Nine Pound Shadow

Sun-Burned Shoulders and Smiles

2010-06-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a skeleton version of the band played at the Haight Street Fair in the City. As usual, Chris and I were up front singing and guitar-ing. Siobhan provided sweet back-up vocals, tip-toeing through the ethers to channel notes that lay beyond the reach of her burly, very-manly sibling counterparts. Julian Razo, long-time friend, adopted brother, and regular partaker in band mischief supplied the gravity on bass.

Yes, Haight Street is just about the biggest thing we've participated in to this point. What a day! What a party! We felt the butterflies in our bellies (who are regular visitors on show days) as we looked out at the the river of people enjoying the fair. The day shimmered with sunshine and shade as tiny hosts of bubbles bobbed by on the light breeze. Sitting backstage, we reminded ourselves that there is no us and them- there is only US, sharing the moment, all together. With that and a few other choice affirmations for courage, we took the stage and played.

It just keeps getting better. Each time we get out there we're reminded that the love we give will be returned and this emboldens us to give a little more of ourselves. In the crowd, a tall, thin man wearing a princess-pink dress, eyeshadow, and sneakers nods his head to the music, a pretty girl looks up and smiles. There's a new-age pirate leaning against the plate glass of the liquor store. We sing. And on the delicate, transparent wings of our butterflies, we flutter upwards. All of us, together.

Thank you for being there...

Love This Song

2009-12-15T18:41:00.000-08:00

What a catchy tune! The video is equally charming...

As the End Draws Near, Walls Disappear

2009-07-03T11:12:00.001-07:00

We played our hearts out last night and with just one show left on the tour, our penultimate performance felt like a proper climax to the journey. At Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, in front of some fifty or so friends and strangers (our largest crowd yet thanks to local radio and TV promotion for Jaimal’s book), we simply did the best we could do.

As we played I saw people's faces transform, soften and open in conjunction with a subtle shift in their hearts as the music touched them. Note by note, line by line, an invisible connection was formed between us and by the end of four-song set, a mellifluous spell of love was cast with few appearing unscathed. One young person who started with a hard questioning look, later said we sounded like the Beach Boys meets Fleet Foxes – and he had just seen the Fleet Foxes open for Wilco. (Dream gig anyone?) He and his pal would buy the album the instant it came out. Another college kid said our power came from the transparent joy and love with which we played. He said straight-faced he believed we would be playing on the tonight show in five months. A producer in the audience gave us his card and extemporaneously showered us with detailed conceptual visions of musical directions we might go, borne from some flash of clever inspiration he had during the set. His lovely wife bought us a round of iced mocha lattes, which were a perfect antidote for the hot summer evening. Sitting far in the back, a pair of charming scruffy Spanish Buddhist surfers just couldn’t stop smiling and they shined like a mirror with the sun it. Many kind folks expressed appreciation for the harmonies and the quality of the singing and songwriting. They all were moved. It was a living dream. We loved the audience and with love we played our music and from nearly the beginning, all the love came back to us.

We lingered long after, high on life, joking and chatting with new friends in the bookstore’s café and later on the streets of Portland. The warm wind shifted gently and the night was beautiful.

As we drove home, laughing, recollecting in wonder the heady sweetness of the moment, and surfing the wave of love that poured out of ourselves and was returned a thousand fold into ourselves from the audience, there was an overwhelming sense of fullness and contentment – it was a moment of perfect alignment. We just kept giggling and sighing and smiling and slapping five. We tried to capture the experience with words, to paint it with metaphors and spontaneous poetry, so that the feelings could be recollected and revived, but our ineffable joy was boundless and defied confinement. Speeding along the dark pavement north, between the haloes of murky street lamps, smiling as we looked at each other there was nothing more to say. I knew that we all felt exactly the same way, all knew with our hearts explosive happiness and a sense of flawless grace that will never be captured. And somewhere beneath the waves of bliss, deep down behind the darkness swam an undertow of apprehension – a whispering fear that the moment could not last forever.

The Journey Continues

2009-07-01T14:38:00.001-07:00

Here we are on the flip-side, barreling toward home. We've been out on the road for almost two weeks and traveled hundreds of miles. Yesterday, we steamrolled into Olympia from Vancouver Island, Canada- 10 minutes late for an event at the Heart of Wellness healing center. In spite of having no time to really ground and get present, we played and sang pretty well. We're growing, learning to adapt to a variety of situations. There are plenty of moments where the self-judgement and fear of not being liked completely abandon us. Instead, we remember to love ourselves and everyone else and find confidence and happiness in the fact that we're doing what we love. Being so far away from home, sometimes playing in front just a small handful of people gets you in touch with why we play music. So much joy comes from having a beautiful outlet to express yourself and share with other people. Today we have another show, just outside of Portland. We've met some amazing people who have really made the trip special. With every mile traveled, every song, and every new friend made we are reminded that the love we emit is constantly returned. Venturing in the unknown, the moments are so full...

To Infinity and Beyond

2009-06-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

Today we threw down the music gauntlet at Inner Chapter Books for a friendly crowd of six people. An Ichiro-stone’s-throw from the Seattle space needle with nothing more than two guitars, a bright red keyboard and some angelic harmonies, we did our best to lift a half dozen people to melody heaven. I think two people made it.

One night before on a damp and dismal Thursday evening, we played a two-song opening act for a double-header book reading at Eagle Harbor Books on Bainbridge Island. It probably doesn't get more rock star than that. If we make it through this tour with our hearts intact, musically, nothing is impossible. Thanks to the second author, Amy Waeschle, twenty or so locals turned out to smile and bob their heads through our tiny set. Afterward, some very generous book-loving surfers were mightily impressed and said they expected to see us again soon on a TV screen. The sweet middle-aged bookstore keepers reported that lots of people asked where they could buy our music, and said they would plug our website on their own as soon as we emailed them the link. People have been very kind and everywhere we turn, smiles shine back at us, in spite of our fears.

