Audrye Sessions

Our good friends Audrye Sessions are having a CD release at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco this Saturday. The album is amazing and I'm dead serious when I speculate that it will be all over the radio and MTV and such in a couple months.

We'll be there, so come say hello.

in w/ spin

For the Spin.com Book Club we just discussed Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Its not my favorite book by him but it's a great read! You can check out the highlights of our discussion here!



Also check out the Blog section at Spin.com for most of my Journal entries from the last month. They've been posted there.

Rust and Dust and Bile

We have a Friday night off – there is something wrong with that - I’m pretty sure that’s the night people go to shows. Oh well...

We’re caravanning through Western TX with Thunderbirds, making what is generally the most aggravating and seemingly endless drive in the country breeze by painlessly as they follow behind our trailer in their red Ford, stopping for gas and snacks and meals and beer and hotels with us. One at a time they will ride in our van for a section of the drive, enjoying our AC and nicely breaking up the monotony of our inter-van interactions, adding some new humor and conversation to our sits at truck-stop diners.

Eastern New Mexico is generally one of the most beautiful stretches that we pass through. I recall one morning last summer watching the sun rise over the plateaus, illuminating all those deep red rock formations and endless plains, hitting its peak as we crossed the Texas border where the palette of the landscape immediately took on hues of rust and dust and bile. Though today, I must admit, it wasn’t so bad out the window once the accents and road signs changed over with the state line. There was a faint piece of rainbow above one rest area and the shrubs are still lush with the waning spring. We pulled over on the side of the highway to switch drivers and the crickets were chattering something wonderful.

Austin tomorrow! I think everyone is excited, though Dallas better be sympathetic to our hangovers on Sunday.

my blog on spin.com

I'm splitting time this month posting here and in Spin.com's Blog Section. New posts are up there twice a week.

BFD

preconceived notions

There’s been a lot of driving in the last few days and very little internet. In fact, pretty much every day in June so far has been mostly filled with driving. We hauled from Oakland to Lawrence without a hotel, sleeping for a few hours at rest areas. After flying home from New York, I spent one day back in Oakland, crashing at my folks place, then met the guys in the same liquor store parking lot as always and took off. You lose any attachment to time in three days of constant driving. There is not a moment where it makes more sense to be either asleep or awake. I don’t know where the time goes, it just… goes.

Getting to travel and perform all the time, there are a lot of moments that pass by which you have spent a lengthy time building up in your head beforehand. When we play an important show, reach a new milestone of some sort, or in this case start a new tour, I collect so many preconceived notions of what the event will be like, I’ll even create a vision of what the setting and various new people will look like in my mind so I can better play out what may or may not go down.

Of course, each time I build something up, the moment comes and obliterates all my preconceived notions. Life passes through it and I’ll be a day or two down the road before I realize that the special event, in which I had allowed myself to become so emotionally enveloped, is gone. What was once a coming context with numerous possibilities is now solidified into a memory. Unalterable, forever gone. The decisions were made however they were made, the situation played out as it played out. Usually that realization is interesting to compare with my imagined version, but sometimes its hard to give it up – you can get attached, I guess, and sometimes the buildup is more satisfying than the actual experience.

Anyway, I had little notion of how this tour would be, and as a whole I have no idea how it will end up. Its been a little more difficult than I had expected, but we have never shared a touring bill with bands that we have connected with faster than Thunderbirds Are Now! and The Junior Varsity. We’re all hanging out in Las Vegas tomorrow for our night off, after only three days on the road together. That’s sort of unheard of and pretty awesome in our book. Tonight my preconceived notion of Kilby Court, an wonderful little shack of a venue in Salt Lake was shattered, but only aesthetically. So many bands that I’ve followed in the past few years have played there, but none of our SLC shows have ever been booked there. It certainly lived up to its praise though, and playing in a little room full of people who know the words is such relief after a nine hour drive.

I’ll update soon. For now I have a nice green carpeted floor to crash out on.