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26, 30 Sep: Atlanta

26 Sep – Eddie’s Attic (Atlanta)
w/ Mrs. Fun
30 Sep – Eddie’s Attic (Atlanta)
w/ Kitty Snyder, Blake Guthrie

One band show, one solo show, same club. Welcome back to playing shows, Paul.

So I took some time off, obviously. Partly due to being a little overexposed in town, mostly due to head space and trying to sort it all out. We haven’t rehearsed since late July, I think, and we got together once before the show Friday. But rehearsal went well and felt good, and we’ll be starting back up next week. The show went well, too, a little rusty but overall pretty tight. A nice sized crowd, not as big as would have been nice for a Friday, but with Mrs. Fun being an out of town band the crowd was mainly our draw. The crowd also included a long-time ex of mine as well as the first girl I ever kissed in my life. It was also Andrea from Daemon’s birthday so we played “Antmusic” for her.

Mrs. Fun are just that.

Tuesday was a solo show, a benefit for the Dekalb County Humane Society, a strange place to be for me having just had to put an 18 year old cat to sleep the week before and made the mistake of bringing it up during the show and started to choke myself up. But the show itself was good, a bigger crowd than Friday and they seemed to enjoy themselves. Kitty Snyder played with her band afterwards and I find that I am really a big fan of hers. Just in time for her to announce at the end of her show that she’s taking a year off from performing to write a novel.

Greg from chain poets came out and I got to talk to him for a bit, I haven’t seen him in a while. We talked about the need to do another outlandish cover song together soon. I talked to Todd, the owner for a bit after the show and he talked about having us in more often and was really very complimentary. I have seen a little complaining about the new ownership at Eddie’s but I would like to say that, while I appreciate that some of the changes he’s made might seem a bit jarring, he really cares about the place and is trying to keep it alive. I loved Eddie and supported him as well, but I hope everyone will give Todd the time to really put his ideas into motion.

There’s also a new soundman at the club, his name is Shalom. He just happens to have run sound for a lot of Jellyfish shows and was in charge of the box set that came out last year. His first night was the previous Tuesday running sound for the weaklazyliar show at Eddie’s and the sound was amazing (THEY were amazing, I might add. One of them, I can’t recall who, said they had finally decided they weren’t a ROCK band, and it showed, and I mean that in the sense that they really seemed to come into their own this show, playing who they were and just sounding damn incredible). He got the permanent job based on that show and happened to run sound for both of my shows and I loved how it sounded, and he seemed to really like my stuff, solo and with the band. Damn nice guy, too. How I lucked into having him running sound at a club I play regularly I don’t know, but it’s cool as hell.

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I’ve had a strange few days. I came back from Nashville not feeling very good at all about what was ahead. But at the same time not giving much credence to the feeling because I do that all the time and even I know when I doing it. But still, it was a frustrating experience and looking ahead to more shows out of town, especially when I don’t enjoy playing the acoustic shows anyway, I wasn’t feeling very optimistic.

But then Thursday Daemon calls to let me know that I have six shows with the Indigo Girls in November in Florida. It’s weird because I know it’s a big deal while at the same time I knew it was coming in some capacity because at some point pretty much every Daemon artist opens for them. It’s sort of the bonus of being signed by them. Though when they told me about it when I first signed the talk was about it being a couple of dates and that it would hopefully pay enough so that I could bring a band along. But the tour that starts in November is an acoustic tour for them, so I just assumed that’s what I’d be doing, too, even aside from the fact that I just didn’t think I’d be able to put together a band that could AFFORD to go out on the road with me for a string of dates.

But then I started looking at the venues online Friday. For some reason, and I can’t really say why, when they said they were playing acoustic shows I envisioned them as being small venues. Oh no. These are 2000 to 3000 seat places. So suddenly I was filled with the thought of that same guy who just stumbled through 20 minutes in front of 30 people in Nashville trying to entertain 2000 with just his acoustic guitar. And it was not a pretty sight.

Suddenly it seemed huge.

