We Buried the Bodies in New Braunfels
At least that was the saying we kept using this week.. And then following it up with “There’s probably no better place to bury a body than New Braunfels!!”.
This last week we officially played our last show under Fire in the Kitchen and I think we went about it in a really cool as well as symbolic way.
We played at the Phoenix Saloon opening for another Austin band called The Cover Letter. We had about an hour and a half of a set w/ a little break in between so it worked out perfectly to play old FITK songs and then progress into the band that is now Major Grizz. I’d say that FITK songs were probably more appropriate for this venue and especially their soundguy w/ whom (?) we pissed off multiple times by playing too loud.
And that was only during the FITK set of the night...
After that I played a solo set by myself which felt really good. I don’t do that too much these days but it’s something I’m wanting to explore more of. From there we moved into playing our Major Grizz tunes and I’m pretty sure the sound guy just gave up on us at that point. He seemed to basically lower the levels on us to where I could barely hear myself sing in the monitors and was nonresponsive when we’d ask him to help us out.
In the past this type of show would’ve really freaked us out. We can’t hear ourselves, what are we playing? is anyone enjoying this?
For whatever reason this weekend, it seemed to work out really well for us. I’m guessing the Phoenix Saloon is just a place where people come to hang because we had a decent sized crowd and they seemed to enjoy the show. And we ended up making it out of there fairly unscathed.
One of the main differences I’ve seen in the band lately has been our general change in attitude. I can’t say that I’ve felt like more people are on board with what we’re doing just as a band internally. Usually in the past, I could feel some sort of tension or nagging in the back of my brain about something but not so much this time.
A great example of this was on the ride back from New Braunfels, Jason, PJ and I were singing along to our new first mixes from our last recording session with Frenchie. It’s late at night, we’re on 35, we’d just stopped at Buc-ee’s and PJ is singing his fucking heart out to words I wrote in the backseat of Jason’s SUV.
He’s getting the words wrong but, I loved it all the same. I loved that he has his own idea and interpretation of the songs and I have my own as well. And yeah it’s a bit of an ego boost to hear someone sing along to a melody you wrote.
One of the other things that’s change with us is that we all generally like hanging out together. In the past when we’d taken a road trip even for the night for a gig, we probably wouldn’t talk to each other for a week afterwards.
It felt like we’d used all of our patience with one another in the span of 24 hours and we had to recharge that battery constantly.
But this weekend, shit, we got together the very next day to shoot a silly and overall gross promotion video w/ some of the guys in Yuma and Marcus Brown for our next show. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPpSS2agmc)
We wouldn’t have done anything like that and been all onboard to see each other. Before Tyler in Yuma showed up we were giving each other a fucking group hug outside of Stubb’s. Which to an outsiders perspective might’ve looked really weird...
I’ll keep this one short, things are really good in the band right now. We’ve found a rhythm to engaging with one another and an openness to communicating that makes my life easier. It drives me to want to work hard for these guys and myself. In the past it’d feel like I was dragging everyone else along on a ride that people didn’t want to be on, now there’s an excitement and a renewed energy to what we’re doing that makes me really excited about what’s to come.
PS, we just got our first mixes back from Frenchie on Friday and now we have a whole EP Tracked and recorded!!!! We still need to get things mastered and some knobs turned but if anyone that reads this would like to hear the work in progress, we have no problem sharing it with you. Simply send an email to [email protected] asking for it (nicely!!) and I’ll shoot you over a private soundcloud link to it.