this afternoon we climbed arthur’s seat, ate haggis at the sheep’s heid, and saw dr neil’s garden. thanks, john, for showing us around and putting us up. we enjoyed your coen bros and holy shit, you were right about the chocolate…
above, from our session on bbc radio scotland today. as you can see, we had a terrible time.
couldn’t have ask for a better start to the tour than last night’s show at the sage in gateshead. thanks for all the tweets!
hello en route to gateshead, our first show of the tour. i’m up front with driving steve, eating apples from his girlfriend’s garden and a candy called fizz mania. everyone else is sleeping. we left the tin angel office in a scramble of amps, merch boxes, and musicians. it’s a grey day but with a nice breeze and not too much traffic. i’m still excited by the magpies here and the the fingers on the ends of raven’s wings.
i thought i’d introduce the people i’m on tour with, so i can post lots of stories and pictures of them over the next month and you’ll know who they are and be interested!
steve rubacki is driving, as i said. he’s wearing a hat that nicki bought for him while she was visiting me in austin, a sort’ve hipster trucker thing that he wears well. we’ve been talking about the job he’s leaving for in a couple months, teaching snowboarding at whistler, woah! he also just did a bunch of work at the tin (the coventry venue formerly known as taylor john’s house, in the canal basin, next to the units where tin angel records is based), fixing up the place, turning pews into booths, chalking out the new menu, tiling behind the bar. super spiff.
thom gill is sleeping by the window. i’ve been lucky enough to tour with him for about a year now, and he’s usually opening the shows (on this tour, with the band bernice) as well as playing with me. when he’s not on tour, he’s at home in toronto, organizing amazing shows, playing amazing shows, wearing amazing clothes, and being an incredibly sweet and supportive friend to a zillion very special people.
robin dann, who is a row behind thom in the slumbervan, is also from toronto, and ticks pretty much all the boxes above too. she is gentle and hilarious and exceedingly gorgeous in many more ways than just her new bangs. robin writes the songs for bernice. she and thom wrote and performed all the vocal parts on colours that aren’t mike’s or my parts.
joe carvell plays bass with batsch, the birmingham band who used to be called don’t move. joe also plays bass with many other people, myself included. he brought a still-warm apple crisp to rehearsal yesterday. joe is the youngest of us, but it’s not his age that makes him the most open and open-minded of us, it’s just his joeness. he’s also the hairiest.
neck-in-skinny-neck with joe for kindest and most caring of the band is euan rodger, our drummer. euan also works for with the label and also is a new father. euan and joe and i are the hackeysackers in the van. euan and joe make playing music easy and fun.
i’m devon, riding shotgun, pleasantly tired from last night’s packing, movie watching, and husband skyping. i’m playing a new guitar on this tour, a funky old ibanez that i got when i was a teenager and then forgot about. i wrote most of the songs we’re playing on this tour, songs from a record called colours, with my friend mike o’neill who lives in halifax, nova scotia. he’s there now, working on movie scripts.
we have two people joining us later on this tour. one is my husband paul curreri. he helped our friends move a couch yesterday, and later, watched paris, texas. he just drew a big beautiful backdrop for his mom’s girlfriend’s music class’s christmas play. he is currently clean shaven and loves things like guitars, ghosts, motorcycles, and me.
chris cummings, aka marker starling, formerly known as mantler, often referred to as “that really cool dude, y’know, the one who wears the white suit” is stopping in to support the second half of the tour, on his way back from a show in russia. chris’s songs are like elegant, charged, winding sculptures of words built on perfect grooves.
richard guy, our man behind the curtain, will be holding down the homefront from the tin angel office. he is our hub, our bud. rich is just finishing war and peace and he swims every day, very slowly.
day one was with marc riley on bbc 6 music, lovely as always. four days left to listen online, if you care to jam along!
here’s a new live video for the second song from colours, magic in the panic. thank you, southern souls!
to hear the recorded version and read a little thing i wrote about the song, click here.
it’s morning in texas and there’s lots of good stuff going on: i can tell by the way paul is pawing at his phone that he’s making another cool collage (see his other recent ones at our tour group page https://www.facebook.com/
also, our friends doug and telisha are in town and gave us the excuse to get out of the house last night …we went to curra’s and i had my first (and second) ever avocado margarita…then we came home and watched (american) football, which i still don’t really understand but i really, really enjoy nonetheless…
also, our friend anthony gerace made a very beautiful tour teaser video for the october tour. if you have time to watch it, the song you’ll be hearing is ‘nobody tells me a thing,’ the penultimate song from colours. ‘who wrote the music and who wrote the words, dev?’ well, mike o’neill wrote almost all of the music, plus the lyrics to the first verse and the refrain line. and then i wrote the rest of the lyrics. they’re mostly about experiences — both comforting and scary – of beautiful places (mostly in canada) where things are wild and overgrown but also quiet and simple. and then i got to sing it, too, pretty much just because i knew it better (going into the studio) because paul and i had worked up an arrangement for our new year show in c’ville. anyway, it’s just a clip of it, but here are the lyrics, in case you wanna hear what happens in the end… and thanks, anthony, for all the uncorralable colours. and thanks to you guys for keeping me company here on facebook.
My cattle are escaping,
Nobody tells me a thing.
How can I corral them?
Nobody tells me a thing.
I know they’re laughing when I turn my back.
Don’t they remember my mom and my dad?
My friends back in the city
Nobody tells me a thing.
Don’t think I have it in me
Nobody tells me a thing.
I remember days kept in by the rain
On the sleeping bag with the old rodeo scene.
I could give up,
I could blame the wintery air.
But where will it stop?
I fear wherever I go, I will find myself there.
I came to turn it over.
Nobody owes me a thing.
But I’m so alone here,
Nobody owes me a thing.
It’s wild out in the garden.
Nobody’s tells me a thing.
Inching toward my doorstep.
Nobody tells me a thing.
I wake up in the darkness
Nobody tells me a thing.
The stars are in the millions.
Nobody tells me a thing.
How can I corral them?
Nobody tells me a thing.
goodbye, misty scotland. hello, humid austin. goodbye instant coffee and milky americanos. hello, texas beans in a drip machine. goodbye, traveling in a group of seven! hello, news from the homefriends front. goodbye, only-one-thing-to-do-in-a-day (plus the getting-there). hello, choose your own adventure. goodbye, magpies and rooks. hello, cardinals and jays.
arrived to shetland! highlights of the 12-hour ferry trip over included:
– playing games w/ robin, thom, matt, and paul w/ pints of simmer dim
– reading oscar & lucinda
– pretty comfy bunks
– dancing on the deck (see vid attached)
– being picked up by neil riddell (ragged wood promotions) and taken back to scones and cats at his house
– heading out to explore, bye!
I couldn’t hear the rain over the hubbub in the bar downstairs but now that we’re up in the room, it’s such a nice going-to-bed sound. When P and I were talking earlier, the view out the window behind him was insane: the weirdest round mountains totally smothered in mist, one in front of the other, all slightly different greys, and the water of the lake even another one. Now that it’s total day, the green is emerging a bit.
We took the long way up here to Ullapool today, everyone taking turns napping, window gazing, and reading the St. Kilda book that John McInnes gave us. Matt and I jumped into Loch Lomond! Robin wore beautiful white shoes at the show. We cleaned the place out of venison sausage.