

After Louisville we drove long and hard down to Nashville, TN. Nashville’s a special place. I don’t really mean that in a nice way. It’s a little better than it used to be simply because we know a lot of people in the area, both old friends like Whitney (Hell, my first real girlfriend!) to not-quite-so-old-but-still-old friends like Tony Liaolo (from 2005 back when we were finalists at Kerrville) to the slowly expanding circle of road-warriors that we’d met more recently like Louise Mosrie and Blair Bodine from Falcon Ridge – and they were all there! We even had friends from Maryland show up… admittedly because Sandy had kept them from getting home from their high school reuinion – but I’ll take their presence no matter the reason!
Nashville, Music City USA – not to be mistaken for Catonsville, which is merely Music City, MD. What do I think of this town? It’s a mechanical industry built around the manipulation and realization of dreams and passions. Contracts built around how well we can capitalize on other people’s lowest-common-denominator tragedy.
For ours econd night in Lousville, KY we take some friends’ advice and pop in to Alanna Fugate’s open mic over at the Corner Door Bar. I greatly approve of this open mic list. Happy day-before-the-day-before-Halloween at the Corner Door Demon Corn Open Mic in Louisville, KY! I clearly don’t fancy-up my own open mic lists enough! Alanna kicking off the night. Matt Presley, the Bard in Blue is currently the Bard in Black for a second day of Halloween-themed open mic fun. But a daemon’s gotta drink! (at Alanna Fugate’s open mic at the Corner Door Bar & Grill in Lousville, KY). Okay, Halloween is a damned interesting time to have one’s open mic. I sort of regret being away from my own (except Teavolve got washed out this Monday) – but here at the Corner Door Bar and Grill in Louisville, KY, the weirdness is in full force. Homini and Gris (above and below) never counts as “normal” but they are charmingly bizarre. I wasn’t completely prepared for her to whip the horn off her head and play it – butshe was a one eyed, one HORNED flying purple people eater after all…. Dan Bowlds performing. Matthew Presley (divested of ghoulish attire) lounges with Charles and Alex, new and inspirational friends from the open mic. Unfortunatley we could stick around for this bear and doumbek duo, but I did listen into their practice for a while…. cause you LISTEN when bears play guitar!
There are great songwriters here – but there’s a commonality to almost all of them that I find it difficult to ignore. There are great musicians here – but the same thing applies. There is so much to learn here, but I think a lot of people learn the WRONG things.


Fortunately we’re not here to dally and the only contact we have is with those writers that we really enjoy, so I can sort of forget that for a while and just bask in the wonder that is the people that we know and admire here. We go to a great coffeehouse, we see a great weenerie, we enjoy the scenery and even the venue we play has a different sort of edge to it: the Family Wash is one of them family-friendly bars or something, and almost every table in the place has at least one infant strapped in at least one of the chairs.
The show itself is typically Nashvillian. Stoic and unresponsive, they act like they’ve seen it all before and quite frankly, maybe they have. After the gig I hear from a couple of friends that they wish they could’ve heard better – that despite the loud-as-shit monitors our impression of our volume was completely unrealistic and we just bled into the background…
I hate that. It’s something to fix, not simply to grimace through – but people are so fucking polite. Can’t be havin’ with that. No matter. We don’t have time to stick around and hash out the details. I can’t even chat with Whitney though I’ve got a nephew and she wants to know more and she’s got a kid and I want to know more… we haven’t seen one another in far too long and she’s hard to read and I miss her… and there’s at least four people in the room that I could spend an hour or so with just chatting and catching up –
But we’re driving to Saint Louis tonight. Heather wants to celebrate her 32nd birthday clambouring around in the bowels of Bob Cassilly’s greatest creation and … well I can’t say I blame her. If there’s anything that’ll keep you young it’s the realization that places like the City Museum can and do exist.
Well – I say place”s”. There’s nothing else out there like the City Museum. But if we had managed to get out the door within moments of getting off stage in Tennessee we could’ve been in bed by 3am… but by now it’s taken us half an hour to get out the door and we still need to get gas…