Note: This is a journal entry — it was written on paper or on my computer, then transferred to my website, maybe years later.

Just got back from the club where we played in Vigo, called Vademecum.  Great club.  It’s like a groovy dance club with a chillout room on the side.  The owner Julio said it’s only open on weekends.  We played at 12:30 AM and by the time we left it was really hoppin’.  Tonight was daylight savings night, so we got an extra hour to hang out without worrying about losing sleep.  :-) Anyway our drive tomorrow is super short, only a few hours to Oporto, Portugal.  I had a pretty good time playing tonight!  The audience was very good so I rewarded them (haha) with that Lydia Mendoza tune for an encore.  :-D There were plenty of people for my tastes, maybe 60 that came to see us play.  A lot more people came in later though, for the dancing.

For dinner before the show, Julio took us to a really good restaurant where we had ensalada and then paella de mariscos.  (Seafood paella and salad.) Sooooo fucking good.  Really yummy wine too, from this same region (Galicia?) We’re staying in a nice place called Hotel Junquera (the first one so far that doesn’t call itself a "hostal" instead of "hotel”).  Plus, the show was free!!  No cover.  Man, I don’t see how they can afford to host bands and feed them so well, and not even charge a cover.  I know I shouldn’t be obsessing over every little penny, especially money that’s not even my own, but that’s how my mind works I guess.  I hate it when people are losing money on my ass, it’s bad enough when they’re just breaking even.

Vigo is a seaside town in the northwestern corner of Spain.  This afternoon as we were pulling into the city I had to do a live interview on Radio 3, the Spanish national radio.  What a trip!!  We turned on the radio as soon as we could get it to come in clearly.  It was a show all about independent music; they were talking about my friend Dominique A when we turned it on.  Andy had told me they were going to call on his cell phone so I could do a live interview, but I thought he was pullin’ my leg.  I kept saying, "no… you’re fuckin’ with me.  It’s not true, right?  You’re just screwin’ with my mind, right?" and he kept laughing, going "no, it’s true, I swear." He patted my knee and said "Don’t worry, it’ll be fine!!" and meanwhile I’m getting more and more freaked out realizing my voice is about to go out live all over the fucking country.  Omigod, I’ve never done anything like THAT before!!  So suddenly we hear one of my songs come on the radio (NATIONAL radio…!!!) and the guy starts talking about me and says… "oye Andy y Edith, estamos en punto de hablarles por telefono…" (I’m just about to call you guys…) so we pulled over and waited for the call. So the radio host Julio called and as soon as Andy put me on the line the guy starts chattering with me in Spanish; this was while my song was still playing so we weren’t actually on the air yet.  I ask him if it was okay if I spoke English and Spanish both (because I knew I’d have trouble speaking only in Spanish) but he chattered away that it was going to be FINE, that we were GOING to do the interview in Spanish and that was that.  "Tu espanol es superlativo!  Vamos a hablar en espanol.  Tu vas a ver, voy a hablar despacito para que me entiendes, y no te preocupes, no tienes miedo!!" (Don’t be scared, your Spanish is fine, don’t worry, I’ll talk slow and it’ll be just fine.  YOU ARE DOING IT IN SPANISH.) Hahahaha!!!  So anyway he puts me on hold while the song finishes.  We go live and suddenly I’m fucking talking in Spanish to around 200,000 listeners, it’s going all across the fucking nation.  OH my fucking god.  But it was okay.  Somehow I was able to explain my music more or less understandably, and he asked a bunch of questions which I actually understood perfectly fine, and I answered them and kinda stumbled around with my Spanish a little, but not too bad at all.  The questions were the usual… "what are your influences?" "what was it like to work with Steve Albini?" etc. etc.  He asked me about where-all I’ve lived, and I told him about how I lived in Mexico when I was a kid.  I started feeling paranoid like I should say something nice about Spain versus Mexico, so this is the lame-ass thing I came up with:  "yo creo que todo en Mexico es una copia de lugares o cosas en Espana." OH MY GOD!!!  Did I really have to fucking insult my beloved Mexico just to say something nice about Spain?  Oh well, it was the best I could do.  LOLOLOL.  Lo siento mucho Mexico, te lo juro que no sabia que estaba diciendo!!!

After the show at Vademecum we tried to sell some T-shirts but nobody was buyin’, so we folded up the table and stuck everything in the back office.  Hung out with Andy and Ryan in the chillout room, drank a few beers and shot the shit for awhile.  Andy’s a really cool guy.  He’s a musician and doesn’t want to be a tour manager really, but I gotta say he’s pretty good at what he does.  The perfect example is the other day at the Los Conos restaurant, where everybody was yelling at him but he kept himself perfectly composed and just held his ground and said he wasn’t going to be ripped off.  Ellos querian empezar una pelea y el se puso un frente muy profesional y no iba a ser enganado.  Quiero volver ahi y pintar el nombre del restaurant para decir "Los Coños" en vez de "Conos".  (They wanted to fuck with us because we’re foreigners, but Andy wasn’t havin’ it.  I want to go back and paint a tilde on the name of the restaurant so it’ll say "The Cunts" instead of "The Cones".)

Ryan and I talked for awhile tonight, just like the other night when we were playing Scrabble.  We keep saying, but this time we are really going to do it, that we’re going to do a double-date with Ryan and Maura and me and John.  We’re going to go eat seafood at El Barco (?? haven’t been there) and then we’re going to go to the Lakeview Lounge and watch the hippie band playing cover tunes.  We are going to do this one day.  We really are!!!  We also talked about the eternally unfinished country album we’ve been working on for like fifteen years.  I’m going to ask Rian Murphy if he’ll help me finish it and just put it out on Drag City.  I obviously need help, I’m never going to finish it on my own, and I guess I really need Rian’s help specifically, as opposed to any other musician or whoever.  I don’t know why it is that I need him so much, but I really depend on Rian to get my music right, to get it the way it should be.  Without his guidance I’m fucking useless, I can’t finish anything or get it to sound the way I want it to.

Okay, I have to go to sleep now.  I can’t even formulate a clear thought anymore…!