1. Tones on Tail - "Happiness"
2. Legendary Pink Dots - "The Shock of Contact"
3. Cool Memories - "Into the Blue"
4. Eurhythmics - "The Walk"
5. Sinead O' Connor - "Jerusalem"
6. Julien Cope - "Shot Down"
7. Love and Rockets - "Motorcycle"
8. Christian Death - "Figurative Theater"
9. The Jesus Lizard - "Slave Ship"
10. Agolloch - "Dead Winter Days"
11. Caustic Resin - "People Fall Down"
12. Lungfish "Love is Love"
13. Two Ton Boa - "Bleeding Heart"
DOWNLOAD VAN MIX 1
Also some diary recapping:
LA : Stayed with this deeply sweet guy Eric, his wife Laurin and their baby Mason who jammed with me on the piano.
Eric is a real serious supporter of a certain circle of bands, our friends. His place was a real oasis.
As for the show, Jesus Makes the Shotgun Sound are an awesome band! Really funny soulful guys too. I was supposed to roll with this lady that night but she wound up sticking with her boyfriend so I ended up with the Jesus Makes dudes in their van getting into some more chemical romance instead. We were parked three cars behind the Extra Life van but my bandmates thought I had ditched them so they peeled off and a high speed car chase ensued.
San Diego : We played and hung out with the wonderful Vaginals. They introduced us to several different seafood burritos and to this totally incredible, intense person named Bill Wesley. He's a 50-something instrument inventor who has created this wild arsenal of what he calls Array Instruments. The illest of these was the Nail Violin, pictured below. It sounds somewhat synth like, very beautiful and hard to describe.
Bill is a wild thinker and inspiring speaker. He's something of a local legend in San Diego, and his instruments and ideas are now spreading across the world.
Phoenix and El Paso : Past Lives are so great! The caliber of bands we've played with on this tour is really unusually high.
Tucson: Xiu Xiu dude. Like I really need to post a link! I love this band so much. New songs kill, the new lady Angela kills. You know, it's been really cool to play to these younger crowds, real teenagers. They're actually not more awkward than adults, they just haven't built up a bunch of ridiculous shit to hide their awkwardness yet. The main thing is, they actually need music.
St. Louis : Playing at LEMP is always a very substantive experience. Mark, the guy who runs it, is a serious musician, teacher and person. Lots of community outreach going on there. He hipped me to this counter tenor Phillippe Jarrousky :
I'm not the biggest opera buff myself in general, but it's great to check out who's at the top of the game. I can get into Baroque opera, Monteverdi, etc.
Oh god I also just read the most gorgeous and powerful novel I've read since I can remember: The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima.
I can't believe it's taken me this long to find Mishima. You all may have read this when you were fifteen. This book is the most brutal and elegant articulation of love, loneliness, manhood, death and just the human condition in general. I'm not exaggerating.
Also as a touring musician I related a lot to Mishima's picture of the sailor's condition. Tour is in every way the opposite of normal life. It's just so intense, no matter how many times you do it: Waking up in a different place every morning, driving for hours, eating the worst food, getting on stage, shattering your soul apart and blasting the shards in people's faces, meeting a bunch of new amazing people, sleeping on a couch and then repeating every day for a month... After a month all I want to do is be home and dry, but the second I get back I'll want to go back out again. I don't know if I'll ever have kids.
