I’ve spent most of this trip sitting in Victoria Station in Putnam, CT, one of my favorite little towns, watching the same people go in and out that we’ve seen go in and out every day for three days. One day, the exact same people were all there on their laptops, just shifted a single table to the left. It’s the College Perk of the north, just with chandaliers. If Perk is New Orleans, Victoria Station is Savannah.
We become honorary regulars at places like this. Two people walked through and excitedly asked us if we were playing. I like that.
“Sweet Home Alabama” seems weird to be playing through the speakers, but the owner is an old rock dj. We’re spending our nights in town actually staying at his house up the hill, and I’ve been enjoying my 15-minute walks to myself that take me from the door of his (surprise) Victorian house to the coffeeshop after I wake up in the morning. I need to live close to something worth walking to or biking to.
Show the other night went not as well as I expected and then turned around to be better than I expected. We had to stay quiet for the dinner crowd. The following night, the demands of the gig were completely different and we would have to rock as hard as we could. But frankly, it was one of the most disappointing nights ever. We got to see our friends, White Rose Confession, which was great. But the sound system had been trashed by the previous night’s bands, we wound up playing through the monitors for PAs and they patched the system in the middle of our set. We played really well, but it was unecessarily angst-ridden. I stood outside most of the night gleaning the life story of the food vendor, which all started with him selling jello shooters years ago to get into a concert, later driving to Maine to pick up an old donut truck he bought on Ebay while dodging the local Jesus-freak in her holy roller sticker-covered cross mobile.
I’ve been struggling to figure out where I fit in musically in the world, not confident enough to just say, “This is what I do and you can file it where you like.” No, I’m too much of a business person, and my desire to please everyone seeps into this business in one simple way: I don’t want people to disregard us because of a preconceived notion. One song can no more define what rob and I do than The Green Mile could define Stephen King. We need people’s attention for a set. We need that much of a chance from people. And so I frequently feel like I’m striving for people to just give us a chance to impress them, touch them, affect them as much as I think we can. For example, I’ve uploaded a couple new songs to my experimental myspace site, http://www.myspace.com/upholsteredfortress, trying to get some feedback on whether Draw You In and Turn the Weather On might have a place in the ilyAIMY setlist. I’m all too aware that I’m not writing enough for use with the band … and I want to contribute. I want to feel like I’m pulling my creative weight since I can’t do any fancy instrument work.
Life in the middle is hard. I want to feel like I belong somewhere, which is not something I’ve felt strongly in a very long time. Victoria Station will be a show where we can do what we like, and people will listen either way. This week offers some other possibilities where that might be the case, too.
