Archive for the tag "old town school"

• I have a Google "Shared Stuff" page? Huh. #
• Being thoroughly confused by video codecs, but my pal Jeff Economy’s trying to sort me out #
• Uploading the Old Town School video to my Virb. I couldn’t reencode my way out of a paper bag, so thanks Jeff!! #
• @phineas:  Welly-well-well!  I guess you can unfriend me now.  :-P  #
• I tried to upload a video to MySpace for the first… and last time. Fuck that shit. Virb is where it’s at!! #

"If It Weren’t For The Words" live at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4/15/06.  It was the last show of a super great tour I did with my pals the Zincs.

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.

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With the Zincs

At the Old Town School of Folk Music
4544 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago, IL 60625
(773) 728-6000

My band: Nathaniel Braddock (guitar); Ryan Hembrey (bass); Jason Toth (drums)

OTS posted a video online for the song "If It Weren’t For The Words".

Few more shows to report on the western leg of the U.S. tour…

3/24 Sokol Underground, Omaha
3/29 Lo Fi Cafe, Salt Lake City
3/30 Neurolux, Boise
4/6 Spaceland, LA
4/7 Plush, Tucson

I’ll be posting these to the sidebar and creating the links later today.  Now we’re just waiting for confirmations in the April 8th-14th range.  And Europe of course, but that’s later-later (in May probably) so it’ll be awhile before I have solid news to report on that.  No questions please!  No autographs!  When I know, it’ll be reported here, no sooner and no later.  I am soooo drowning in a sea of e-mails over this stuff, but the water feels fine.  :-)

Oh BTW, tickets for the April 15th show at the Old Town School went on sale yesterday for OTS members; the general public can dig in starting tomorrow.  Better snap those up if you’re planning to go… I’m sure crossing my fingers for a sellout but we’ll see.

I had a pretty fun weekend.  Sarah comped me a ticket to see Otis Clay open for Marty Stuart last night (=Sunday) at the Old Town… Eric tagged along too, and I finally got to meet Sarah’s friend Mark, he was nice.  The show was soooo goooood.  I knew Otis was going to be awesome but I had no idea about Marty.  I vaguely remembered seeing him talk about older artists on various documentaries, but had never heard his own stuff.  I guess I saw the mullet and didn’t think I needed to… what a mistake that was!  Remind me next time not to judge a mullethead so quickly.  He was totally great.  The real deal, no doubt about it.  An amazing musician (mandolin mostly) and a super-crack band too.  Loved every minute.  There was a group of fucking assholes sitting next to us who couldn’t stop cracking up during the most inappropriate times despite our intense glares, but oh well.  It wasn’t so bad that it ruined the show for me or anything.  You gotta wonder what they were doing there though.  Maybe they were just too drunk to give a shit, who knows.

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Eric got us into this one, thank you Eric and thank you Anne!  It was a total old-school folkie show, with Tom Paxton in his Greek fisherman’s cap and everything.  Not what I usually go out to see, but I loved every minute.  Anne played a new song she’d written called "Plainsong" which just killed me… she’s about to record a new album and that’ll be the title track.  I can’t wait to hear it.

Weird… I’ve gotten a couple of spams today that had my OWN address as the "sender".  Both were ads for Viagra… no attachments, so I don’t think this has anything to do with the Klez worm.  One of them seemed to originate from Korea, and the other from AOL, but they both had the same x-mailer in the header: "The Bat! (v1.52f) Business".  Strange!!  If I get any more I’ll run ‘em through Spamcop.  Haul those headers in for questioning, as they say.

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The Pine Valley Cosmonauts at the Old Town School Folk & Roots Festival in Welles Park, Chicago

Jon Langford & Diane Izzo

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"Backstage" at the Pine Valley Cosmonauts show at the Old Town School Folk & Roots Festival

Jon Langford of the Mekons, Waco Brothers etc., with me and Rosie Flores. Photo by John Whitney

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