empty bottle take 2

we played at the empty bottle last night. we headlined. we played the best we have ever played too. as always there were a few teeny mistakes, but isn't that why live performance is so fun? but holy shit, it was soooooo fucking gloriously loud. excellent. at one point we were playing and the floor was just shaking from all of the sound- i think that was during 'angels floating on the head of a pin.' i am extremely proud of how we did last night.
as if that weren't enough people responded incredibly well to it- better than i expected. it always makes me laugh when people yell out at us during the show- as in good encouraging things. as if that weren't enough we played for about 45 minutes and then we actually did our first encore. we didn't leave the stage, but one dude was asking us to play one more and play one that stefanie sang and we did 'to the sky' and it sounded absolutely perfect. the monitor mix was a bit low for our vocals, but it's not really a complaint that you can make when you go for as much volume as i did last night. wow, it was really fun and wonderful and inspiring. a good way to get started before we head out on tour.
we are in peak form right now. i can't imagine a better time for us to go out and tour. i was worried about playing for an hour at the show in bozeman because i didn't think we could do it and be entertaining but i'm not so worried anymore. we even did the 'sloba'/'down to sleep' switch where we just play one and then go straight into the next song without a break- i almost called it off and then when i was making noises for 'sloba' and i had it all sampled and going i was just thinking 'fuck that- we're going to do it- it's going to work' and it did. it was awesome! my manager wasn't able to make it because a good friend of his was in town playing a house show and he was going to try to swing by to catch us, but he didn't make it. i get to give everyone that i work with crap because they missed us at our very best.
the other three bands were all fantastic as well- a tundra were super nice and we are going to go see them again. it'd be fun to play with them again as well. jim's band were fantastic too. they have a residency at the horseshoe lounge for the month so i'm going to go to a few of those shows- one of them is when we'll be gone, but the other two are doable i think.
the waiting around wasn't so agonizing either. i figured having to wait that long to play would be awful, but we just hung around, had a few drinks and talked to our friends and watched the bands. they were all so good that the time went incredibly fast. by the time we'd gotten all of our stuff off the stage it was about 1:15 and we played at about midnight.
i'm so excited for tour now. it's going to fantastic. i think we're going to try to rehearse a few more songs on saturday, which will most likely be our last practise before we leave. we'll have a well of about 20 songs to draw from, which doesn't sound like much, but we can rarely fit in more than 5 songs in a set, so it's a pretty generous number really.
today i am going over to nick and nadine's space to do some screen printing on t-shirts. hopefully they can help me with the problems i've been having. i've ruined about 10 shirts already. kinda bad. yipes. i ruined one of my screens as well because so much ink dried inside the screen in the design and while trying to get some of it out i scratched off some of the dried emulsion and ruined some of the designed parts. it was kind of a crappy screen anyway, but it still sux.
that's all for me. tour here we come!