Of Wisconsin and Wedding Hashtags
Hello, friends! Rob here.
So, um. Ed is married. Holy crap? Also, wedding guestbooks are so 2006. It's all about the wedding hashtags these days #edandmaggie2014
We're approaching the end of a long break, which itself comes on the heels of a long break. There have been many long breaks so far this year. But now is time for a long tour! We're very excited to be spending the majority of April on tour, and to be spending the majority of that tour with the fantabulous Moon Taxi! For those of you not in the know, Moon Taxi is a band from Nashville and they rule pretty hard, so us going on tour with Moon Taxi is like Batman going on tour with Superman, except for all the good they have done I don't think either of those guys are particularly talented musicians, and they may or may not actually exist.
Side note: My word processor apparently thinks "fantabulous” is a real word.
Working backwards now: South By Southwest sure is crazy, huh? It's like, instead of having a few bands be in the same city, let's just put all of the bands into a five-mile radius and make them fight each other, "Beat It” video-style, for the three parking spaces in downtown Austin. That's really all I can think to say about it right now. In the past I've always compared South By Southwest to the scene in every movie about the Vietnam War where a bunch of wide-eyed recruits step out of a helicopter in some army encampment thirty clicks north of Pleiku and see men in torn-up fatigues playing cards and roasting a pig not twenty feet from whatever patch of jungle they just finished flame-throwing and it begins to dawn upon the recruits that theirs is now an impossible world where violence and chaos and barbarism go hand in hand with humanity and normalcy. A world not governed by morality, or nobility, but by one simple directive: Survive. The unit's shotgun-toting Corporal tosses one of them a beer and spits a greeting around the sides of his cigar: "Welcome to hell, boys.”
Anyway, South By Southwest is kind of like that, but with tighter pants.
The run leading up to SXSW was short, but surprisingly demanding. We only had a few shows, but we found ourselves dashing from one cool media thing to the next* in between. The shows themselves were all quite nice. I'd love to just say the grandstand stompdown in Chicago took the cake and be done with it, but we were really blown away to play to such an enthusiastic crowd on our first visit to Madison, WI. The welcome was very promising in Bloomington, IL as well. Those three shows in three days were kind of like working backwards through the process of building a relationship with a city. We started in Chicago, which by now is a well-fortified bastion of friendship and musical success. Madison is new hotness, in an unexpected but much-appreciated sort of way, and Bloomington is like a clean slate that we can't wait to build from the ground up without mixing any further metaphors. Good times in the cold middle west.
Side note: My word processor does not think that "stompdown” is a real word, even though I use it about once a month.
Oh god that reminds me I haven't updated this thing since freaking Mardi Gras I am so sorry friends. In years past, I have caught myself grumbling about being "too busy” during a time that I wish I could be spending with all of the loved ones in New Orleans who have become my surrogate family since college (not that I need a surrogate, my regular family is great), but maybe it's good to stay busy during Mardi Gras. To quote George, New Orleans is a dangerous city when you're not busy. I'll spare you the details (mostly because I ended up sparing myself a lot of the details), but suffice it to say it was a fun and exhausting couple of weeks.
And that brings us, more or less, circling back around to present day. We've made pretty productive use of our Ed's honeymoon break. Ed and his new wife Maggie (don't worry, there isn't an old one anywhere) spent most of it honeymooning (as you may have guessed). Andrew took a plane to Spain with his family (it was actually France, but that doesn't rhyme and I got confused for a second). Dave and Zack did some duo gigs and crossovers with a great Chicago funk group called The Heard, and George and I got to play complicated music with a fun side project we've been calling Space & Harmony. During the weekend of Ed's wedding I actually had some supremely talented Canadian trad-jazz musicians (and mercifully low-maintenance houseguests) staying with me, and the following weekend I got to fly to Kansas City for another wedding (#sarahandcorey329), so I've been keeping busy, but fun busy. Soon we'll be back to work busy.
Good thing work busy is fun busy.
*: When I write entries, I leave messages to myself in caps lock and parentheses when I need to link, fact/spell check, or reword something so I can do it when I edit (yes, I edit. Just imagine what the first drafts must look like) instead of interrupting the flow of brain-words while the tap is running. After the footnoted phrase in this entry (in case you really can't be bothered, it was "dashing from one cool media thing to the next”), I left myself the following message: (IT WOULD BE AWESOME IF SEVERAL OF THOSE WORDS COULD BE LINKS TO THINGS) I stand by the assertion that making several of those words into links to our appearances and performances on Audiotree, JBTV, Daytrotter, Fearless Radio, and I'm pretty sure there was at least one more, would be awesome. Unfortunately, for a variety of technical reasons, only one of those is currently available to me. But on the bright side, I can still leave you with half an hour of us playing music, drinking tea, and discussing who would be the captain of our spaceship, courtesy of the good-hearted folks at Audiotree:
http://vimeo.com/90039182
