10.10.04

The Red Line Tap

Man alive, does it ever feel good to be back! Since last we played, I’ve lived the high life in New York City, Tim escaped hurricanes in Georgia, the NFL and NCAA Football seasons kicked off and we’ve worked on our butt grooves in our respective football watching chairs, we’ve started recording again, Tim cut his hair, I did too (but by the time you read this, it’ll have grown back and won’t look different), the winds grew colder, suddenly we’re older… etc. etc. etc. It feels like ages since I’ve sang a song live in front of an audience that I wrote! Too much Tony n Tina’s Wedding…

So, the Red Line Tap is north. No kidding. And it teeters on being in a bad part of town. Those details aside, we really liked the bar… lots of character to it. Pool table in the back, directly across the room from the stage, bar, bar bathrooms, guy who looked like he was  homeless sleeping on a bench who turned out to be the opening act… standard, but cool.

I loved the guy who started off the night… said he was touring the swing states to get people to vote for Kerry. He started playing and I wondered if he was helping or hurting Kerry’s campaign… Carrie and Tim can second this… no one would believe just one of us. He kind of reminded me of Laslo from “Real Genius”. Then, Brettly, who booked us at the Red Line got up and played a few songs. Disappointingly, he was good! We’ll have to come back and check out his band.

We got up on stage around 9:30 and immediately I could tell it would be a fun gig. We had a nice group of people gathered ‘round and we didn’t have a set-list, which didn’t bother us one bit! Per requests, the first few songs were a little review of Overdogs and then we moved on to some of the new stuff we’re recording. Tim’s song “Broken” was the first of the new and is one of the ones we’ve laid down the basics of in the studio. It sounded so polished to me because we’ve had an opportunity to work out some of the kinks and put all the pieces together. Definitely the best that song has ever gone. We took a break from our stuff to do Jason Mraz’s “The Remedy (I Won’t Worry)” (if you don’t have it, buy his album… then buy the live album… then, wait until we’re done recording our album and buy ours) and Tim’s arrangement of “You are My Sunshine”. Somewhere in there, we also did a tribute to David Lee Roth in celebration of his birthday with a hilarious version of “Panama”. Returning to songs we’re working on in the studio, we did “Have it All” and “Wreck Me”, which also felt really good – I was pretty impressed with myself for singing the last notes and hitting the right chord all with my eyes closed. Yup. I make that many mistakes that something like that makes me feel like a golden god. Everything felt like it was clicking again. Tim’s solo on “Exclusively” sounded right on – like it’s been boiling up inside him since the last time we played and he just needed to let it out. I loved it. I loved playing. We’re excited again!

Thanks to everyone who was out there, rockin’ with us. We promise the new album is in the works and some new songs are on their way. We’ll see you on Halloween…