though we probably didn’t accomplish QUITE as much as we wanted to!
Neale shows off some Photoshop plug-ins… Putting together the stage plot for tomorrow’s show… it turned out to be woefully incomplete. Setting up at Serendipity Cafe. Loving the sun on my toys! It’s LIKE the Heather mobile hath arrived from orbit! Hoiy crap – the Hobsons made us another cake!!! VEGAN CHOCOLATE CAKE WITH OUR LOGO!!! A beautiful evening in Maynard. One of our new fans did some quick drawings of me while we played! Practicing at Neale’s place, prepping for the morrow!
June 27th, 2019.
The morrow! Tonight we play at the Burren in Somerville, MA. A good room that we haven’t played in about seven years with an AMAZING musician almost 10 years to the day after we first met him. The tunes we play with Matt Nakoa tonight were… about the best versions of themselves they’ll ever be able to be. T’was an incredible night to a pretty packed room.
Tom’s drinkables – Tom couldn’t be with us tonight (another gig) but he was there in a form that we could put our mouths on. I picked up a daggit at the toy store across the street!!!! The stage is… not ready… but looks nice! Matt Nakoa kicking off the night! ilyAIMY kicking the night in the ears in their balls! Or something. Matt rockin’ with ilyAIMY. Thanks to Crystal Huff for coming out – good to see her outside of the sweaty, sweaty confines of the Lost and Found Tent at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival! After the Burren show we come home to one of MY favourite friends – Bo!
Friday, June 28th, 2019.
These three gigs – one right after the other – have been really a LOT more fun than I’d expected. All of them were very, very different, all of them were stressful in their own ways, and all of them were a LOT of fun once we were in motion. The whole week has been very rough, a lot of things seemed like they were more effort than they should’ve been. Close-to-band-breaking moments, quite frankly – but each gig fed a different part of the soul.
Wednesday at Serendipity, the small but FERVENT crowd headed up by the owner’s themselves – not only baking us a cake, not only baking us a cake with our LOGO on it, not ONLY doing that but making us ilyChili out of our own cookbook… AND opening their cafe to us and bringing us a crowd and… it was just a beautiful night.
Thursday night – all the stress of making that show happen was really, really worthwhile. I had to do some pretty aggressive band-momming, but it all came together and the show itself contained some of our finest moments on stage…
And then tonight in Stoughton, MA – playing OUTDOORS for the first time at SHOB meant that we controlled our space in a way that we’d never been able to do before… meaning that people were confronted with a LISTENING ROOM environment and were … silent. I mean, it was probably the most attentive room of the whole week! A far cry from the usual SHOB crush of barroom chaos!
For a tour that started off with its heart being ripped out – the two centre gigs gone – it came together really, really well.
Stoughton House of Brews – is it a good idea to play outside? Yes. Yes it is.
Saturday, June 29th, 2019.
We’d SORT of planned to have a gig tonight, but I’m SORT of glad we didn’t make it happen. The drive home was plagued by traffic and weather and weather-inspired traffic. But we made it!
Car Tetris… GO! Lola, don’t even act like you’ll miss us you angry, angry animal. Ah! A beautiful day for a drive! Or a roller coaster… Or… oh. And it MIGHT be a dragon… Or weather… … but this too shall pass.
