Just Because

Looking at my last post, I see it's been a week since I wrote.

The reason for my lapse is pretty simple: I've been busy as hell. A quick recap... Tuesday: Teaching, acoustic rehearsal with Aoife. Wednesday: Work, band rehearsal. Thursday: Cubs game outing, acoustic rehearsal. Friday: Work, acoustic gig at Cubby Bear. Saturday: Teaching, full band show in Joliet.

Sunday: Exhaustion.

Luckily, nothing to do tomorrow but sleep and hopefully eat some good barbecue. As dead tired as I am, it was a good week for music. The Friday night show at Cubby Bear was the first time Aoife and I have performed as a duo and it went really well especially given that we only had a rehearsal on Tuesday and half a rehearsal on Thursday.

Why did Thursday's session count as half a rehearsal you ask? Let's just say that when your "beer-consumed-in-ounces-at-Cubs-game" number hits triple digits before 4:30 in the afternoon, anything you try to do after that is going to be... half assed.

So Friday we got up and just played the tunes and the feedback was really strong. Both sound guys were way into it (always a plus), we got rid of a ton of CDs, and, most importantly, I felt like we listened to each other and played a really good set.

To boot, a good friend of mine from grade school who I hadn't seen in nearly 5 years showed up randomly and I got to hang with him and catch up after the show.

Saturday's show in Joliet was at the Chicago St. Pub opening up for John Condron. Doc plays bass with John and Barret has recently started playing drums with him too. John is a co-owner of Chicago St. and possibly one of the nicest people I've ever met. So nice that you feel like you're being put on.

He and I had a really nice mutual admiration society going and hopefully it'll translate into some cool future projects. Our set went okay. It was really loud on stage and I had a lot of trouble hearing myself. But I felt like we played our asses off and the feedback from the audience was positive.

I've figured out that the difference between having a good and bad show is whether or not I can hear on stage. Hear myself, hear the band... The thing about this week that encourages me the most is that, going back to the studio session last weekend, I've done serious singing 6 out of the last 9 days and my voice seems none the worse for wear.

The last few months I've felt like my voice has been pretty fragile, but I think it may have been the stress of singing in the studio... because especially Friday and Saturday it felt very strong.

So now sleep beckons... sweet sweet sleep.

Happy 4th.

jbg