I’m home now.  Happy Easter!  Ohhh I wish you’d been at the Old Town show if you weren’t there, it was spectacular.  The sound in that auditorium is so amazing, I don’t think I’ve ever played in a better-sounding venue and I think any other musician who’s played there would agree.  It’s a just a room that was designed for perfect sound, plus there’s the whole history of the OTS, so many of the world’s greatest musicians have played there.  I’ve seen so many amazing shows at the OTS since I moved to Chicago so it was just a huge thrill for me to be able to play my own music there for a night.  And oh, the band sounded so great!!  And I was singing just fine too.  Maybe a little wobbley at first from the jitters but nothing wrong with it after that.  Err… I was babbling onstage a little, what the fuck was I saying?  But other than that I was really psyched with that whole show.  Really great way to end what turned out to be a super fun tour!  It all went great, we had a really good time and played a lot of fun shows and met up with so many old friends and made so many great new ones.  I miss my bandmates already, we all got along so well, there were tons of laffs.  Musically it was awesome, best band I’ve ever toured with.  We had a few weird shows but that’s unavoidable on any tour, you have to play lots of different venues and maybe not all of them are going to be ideal in every way.  Overall though, the good shows definitely outweighted the bad.  I am very pleased with how it all came out in the end.  I’m super fucking tired though, omigod.  Sooo pooped… I don’t even have the mental energy to go through what-all went down on tour, not today anyway.

But I will talk about one thing, something I haven’t SHUT UP about for the past several weeks!  And that is, I have a favorite band again.  Which is pretty cool ‘cuz I haven’t really freaked out over any band in so many years, maybe since the Cocteau Twins in the 80s!  OK maybe I’m exaggerating but I really dig this stuff.  It’s not exactly a band, it’s a guy named Henry Frayne and he goes by the band name Lanterna. My pal Robbie in Seattle turned me on to them while I was out there and now I’m all obsessed with this shit!!  I can’t describe it very well, it’s instrumental music (mostly).  Cruisin’ music.  It puts you into a trance after about 5 minutes and you never wanna hear anything else, at least that’s the effect it had on me.  You can hear some of his tunes on MySpace if you’re interested.  I hope y’all will buy all his records and go to his shows and turn him into a rich man ‘cuz he’s definitely all that.  To me anyway.  And I got to meet Henry when we played in Champaign and that was a total thrill and I totally embarrassed myself gushing over how I just can’t get enough of this shit!  I’m listening to Lanterna right this minute!  As you are reading this, now and in the future!  Because if I’m not listening to Lanterna on the CD player or on the iPod, I’m listening to it in my mind, man.  OK… heheh… you get the picture, I love ‘em and I’m the number one new superduperfan and it’s time for me to shut up now.  :-)

Oh yeah… just to let y’all know, my site has been getting absolutely pummelled by comment spam lately so I’ve turned on the captcha feature for comments submission.  Non-webmasters probably won’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but yeah.  Captcha is a method for ensuring that a person submitting a comment is an actual human being and not a spammer-bot.  An image gets presented to the user, the image contains a security code and you have to type that code into a slot before the comment will be posted.  It’s a bit of a pain in the ass I know, and it limits accessibility for some people, so my apologies to those of you who might be using screen-readers and the like, who won’t be able to post comments anymore.  It sucks but it’s what I had to do so I won’t have spend all day cleaning up after those dirty rotten spammer slobs.  Bah!!