People gathered to save me tonight. A rough night at the Velvet Lounge in DC. Though the sound was pretty nice, and at this point I’m realizing that even on our worst nights we tend to blow people away, I was moody and angry. I don’t know if it was simply a swing of my emotional needle or lack of the right sugar or something legitimate eating at my insides, some people said the wrong things and I played some of the wrong things and in my soul the gig tonight hurt.
The audience Loved it, and that soothes me a little bit, but I know my emotional state can be so precarious after a gig – after all the anger and the ferocity of pouring myself through my little sieve of strings, I’m always fragile and brittle.
On top of all the weird emotional turmoil I kept playing things the way Heather and I play them on the road, forgetting to let Sharif start songs, or Rowan, or whatever. I was embarrassed everytime I did it, and embarassment always fucks with my head.
The sound was great – Brennan did a great job setting everything up, and actually Brennan got me through the gig by coming to the front during Counting and dancing the way I imagine people dancing during that song. A threshing tremor of flesh echoing back the frustration and hatred in that song. It’s a song about hatred and wanting to hurt. There’s redemption in it, but the redemption is long gone, and now it’s simply about the useless people clogging the streets. All the hippie jam-band kids who like usso much WOULDN’T if they listened to the lyrics. Too damned dark. I wish we’d played Chalk Pit tonight. That would’ve been quite satisfying.
