Friday, April 11, 2008

2008 Spring/Summer Tour - Day 9

We hung around in the morning while the girls played. Phone calls, e-mail, etc. April came back from Amy's school and brought a book the kids had made for me. How cute! Each student wrote a page and some of their messages included, "Do you like cats?", "I like your mustache" and many comments about how much fun they had.

Evee wasn't feeling good this morning, and we're wondering if she might be developing lactose intolerance. She's never had a problem with milk or yogurt before, but over the last few days she's complained of tummy aches or has puked after drinking milk and eating yogurt, so we'll have to take her in somewhere and see if they can figure that out.

We were planning for the girls to have naps so they could stay up late and have a sleepover party with Amy while we went to my coffeeshop gig, but they just would not go to sleep. Evee eventually napped for a little while, but at that point we couldn't justify letting them both stay up late with Amy, so they came along in the bus and went to bed while I went in to the gig myself.

The gig was at Mission City Coffee Roasters in Santa Clara, which is a great venue for acoustic music... nice stage and sound system, and even a baby grand piano. It was a showcase by Vincent Lowe (pictured below), a guy from the area who has hired me to produce some songs for a kids' (older range, 10-14) video project he is developing called "How Far Jafar". The program will feature stories centered around science concepts like time, velocity, weight, etc. The first song I'm doing will be for the velocity episode. The other two musicians he is working with are Amy Obenski and Nicole Campbell, and all three of us each did about a half hour set. I went first and since it was all adults there, I did a mix of some of my kids' tunes that translate well to singer/songwriter situations, including a few from my next album like "What a Ride", "How Big" and "Stink Bug", and some of my old coffeeshop fare like "More Will Be Revealed" and "What a Wonderful World". I also did "The Elephant Song", which is unusual with a group of adults, but they played along just fine. The audience was great and very appreciative throughout, though I did feel a little out of my element... I used to perform at coffeeshops like that all the time before getting into the kids' thing, but now it feels a little foreign to just stand still behind a microphone.

Apparently, some ornery lady was complaining to Roseann that we had parked the RV in front of her house, thinking that we were going to sleep over there all night... nothing like jumping to a conclusion, eh? The sign in front of her house said "2 Hour Parking" and we'd only been there for a little over an hour. So anyway, Roseann called me after my set and asked me to come back right away. We were able to find a good spot near the coffeeshop, so we parked there and Roseann went in for a while to meet Vincent. She saw Nicole's set and said she was very good and also adorably cute and funny... I guess all of her songs involve math/science mixed with the more typical singer/songwriter love/struggle concepts, so that sounds really cool and would seem perfect for Vincent's project. (That reminds me of one of our favorite blogs, indexed, which has some hilarious graphical jokes. Check it out...) I'm disappointed that I missed Nicole's set, but we did the tag team thing and I went back in to catch Amy Obenski's set. She put the piano to great use and sang very beautifully, a la Sarah Maclachlan, with a local bassist named Ted playing some cool acoustic bass accompaniment. I was very impressed with her "Time" song, which was written specifically for Vincent's project... She said that was the first time she ever wrote a song specifically to a subject, and I think it turned out great, covering aspects of time in a very poetic way.

It was late after we left there, so we went back to Steve and April's, plugged in the bus, and went to sleep.


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