PHILADELPHIA, LAST SHOW, UP ALL NIGHT Hell of a day and night. Most of the details are foggy and most likely distorted as I recall them, but I do know that it was fun. I’ll probably do a lot more writing in the coming weeks to try and jog my memory but for now here’s what I got. On Friday morning, I woke early enough to go for a bike ride before the rest of the folks were awake. I think this is true but I’m also remembering a big breakfast although the more I think about I think the breakfast I'm thinking of was from before we even started the tour. So, the bike ride. Since I’m still pretty unfamiliar with Philadelphia outside of West Philly and Fishtown , I decided to take the most familiar to me route, about 60 miles total from The Bath House up river trail to Valley Forge and back. It’s alright but it’s so flat that it’s easy to get bored even if it is kind of pretty. Back at the house lounging was the activity of the day. Maybe I took a nap, maybe I worked more on the Pigeon Island songs since we were going to be recording in just a couple days. I know I spent some time on the porch. Before the show we had a big last dinner together. No idea what we ate but I’m sure it was good. I’ve eaten very well on this tour and Jeff is an awesome cook so if he was behind it I’m sure it was great. Hannah and Jacob are also really good cooks so maybe they helped. I just remembered that Matto made a kale salad that I most of because it was the shit and because I have no self control when it comes to good food. Although I’m speaking of the night kind of lightheartedly it was actually kind of sad. The goal of the night was to have fun and play an awesome show so no one mentioned it if they were bummed about the tour coming to a close but I was definitely thinking it. I love being on the road and playing music every night. It makes more sense to me than most things. So we got to Barrett’s place for the show around 7 and no one was there. We loaded in and went down the street for coffee. Back at the venue I finished catching up on some writing and waited for people to arrive. Jeff and Diehm came back with a case of Budweiser, but I wasn’t ready to drink yet so I just chilled. There was a slow trickle of people at first but eventually the porch filled up and by the time The Weaks started playing the basement was pretty packed. I watched part of the set, took a Bud break on the porch, and then watched the end. Evan is great and we got to hang on the west coast just a month or so ago when Mike Bell and The Movies played in San Francisco with Big Kids for our final Bay Area show. It was cool to see his other band. Pigeon Island was next and as we set up it felt just like any other show we’d played over the last 2 weeks except this time we knew it was the end. Since we live on opposite sides of the country there’s no telling when the next time we do something like this together will be. Soon we’ll all be in 3 different regions since Brum is moving to Austin come the new year so that makes it even less likely to happen again. So we played our last set of the tour and maybe more. It was fun and over before I could feel prematurely nostalgic about it. It helped that we only have a 20 minute set including bs between songs. Acid Fast was next. Playing drums after Pigeon Island every night has been awesome because I never have to set up anything since I’ve been borrowing Jeff’s kit. I put my cymbals on and while Matto and Hannah messed with their amps, took the opportunity to go upstairs for another bud and to say hi to some friends who had arrive while we were playing. The set was fun. We felt tight after having played everyday for a week and half. Everyone seemed to be having fun. I love playing drums in that band and would do it so much more often if we could make it work. In Brooklyn we played our very chill cover of Linoleum and it was well received but I broke the bass pedal have way through the song. This time when we played it nothing went wrong. You could hear some of the older folks at the show unabashedly singing along to a song they probably hadn’t heard in a decade or more and I tried to sing along as much as I could without messaging up the drum parts(which admittedly I was making up as I went along) and yeah it was all fun. I thought that was the last song of the night, but after I stood up Tim tricked me into walking over to him to take a shot of whiskey Jeff jumped behind the drums and played a song with Acid Fast. It was strange and awesome watching them play together. After the show we left all the gear in the basement and went to a party down the street. It went late and I was one of the last people at the party. I ended up going to sleep around 5:30 in the morning and it was fun. There.