St. Louis, Missouri.
We’re driving along I-70 westbound right now, the last full day of driving. We should be home in Boulder by late afternoon.
Nice arch. (St. Louis)
We had a fun show in Kansas City last night, where we met a lot of great people. We had heard from friends about a gourmet burger place up the street from the venue, and we decided to go try it out. It’s called “Blanc,” and we all left there agreeing that they were by far and away the best burgers we’d ever eaten in our lives. They also served onion rings and sweet fries in little shopping carts. Yep.
Blanc (Kansas City, MO)
Jay & Anton enjoying their gourmet patties.
the “american kobe burger”
cart o’ fries
Beers and his cart o’ fries.
Our waiter ended up coming over to our show a couple of hours later, and after the set told us that we can consider ourselves having a free place to stay any time we come through Lawrence or Kansas City, as he lives in the area and has a big place with room for our van and trailer, plenty of sleeping space, laundry machines, etc. It’s one of our favorite things about tour – meeting so many kind and generous people. We’ve seen it this entire trip.
We played an hour set, opening with the new “D9” tune. Here’s how the setlist panned out:
D9
Turn My Egg
I’ll Race Ya
Story Of…
Eoghan, Late Saturday
View From Way Up Here
Obey –>
Life During Wartime
We met another band on tour out of Detroit, super nice guys and we traded tour stories for an hour or so… then split for Topeka, KS, about an hour away. Stayed in Topeka at a hotel that apparently had zero insulation in its walls. Our rooms were a steady 45 degrees all night, and no one wanted to get out from under their covers this morning. We got on the road at 8:30am, warmed up by some Hunt Brothers Breakfast Pizza from the gas station next to the hotel.
downtown Kansas City, Missouri
The Riot Room (Kansas City, MO)
our parking luck continues… 15′ load in – Kansas City, MO
Loading in (Kansas City, MO)
Russ & Beers at the Riot Room
“give me tense.”
“give me thoughtful.”
Jay breaks character.
We’re all bittersweet about being back in Colorado… it’s great to see our families and sleep in our own beds, but it’s also a bummer to not be continuing on to new cities and new audiences tomorrow and the next day and the next…
Our big excitement for the next 90 days is to get back into the studio and record the new album for release in March. Should be a fun experience, and we learned a lot from the recording of This Room Becomes A Crowd, so it should be a bit more efficient this time around. We’ve got a lot of good material to work with in the way of new songs, too. Looks like all but one of the songs will be brand new tunes. Good times.
An observation to close out this post… we’ve literally been with eachother 24 hours a day for the last two weeks, much of that time spent in a 7′ x 15′ space in a van, bouncing along potholed highways and sitting stopped in traffic jams… and yet we’re all still laughing and joking and enjoying eachothers’ company at the end of the trip. We’ve all played in other bands, and we all agree that the chemistry and camaraderie in this group is unlike any other we’ve experienced. It’s an incredible project to be a part of, and we’re only at the beginning of it..
Hasta for now…