I remembered thinking, right as we were racing the setting sun home from California, PA this last time, about how the landscape surprised me. Traveling the way we do has a habit of detaching you from the seasons. You miss the first flutter of one, the final gasp of another. There were still little isolated patches of color then, like birthday candles missed in that first wishing exhale, dotting an otherwise chocolate landscape. But they didn’t survive a second blow, and the white icing and chill in the house that I can’t seem to escape anywhere except the rumbling laundry room are the signs that winter is really here.
It always amuses me that winter is the time I have to send out all the press kits to be considered for summer festival bookings (By the way, if any of the fans out there know a great local festival to them that we should play, e-mail me.). Even with those applications in front of me, I can’t remember how warm it was late May in Texas, or how humid it was in pre-Katrina New Orleans. They say 40 percent of downtown is still without power. I wonder about our hostel, the Asian Pacific Café. The couple that owns one of the coffeehouses sends out e-mail updates about the rebuilding to their mailing list, which I find VERY informative. I’m so personally torn about whether they should have Mardi Gras. Yes, it is in somewhat poor taste considering the state of the city and it’s people, but in a way, the tourism dollars might be the ONLY way to actually get some money into the local government to start rebuilding, helping those very people to whom the party is a kind of insult, and to remind outsiders once again that the place is still standing, still there, that there are still people in need in it. I wonder if it would be more or less popular . the novelty of being able to say you were there, at the first Mardi Gras the city had in the aftermath an added appeal, maybe?
We too are kind of drawing in a big breath right now, which is why we’re not writing much. Everything is all preparation. Work in the studio progresses. Our most recent session completed all the guitar and vocal basic tracking for the songs. Less than a handful of recording additions remain. We have two mixing sessions scheduled for this week, and I’m looking to post the last five songs to ebay by the end of the week – Just in time for New Years.
Damn, that reminds me, I only have a few days to learn me a couple Christmas/Channukah songs on guitar .I also gotta say I’m still a little glowy over the New Deal Show, which might have been one of the best gigs we have ever played. Gina DeSimone and her fantastic trumpet/harmonica player were a great fit as an opening act, and it’s really refreshing to see a woman play guitar like she does – not flash, but true elegance and suave subtlety.
And we … we were funny, and we played really well … and I made someone cry, and we all learned you should never leave chocolate unattended for more than about two hours. Jeff rocks for coming out and doing sound for us. The New Deal rocks for expanding. I love my bandmembers, respect them all as musicians, like them all as people.
All of it’s a good thing, I promise. I didn’t make someone cry because I ate their chocolate or anything.
