Owsley’s (Denver, Colorado)

First off, I hope you all had a nice weekend. Secondly, this will be short, as I have to get up in 4 hours to head to the airport. My cousin was in town visiting from Spain, and he heads out first thing this morning. He’s a fantastic pianist and musician, so it was a nice couple of days discussing/playing/idea-izing with him.

On Friday night we played a great night of music at Owsley’s in Denver. It was one of those moments that just came together really well for us, without us really ‘forcing’ anything to happen. We were booked on the outdoor (small) stage, while Ryan Montbleau Band from Boston was booked on the indoor (larger) stage. Montbleau had an opening act from Salt Lake City – Good Morning Maxfield – and they were awesome. Great music and great guys. As it turns out, though, we got the best deal of the night. When we showed up to load in, we heard that Montlbleau’s band had intended to play outside, but that with the weather forecasters calling for a 40% chance of rain, they opted to set up on the indoor stage. We set up outside and ended up with absolutely gorgeous “summer night” weather all night. We played our first set at 8:30pm, then Good Morning Maxfield played on the indoor stage at 9:30pm (so we stopped). They finished at 10:10pm or so, at which point we played again on the outdoor stage… then Montbleau started his set at about 10:30pm indoors, stopping for a set break at about 11:45pm… at which point we played again outside. The weather was so nice that the majority of the people came out for our sets and/or stayed outside even during the indoor bands’ sets. We had many, many people come up to us after our 2nd set, saying “umm… we were here for Montbleau tonight, but you guys are unbelievable,” etc. We were SO happy to have so many people come up and talk to us between the multiple sets, about how they can’t believe that we’re not “already huge around here” and “holy crap, I’ll be able to go see you guys at Red Rocks and say that I saw you at Owsleys back in the day,” etc. Again, we lucked out by chance on the location, and we made a point of really playing tight, short sets that left the audience wanting more. Here’s how the three setlists turned out:

Set I
Park
List
Don
ZED
New Song (“Sketch 30″/”Years Ago”)
Hazel
Heat
New Song (“Sketch 32” – instrumental)
Nightlite Jesus

Set II
Story Of
View From Way Up Here
Obey ->
Life During Wartime

Set III
Marula Binge
Turn My Egg

We visited with some of the Montbleau guys and talked about their touring plans, etc. If you’re not familiar with them, they basically play 200 shows a year, touring around in a diesel van, from coast to coast. They’re definitely feeling the pain of gas prices (check out the CNN article just added to the Backstage homepage on this topic). Conversations like that really make us feel better and better about our strategy of limited & targeted touring, slow growth, community building, etc… and we all feel really good about how the live show has improved and grown over the last 18 months. It was exactly 18 months ago that we played our first show as a four-piece with Anton, and at that point he wasn’t even an “official member” – he was sitting in as a friend/guest. For 18 months in existence, we’re all really excited about how much we have in place and how much we’ve learned and pushed eachother to hone our skills live and in the writing sessions. And on that topic, we debuted two new songs on Friday night – one we did instrumentally, because it’s super groovy and I (Russ) haven’t had time to really sit down and work on lyrics for it yet. The other one we did with vocals as a full song, though it, too, is lacking the actual lyrics that will actually be found on any album/permanent version of it. The reaction from the crowd was great on both. We really want to start “road testing” new material on a regular basis… writing in the studio, then taking it out quickly to the live setting to let that pressure and atmosphere have its effect on what we do with the song. Sometimes you can “catch lightning in a bottle,” as the saying goes.

Alrighty… I’m off to bed to let thoughts of SoundRabbit and music and live shows and touring and websites and music and lyrics and shows and music and … on and on… swirl around in my head until my eyelids give up the fight. More later… thanks as always for reading, and for your support, and for the emails we get from you.