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Happy New Year

It’s time to get it together for tour. We hit in Phenox AZ January 27th so that gives me just over three weeks to get my shit together. The goals are as follows: Get my chops up and strength good for tour. It’s always a heavier physical experience playing live with the band, so I need to prepare with extended practice sessions, so I’m ready to exert the extra strength and my callouses stand up too. And I want to get the Chadwick bass sounding nice, It’s been broken down since I came home from the fall tour. I can set it up today, and it can hang out and sit at tension until I have to break it down to fly out. I’ll play it and let it settle. Playing a lot of ‘arco’ or “with the bow” harmonics seems to make an instrument come more alive, loosening and exciting the musical resonances.

G wants to play the new record in one set, so I’m looking forward to putting on the CD and playing along with it. It’s something I rarely do. Usually songs already have a life of their own as live pieces once the record comes out. Back in the day, I feel like we would get burnt out on some songs before we got into them live. And some things work better live, and there’s only so much time in a show, so those are the songs that end up in rotation. So while it was rarely intentional, I do think we ended up with a couple “studio only” songs.

But ever since we played down the first record on our 20th Anniversary Tour, G’s been thinking about trying another one. So we’re going to play down Love Saves the Day for the first set this tour. I would recommend if you’re coming out for the tour to check it out and give it a few listens so you can see how well we do at playing it live. Seriously, people seem to have fun with it when they’re familiar with the songs, so maybe check the whole record on Spotify or listen down to the CD in the car or whatever.

I’m definitely looking forward to getting out there and rocking your town. Check out tour dates at philadelphonic.com, we’re out West first, then back through the Mountains and back to Chicago. See you out there.

Portland, Cold cold sun.

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