September 29th, 2011.

Last night we played the first of the shows we’ve booked through NACA (National Association of College Activities) and it was marvelous.  Not that that has anything to do with NACA, per se.  It had everything to do with the wonderful students we worked with and performed for – a bunch of warm and beautiful humans who made us feel welcomed and at home, who Loved the music as much as we Loved performing it, who signed up on the mailing list and even laughed at our jokes.  In short, the perfect audience.

It’s everything we could’ve asked for – except a closer parking space – but they helped us carry our stuff, so it’s all good. 

The drive up to Plattsburgh was absolutely stunning with partially sunny skies and dramatic clouds rolling in over the mountains and off onto the water.  We haven’t seen too much evidence of the coming autumn or the recent passing of Irene but then again, we’re not sure of what it’s SUPPOSED to look like.  We took a ferry over Lake Champlain and rolled onto campus with time to spare, relaxed at our hotel room for an hour and then made our way over to the school to find a good-sized room for us with comfy-looking chairs and a decent stage and some of my favourite speakers set up for us to growl through.

And growl we did.  Despite some boominess on stage and a really, really Live room (Heather asked Patrick, our soundguy, to cut out the reverb and he replied that he wasn’t using any) the sound in the house was absolutely killer – the soundguy liked the rockin’ and wasn’t afraid to loud us up even in a “coffeehouse” setting.  Striking a chord in the second set got an answering cheer from an audience that truly appreciated the richness of a good, solid drop-D power-chord.

Recently I’ve been kind of afraid of college audiences because, quite frankly, I keep getting older and they stay the same age.  In our initial introduction to the college scene that wasn’t such a big deal, but now we’re playing to humans who were BORN the year I graduated HIGH SCHOOL and I’m overly conscious of playing an Ememem song from when they were perhaps about 10 years old and making references to the Indigo Girls who arguably reached the peak of their popularity before this audience was even born… Hell, even the “pop culture” of my Aqua Teen Hunger Force t-shirt is from before any of these guys were in their teens… this separation is only going to get more and more extreme and I’m realizing that I’m going to have to stay a little more on top of current music unless I want to resign myself to token pop songs that Heather pops into our favourite originals.  Though Led Zeppelin went over really well, I’ve got to figure out how to approach some stuff that “the kids” are listening to in order to stamp my personality on our current library of covers.

Maybe I can mousse my hair over my forehead to make it look kind of emo?

All of my fears vanished with this show though and the SUNY populace actually didn’t make me feel too old.  If anything, we seemed to strike a real fine balance between being experienced and inspirational, and relating to students who be into the retro: I mean, there was one guy with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle hat, a woman with a Mario Brothers keychain, and someone said “rad”.  They were great to talk to and they were a lot of fun – full of the enthusiasm that I crave out of an audience… I wish we’d had more time in Plattsburgh because the whole time we were in the area it felt like exploration – whether it was meeting the SUNYites or watching Lake Champlain for Champ while riding the ferry or simply watching the clouds roll in off the mountains, this drive to the northern edge of the U.S. (we came within 15 miles of Canada) has felt more like an adventure than any of our touring has for quite some time.

Now we’re winding our way back out of the Adirondacks (I keep wondering what trees around me are spruces) and headed first to Saratoga Springs and then south to Putnam, CT to stay with the owner of Victoria Station Café.  The drive is absolutely beautiful, interrupted by squalls of rain and HERE we’re seeing hints of colour and splashes of fall – it’s unfortunate to realize that this whole area’s probably going to explode into autumnal colour in the next week or so and that we’re missing it by so short a time…. But temporal hairs are what we’re missing a couple of things by: the Troubadours of Divine Bliss, friends from Louisville, KY, are in Plattsburgh tonight – we’ll just miss Kelly Zullo (though we just saw her in Indianapolis, and I think I’m just getting over catching her cold) as well and of course we’re just over the border from Ember Swift’s home, but she’s with Kelly in any case – WE were just in Fairfax, where Ash and sahffi were tonight and they had a couple of fans mention us in passing and the mandolin player from Pesky J Nixon is visiting the Baltimore Aquarium at my suggestion… I want a version of Google’s Latitude just for me and my musician friends, watching one another thread our paths around this incredible country, tangling past one another and making more of a point of actually tying up with one another a bit more often so we can chat and hug and gripe about brands of strings and microphones that smell like beer and soundguys that can’t get to a show on time to save their Lives and GPSs that say “toll road” when they mean “get on a boat and cross a monster-infested lake”.

You know – labour issues.

The rain’s picking up here.  We’ve stopped in the familiar warmth of a Panera Bread in Queensbury, NY about half-an-hour shy of where we’re playing tonight.  Lightning is fingering the horizon – and not in a seductive way – this is the stabby stabby kind that is overly eager.  It’s going to be a cold, wet night.