When I was in Radiant City we played Music Midtown here in Atlanta, so we played to easily 5 or 10,000 people, I really have no idea. It was just big. What struck me as funny at the time was that, past the first few rows you just can’t register it. It’s too big and it no longer makes any sense. So I didn’t experience any nerves about it, though I did get to experience the adrenaline rush of that many people cheering between songs. All the benefits of the drug without the side-effects. But the thought of playing in front of 2000 people acoustic was just… wrong. At least for me.

Over the weekend I happened to see both Lee and Chris and talked vaguely about the whole thing. I saw Lee first and asked, really not even taking it seriously, if she thought she could get that sort of time off and wanted to come along. But surprisingly she did, and then later so did Chris. So now I have just emailed Lyle to see if he thinks he could pull it off.

It means a lot more complications. I could really have used the money that playing these shows solo would have meant. Whereas now, if this happens, I’ll be splitting the money, as well as dealing with the logistics of transporting all of us and the equipment and sleeping somewhere. So, barring good response and CD sales, I won’t make much money from this. But at the same time, for me, I think I’m completely willing to make that sacrifice if it means playing the shows the way I want to be heard, and playing with a confidence I will not otherwise feel.

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23, 24 Sep: Nashville

23 Sept – 12th and Porter (Nashville, TN)
24 Sept – the Slow Bar (Nashville, TN)

I suppose I’m really going to have to change my method of writing these if I’m going to be playing several shows in a row, if only because they’re going to get fairly repetitive.

Monday I drove up to Nashville for two shows. I was staying the night with Adam McIntyre, the person who hopped onstage at the CD release party to play bass on “Picture Book,” and his wife. They put up with me sleeping on their extremely comfortable couch for a day. Monday night was “12 at 12th” (in other words, open mic night at 12th and Porter) and I was the first act up. Two songs, and the crowd was bigger than I used to see when I was still doing open mics at Eddie’s Attic here. Couldn’t see the crowd at all but they cheered, and in the glare of the light I could see someone tapping their feet near the front of the stage. We’ll see if it gets me back into the club.

I felt badly for the next act, though, he had an amazing string of bad luck. He was playing five songs, and midway through the first song his cord began to short out, so he was forced to stop and switch cords. He finished that song and played the next, and then midway through his third song he broke a string. The emcee came up to occupy the crowd while the guy switched strings quickly, and once he was set he just went straight into his fourth song (I guess figuring he was losing time as it was). Then he started in on his fifth song and another string on his guitar had suddenly gone horribly out of tune, at least a couple of steps. He paused in the middle of the song to tune it up with a quick twist, but it immediately dropped down again. I’ve never seen anything like that happen before and I’ve been the victim of some weird guitar freakouts in my time. So he just finished the song out of tune. The crowd had been talking loudly through the set anyway, and they gave a smattering of applause and that was that. You had to feel for the guy, really. Especially given the fact that he had driven all the way up from Atlanta to play the show, trying to get his foot in the door of the club. And because he would have preferred to play the show with a band to begin with, particularly when the club was obviously a band club, and the remaining acts (who the crowd had come to see) were all bands.

But mostly I felt for the guy because it was me and that was my show Tuesday at the Slow Bar.

I had a nice time with Adam and Ellen, at any rate.

Just to bring the whole thing thematically to a close… one of the people who played Monday night after me was really amazing, I thought. Her name was Adrienne, she played acoustic and had a gorgeous voice. I talked to her afterwards, briefly, and we complimented each other. It turned out she was playing Atlanta Wednesday night at the Earl, so I went out there last night to see her. We said hello, talked briefly again, I mean, it’s not as if we know each other or anything (but it’s an important, if unsurprising, lesson to keep in mind that High Fidelity was JUST a movie and those things just don’t happen). That was really about it, but I sat at the club during her set feeling out of place once again, ultra-conscious of how I was sitting and that I was alone and felt awkward as hell being there. A culmination of the Nashville experience and the start of genuine touring for me.

Maybe it will help to convey just why I play down the things that are going on right now, because it can be very easy to get caught up in the glow of playing at home in front of 150 people and really crash hard when you travel out of state a week later to play a “New Faces” night at a club that’s never heard of you to a crowd that wants you to shut up already.