From Zero to Tour Mode in Chocolate Cake

Hello, friends! Rob here.

Happy birthday to Revivalists lead vocalist and chief grower of sweet afros, Mr. David Shaw! He's 108 years old today, and still rockin' every bit as hard as he did in his late seventies and early eighties!

Well, it's summer tour all right. It's pretty humid in the van and, um, other stuff I guess? Come to think of it, climate is the only difference between summer tour and other tours. It's bright, it's hot, we change shirts more often, but the rhythm is still the same.

Last weekend was an excellent warm up for bright and hot. We had a really fun crowd in Lafayette on Thursday, and I've written so many permutations of the sentence "Pensacola was great and we love it there” that it's barely worth mentioning how great Pensacola was on Friday or how much we love it there. Fortunately, there's still something to talk about from Friday because HOLY WOW THIS BAND CALLED NAHKO AND MEDICINE FOR THE PEOPLE OPENED THE SHOW AND THEY ARE SO EFFING GOOD AND YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO THEM ALL THE TIME FOREVER. They do an amazing job of tinting straight up feel-good rock with shades of world music without getting too hippy-dippy. Plus, they're just awesome.

It was kind of interesting how Thursday and Friday were so similar (raucous indoor night shows in familiar cities) and then Saturday and Sunday were both extremely sweaty sunshine day festival gigs. We barely made Saturday's show in Atlanta, and as a result we had about eight minutes to get from parking the van to playing the downbeat. Fortunately, the crew at Virginia Highlands Summerfest was incredibly on-point, and we were able to practically almost pretty much start on time and considering we'd had about a forty-five second sound check everything felt way better than it had any business feeling.

We were out of Atlanta early enough that we were able to get to New Orleans by a reasonable bedtime, so we didn't have any excuse to be late for Oyster Fest the next afternoon. It was a fun show, and home is awesome, but my lands was that a sweaty show! I think Sunday might have been the sweatiest day of my entire life. Anyway, then we got to groove out to the Gin Blossoms and go home early and throw Dave a surprise early birthday party the next day.

And now we're out again. We're in Philadelphia tonight. Last night was a good start to the tour. Virginia Beach is full of very nice people, and near the end of the set a waitress at Jewish Mother (which is actually the name of a venue) brought Dave the largest slice of chocolate cake in the world and we led the crowd through "happy birthday” while Dave spoonfed bites of cake to front-row spectators.

So I'm feeling pretty good about humanity in general today. See you in Philly.