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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!