One of the best ilyAIMY shows EVER – June 5th at Villain and Saint. Rowan surprised us by being able to stick around an extra weekend and we had a full six-piece on stage at this brand new venue in Bethesda, MD. Here is Kristen finishing off the band signature in the green room.

We’re crossing the Connecticut River and we are hot, exhausted, dusty, gritty and beat. Yesterday morning we got up relatively early in Philadelphia, PA, piled into the car and drive for five hours to arrive JUST in time for our set at Particle Accelerator. Hot, sweaty and sore we then piled BACK into the car and drove to Providence to play a bar show that basically had financed the weekend. Two hours there, we broke down and drove back to Putnam where despite a desire to be social we crashed by 2am and slept soundly till it was time to spring back into action with a noon o’clock load in over in Plainfield, CT. Three-hour gig our in sunshine, another breakdown and another 2.5 hour drive has us in our current raggedy state.

Yeah – cold shower. Except I don’t even want to have to stand up. A cold bath. That’s what I really want.

This weekend has basically been all about Particle Accelerator, and then I booked some things around the area to fund our travels. Good times have been had, but a weekend trip is NOT the way to do New England, and we’re definitely feeling the miles.

Rockin out at Villain & Saint.

The first headlights came into view and with a road they rolled past at ABOUT 30mph or so. A seemingly never-ending parade of motorcycles – majority American Harleys but with a couple of Japanese bikes and crazy custom steeds thrown in for good measure. Probably the most memorable was some kind of bright yellow trike that had been built out of an old hacked Mustang. They rolled past for a full 10 minutes, which, if my math is correct, rolling at 30mph a mile’s worth of motorcycles must’ve passed every two minutes, right? So that’s at least FIVE MILES of motorcycles!

We THOUGHT we were in for a leisurely morning, but at 11.45am we got a text from our friend Russ informing us that it’s Flag Day and that the road in front of Hank’s Dairy Bar was going to get closed at noon to let the bikers go through… with no time to spare, we hit the gas and managed to be the last car allowed on the road, with a cop dropping an orange cone inches behind the ilyMobile. People were lining the road waving flags and we rolled into Hank’s within minutes of hearing the rapidly growing growl of the approaching bikes.

The first weekend of June proved to be really intense. The show at Villain and Saint was awesome – it was also long, high-energy and late. We got back home a little after two in the morning and had a 10.15am load-in in Frederick the next morning – and so it was with pounding heads and scroffled souls we kicked off another two hour set at the Frederick Festival of the Arts in Frederick, MD. Though part of me knows that we were exhausted, I’m also heartily aware that we were in the zone. This was helped by the fact that we had an entire dance troupe use us as something to warm up to – Friday and Good Heart and many other of our more boogie-able tunes were accompanied by everything from ballet to the Centipede under the hot Frederick sun. I’m still not entirely believing that there’s no video of this….

After the steel stampede, we got everything set up and ready to roll and played to a nice little crowd. The new stage at Hank’s looks great and FELT great and over the course of three 45-minute sets we played to kids and parents and dogs and a chipmunk and bikers and biker babes and everything in-between. We even played to an old friend who had been the girlfriend of the guy who’d inspired Heather to play djembe over a decade ago!

Well – we’ve still got an hour and a half of driving into the setting sun ahead of us before we get to sit still – and then I’ll have to INSIST upon entering the Moisture Chamber before I should be allowed in polite company. Even if the company’s NOT polite I probably shouldn’t be allowed on the furniture till after SOME level of ablutions. At the moment I think I’m so soiled you could grow plants in my wrinkles.

upComing & inComing

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