May 2009

Greetings again from I-70. We’re calling this interstate our “long driveway” to our homes… we’ve been on it since Ohio, and we’ll be on it until we exit for our neighborhoods at home in Colorado. We’re about 4.5 hours from home as I write this… and about 50 miles from Prairie Dog Town!  (see 2008 Road Journal for reference)

We had a fun show last night at the Canoe Club, with a nice attentive room for most of the show, and plenty of copies of the album distributed. Good dinner, too. We love the gigs where dinner is included on top of our compensation (and not taken out of it).

All in the all the tour was really good for us – great camaraderie for the band, more hours logged playing live and tightening our sets, lots of exposure to new ears, great networking and friendship with Keller Williams and crew, and a chance to see a good chunk of the country. We’re looking at a Pacific Northwest tour for August, a West Coast tour (San Diego and north) in September, and a return to the East Coast in October, along with shows in Colorado in between. We’ll rekindle the Road Journal for those… in the meantime, check back over the next week or so as we retroactively add the rest of our photos into the posts below.

Anton leaves for Ireland tomorrow (back to back trips!), so I’ll be working on Backstage content for much of this week, and starting vocal recordings for the new album we’re planning to release this summer.

Thanks for traveling with us!

Greetings from I-70. We’re en route from Ohio to Lake Latawana, Missouri. The weather is actually quite nice right now, blue skies with some clouds and sun, and dry roads. Woo hoo. We woke up at 8am on the nose this morning and we were pulling out of town by 8:30am, so we’re making good time to hopefully be able to relax a little bit before the show tonight.

It’s incredible how many windfarm machinery delivery trucks we’ve seen on the interstates on this trip – giant trucks moving giant pieces of machinery (usually blades from the wind turbines). We drove through a huge wind farm up near the Canadian border in Vermont, probably 100 turbines covering 300-400 acres of farmland. Just drove past three more trucks with blades as I was writing this sentence. Pretty neat. Hopefully the technological challenges of transporting the energy from the windmills will be figured out in this decade.

We just read the “Best of Boulder” list of winners from the Boulder Weekly magazine online, and the winner is an acapella group called “Face.” It was nice to see a talented group win it… the guys can definitely sing (and beat box). The down side is that they do 100% cover songs… so we’re back to the same issue again – making a successful career doing original music is damn tough. Form a cover band or play other people’s music from a laptop and you’ll fill venues. At one of the clubs we played this week, I was talking to the owner and he was saying that they’ve been forced to do live music only 3 days a week due to lack of people wanting to see live music, and that two of the nights are cover bands, and the other is a DJ (playing top 40 stuff)… and that he hates it. “It’s all the same shite,” he said. Amen, brother.

We’re cruising towards Indianapolis… just coming into the East side of the city. I’ll post another update later… hope you’re all enjoying your Saturday.

Hello from Ohio. The guys are all asleep and I’m about to hit the rack myself, just thought I should get an update up here on the Road Journal before the day is done. We’re staying in the little cottage that the owners of Peach’s venue provide to touring artists. We stayed here last fall when playing Peach’s, and this has to be one of our favorite stops on tours. The venue has incredible sound, an incredible sound guy (Tom), and some of the nicest staff in the world. Everyone is so accommodating and grooving during the sets, etc… and then to cap it off with a stay here in the little house is awesome.

We had a good drive from Virginia to Yellow Springs, decent weather the entire way until the last 30-40 minutes. We hit a thunderstorm “soaker” that dumped several inches of rain on I-70, leaving us struggling to see the hood of the van while driving well under the speed limit. Not ideal travel conditions, and evidently we’re in for more of the same on the way to the last show of the tour in Kansas. We’ve lucked out with weather the entire trip, so I guess we can’t be greedy. We’ve got a long drive in the morning (9.5 hours), so hopefully the storms don’t slow us down too much. We’re hoping to get to Lake Lotawana by 6pm or so for our 9pm show.

We played a killer version of Wartime tonight, a bit more up tempo than usual, but it really grooved. The bartender at the venue told us that “Diggin’ in the Dirt” is one of her favorite songs and that we ‘nailed it.’ So I guess that’s good… and we put our Sharpies to use, with people asking us to sign CD’s at our set break. we all felt good about tonight, and we’re looking forward to playing one more show and then sleeping in our own beds at the end of the weekend.

I didn’t get the photos from Anton’s camera yet (sorry!), but I’ll post them in the “charlottesville” post below as soon as I have them.

Dave Chapelle didn’t show up at the show tonight, if you were wondering.

Hasta for now, time to get some sleep… we’re up and out of here at 9am.

We’re making our way West… we’ve “turned the corner,” as the saying goes…

Cruising through Appalachia right now, with beautiful views of the Blue Ridge Mountains off to our left. We spent the night relaxing on the farm outside of Charlottesville last night, after having spent the day walking around Charlottesville, seeing the sights. What a gorgeous town. We walked the University of Virginia campus, which is where our esteemed bass player went to college, so he was able to give us a great tour. We saw Edgar Allen Poe’s dorm room (which they have set up with 1800’s style furniture as he would have had it), the “Rotunda” designed by Thomas Jefferson, the serpentine brick walls designed by Jefferson (brick walls that are only one brick thick, but curved to stay upright and strong), the pavilion gardens designed by Jefferson, the music hall, the big lawn behind the rotunda, and “the corner,” which is the “college-y” neighborhood next to the campus. We ate some delicious bagel sandwiches at Bodo’s, and then cruised down to downtown Charlottesville to check out some local venues. We saw Rapture, the former Gravity Lounge, the big Charlottesville Pavilion outdoor venue, and Miller’s, the tiny jazz bar that Dave Matthews worked and played at when DMB was first forming. DMB’s manager, Coran Capshaw, is featured on the cover of the local newspaper with the title “Coran Capshaw is #1.” Evidently this week’s edition of the paper profiles the top ‘power brokers’ in Charlottesville’s entertainment industry, and Coran tops the list. He owns half the commercial real estate in town, books virtually all of the live shows in town via his “Starr Hill Presents” promotion company, and he owns MusicToday.com, which powers online merch sales and distribution for the biggest names in music (Coldplay, DMB, Metallica, U2, and on and on). Ya, I’d say he’s doing alright for himself.

And so now we leave all of that behind us as we ride up and down the mountain passes of Appalachia. We’re going ‘up’ right now, with some semi trucks around us, but in general the interstate is pretty wide open, which is nice. We had seen on the weather channel that the forecast was looking rough for our drive… severe storms, t-storms, tornadoes, and the like… but so far it’s just been drizzling on us.

Man, the view off to the left right now is incredible – a huge valley full of trees and the occasional open green pasture, with the 4,000 foot mountain peaks on the horizon, with some misty fog from the rain sitting down in the valleys. Looks like a postcard.

Tonight we play in Yellow Springs, Ohio… about 6 hours from where we are now. This is our second time playing there, so we know what to expect, which is nice. The last time we played there, Dave Chapelle came in and danced for a few songs. The owners of the club are fantastic, and they own a little house that they give to touring artists for the night. We’ll be staying there for the night before driving on to Kansas City tomorrow.

I’ll post Charlottesville and UVA photos from Anton’s camera later today (he’s driving right now, but he’ll get me the pics when we change up drivers).

Hasta for now…