College of New Jersey
We’re playing an out-of-town gig this evening at the College of New Jersey. One of the few highlights of the college radio campaign was WTSR down in Ewing taking a big shine to the record. As a result, they offered up the possibility of playing a gig, taping the performance and doing an interview in conjunction with the show. It’s only about 90 minutes away so I took them up on the offer. I finally picked up Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix so it’ll be nice driving music.
At one point, I was thinking I might have to do the show by my lonesome but I was able to round up the major elements of the band so it’s actually going to be a fun gig. I suspect it might rock a bit more than normal because we won’t have Katie on oboe, Flavio on viola or Bronwen on backing vocals to soften things up. Just a bunch of people pounding away on their instruments. I’ll be playing more guitar than usual so that’ll be somewhat interesting. Can be a bit of a crap shoot. The tone of the guitar through the DI isn’t perfect. Sounds a bit synthy actually. But it’ll work and it adds a little bit of texture and crunch to the parts where it’s needed.
We wanted to extend the set a little bit so we’ll actually be doing some songs we don’t normally do. We’ll be playing “Burning a Horse”, one of the great songs on the new record that we don’t play as much. And, more importantly, we jammed out on “There Is Nowhere To Run” which is an old Lipstik song that appears on our swan song EP, “There Is Only One Thing“. The song is pretty and it’ll be fun to do a number that we haven’t done in any incarnation before. I was thinking about covering “All My Friends” but “Valentine’s Day” sounds pretty similar so it felt not exactly right.
Rob Jost is out in Minnesota playing with a singer/songwriter on tour so we’ll also welcome Andy Cotton to the fold on the bass guitar. Andy plays with Paul a lot and is yet one more link between my band and Paul’s band. Actually, it’s basically Paul’s band but with a more masculine vocalist. Gruffer. Manly. Strong and beefy.
So the band tonight is me on singing, Matt Ray on keys and singing, Marc Dalio on drums, Noah Lebenzon on guitar, Andy Cotton on bass guitar, Stan Harrison on sax and flute, and Dan Levine on trombone on euphonium. We play at 8pm in Kendall Hall at CCNJ in Ewing, New Jersey.
The setlist is as follows:
1. Broken Bow
2. If You See Something
3. Dirty White Coats
4. Colorado Drugs
5. Don’t Look Away
6. Life Is Hard
7. Hold My Heartache
8. Valentine’s Day
9. Burning a Horse
10. St. Marys
11. There Is Nowhere to Run
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Wendy