Seven shows and seven towns in ten days - two down (three completed in total) and five to go. Things start to unfold in rapid-fire succession and our sleepy feet stagger beneath the Dream Machine as we stumble onward ragged, bewildered, hopeful.

The cement-slow storm clouds of fate have finally burst into flashes of light and howls of noise (just Breandain and I weeping in our tent late at night). Chewbacca pulls a lever and initiates the jump to light speed. The rain of long held dreams crashes around us in a hurricane of hooks and body blows – falling dominoes of destiny. The book-tour-with-live-music-soundtrack show unravels at the speed of sound and easy going Berkeley boys must dig deep to keep up; we sharpen our lazy wits, our claws and fangs, apply our mascara and blush as we struggle to transform into beautiful killers.

P.S. It was sad to hear Michael Jackson is dead. And it's sad that his tragic demise was so ugly and bizarre. Truly, the beautiful artist we loved died a long time ago. For the last twenty years we merely witnessed his protracted disturbing decay.

At least now, the voyeuristic freak show of his spectacular undoing is over. Now we may enshrine in our musical memory the immortal Michael Jackson - the moonwalker, the undead thriller, Billie Jean’s dream lover. Unfettered by chimps, unearthed from his hyperbaric chamber, and uncut by heartless surgeons, the Man in the Mirror is free at last.

Shotguns and Sunshine

2009-06-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

Chris and I left Gold Beach with Jaimal late Sunday afternoon. Winding up the Oregon Coast, towering stacks of billowing clouds cast dark green shadows over the Pacific. We sped north flanked by lush mountains on one side and the infinite horizon on the other. In a sky this big , there is no shortage of blue. The sunshine was doubled as it burned in the sky and sparkled silver-gold on the cresting ocean waves below. We drove for a couple of hours until we reached Coos Bay, where we spent a cold rainy night munching on quesadillas and camping out in our tent.

The next morning, the sun was shining again. The gang split up for the next couple of days. Jaimal went up to Portland to check on his van, which had recently crapped out on him in a blaze smokey glory.

Chris and I headed for Corvalis, and the home of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Chad, and his highschool sweetheart and wife, Claire. The embodiment of the do-it-yourself spirit, Chad and Claire have a thriving vegetable garden, brew their own beer, and keep bees, which produce delicious golden honey. They have three chickens: Bella, T'wanda, and Daisy. Recently, Chad took up hunting. He has a Browning pump action shotgun with a gold trigger that he fills with his own homemade bullets. After a much needed nap, the four of us went to a public park, where Chad gave us a quick run-through on gun safety: "Don't point this at anything you're not prepared to shoot." The only artillery Chris and I had ever handled were high-powered Supersoakers, so we were naturally a little weary. It didn't take long to get into the swing of things, though. We both started off hot, shattering the first few clay discs as they hovered in the wind, momentarily intact, before being reduced to tumbling shards of clay and dust by the speeding cloud of steel shot. By the second round, I lost focus and became sporadic at best. With his extensive experience blowing away zombies and space aliens on the X Box, Chris was dead-ass accurate. The afternoon was definitely one of the highlights of the trip, so far. I could see how the experience could be almost zen-like: the wind rattled the leaves and the grass bent and twinkled in the late-day sun, we were the only ones there. Four friends filling an otherwise empty stage.

So it Begins

2009-06-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

We drove in blinking broken bursts ascending the northwestern coastline. Silhouetted against the sinking sun as it failed beside us in golden gasps. Before us, radiant flashes of evaporating light painted the green black pines a luminous gold so the treetops shined like twilight mirrors. Every now and then, we leapt out from the green and gold inland wilderness to catch majestic vistas of ocean, isthmus, lagoon and sand. The pervasive natural beauty was starkly contrasted by the intermittent pop-in of stale crumbling beach hamlets. The loveliness of the highway scenery helped distance and time pass easy.

Breandain and I reached Gold Beach, Oregon, at 10:50 p.m., Friday night, over ten hours after we set out. We slept in a tent at Quosatana Camp of the Siskiyou Wilderness, making arrangements with a crotchety, though helpful, groundskeeper named Allen. We practiced four songs this morning, winning the attention of a scruffy gang of bicycle mounted camp kids, who listened curiously along with the indifferent butterflies and sparrows. When they moved on we could hear their melodious chirping, which reminded us both of characters from a Pixar cartoon.

We tore the car apart like lions dismembering a zebra in a panicky search for the keys we misplaced. We raced down the mountain back into town to Gold Beach Books just in time to enjoy the last ten minutes of Jaimal’s reading. It was a great passage about perilous life lessons learned on a surfboard facing legends, death and strange men. With unpretentious simplicity, he handed out spiritual pearls of wisdom to the small crowd. He suggested that to reach our fullest potential we must leave behind fear, and to gain meaningful insights we had best cast aside small-minded assumptions. The wisdom was unexpectedly relevant.

We played at the café inside the bookstore for an audience of less than ten strangers but felt as nervous as if there had been fifty. The songs went well enough and everyone politely clapped after each one. At the end of our twenty minute set, some folks smiled kindly and left, a man yelled he loved the harmonies, another shook our hands and said the music sounded nice, and one girl working behind the counter said she was in love and if the tour needed a following, she would be willing to stalk us. She then gave us each a free large mint tea. As beginnings go, our adventure had a good one.