Man, the sleepy has me. I’m not sure how or why but the last couple of days I’ve simply felt exhausted the whole day through. Maybe I’m not standing up to the travel as well as I used to, but I’ve been drowsey-eyed from waking up to breaking down and we’ve still got 45 miles to go. Thank goodness Heather likes to drive.
Today we just sort of bummed around with Shane, walking to hunt down an Indian brunch in the Philadelphia snows. It was really good to see him, and fun to just babble. He’s infinitely comfortable and I admire his ease-of-self. It’s something that I will continue to fake until I make.
The show at Burlap and Bean was fun, but plagued with technical issues. The soundcheck was flawless, the soundguy great – and we were playing through some of my favourite speakers ever – but once the show kicked off the guitars started misbehaving, there was a weird distorted rattle in the low-end of my guitar (I think this was something in the room, but it’ll worry me until we land for long enough that I can check it out), there were some cello cable pops, a horrible breakdown in a mic (actually turned out to be the cable – a result of catching it under the stool and neatly and very precisely crushing it)… Ethan’s guitar had some sort of string issue too (he said one of the strings started unraveling on him during a song!), tuners LIED…. There was only one thing we could do to bring ORDER back into the night and that was (of course) a big ensemble version of “Superstition”!
Whew. I think that whenever I’m having a rough day, or whenever ANYTHING goes wrong Pesky J. Nixon should whip in out of NOWHERE and we’ll all break into Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”. It’s just so much fun, tossing solos back and forth and seeing how things turn out THIS time. They remind me a lot of what I initially found so very compelling about music: this other language privy to the performers, listening and playing back and playing around with the ever-changing LIVENESS of it all. The Living THING that is a Live performance that will never quite happen the same way twice.
Dare I say it? Yup, I Live for the jam.
