10 February 2006

The wild card that is Boston (will anybody come to the concert?) turned over in our favor. Despite the fact that the performance was in Hyde Park, a suburb of the city, and the venue was difficult to find (I used to live in the Boston area and, even with directions, the band got severely lost on the way to the gig), there was a solid and enthusiastic audience for the show. After receiving a number of reviews and previews during the tour that suggested that, though The Color Of Memory is a good album, it just repeats the same “formula” used on the quintet’s previous releases, I decided to organize the concert differently than I generally do. The first set was comprised of material from that album; the second set was put together from compositions written since Fred Lonberg-Holm joined the group in August. Played side by side, I think it was pretty clear to everyone in the room that the material keeps changing as the quintet continues. The music always speaks louder than words.

From there we hit Philadelphia, playing inside an old cinema that was clearly about to be torn down- exposed duct work, old fluorescent light bulbs, broken toilets, Astroturf instead of a carpet on the performance stage. It was like looking at the current infrastructure of the United States. Next stop was, appropriately, a suburb of the nation’s cheap phentermine capital, Arlington. Last time the band played there I think there were about 30 people, this time there were 135, so that was a nice switch. The cds and posters we brought for the tour continued to move well, and we sold out of our copies of The Color Of Memory at this show. From Arlington it was a nine-hour trek to Knoxville without access to one drinkable cup of coffee. I don’t even drive and the lack of decent caffeine was brutal, I don’t know how Dave, Fred, and Tim made it through that trip.