Author: Adam Johnston

spring gig at Cuppa

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We’re back at Cuppa (552 25th St, Ogden) to welcome spring. Friday, March 22nd, 7-9 PM.

Drop in for informal atmosphere, a grand piano, good vegan fare, and some new songs. This is our first gig since a couple of recording sessions, so it’s fun to break out things that have been on the back burner as well as show off things that are really well rehearsed at this point. It’s all changing, all the time. We like to return to Cuppa because they’re so welcoming and it is like we’re playing in a really great living room that just happens to be lofted above a fantastic kitchen.

Here’s the event on Facebook, in case you need that bit of social media pressure.

science love

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As we all have multiple lives and pursuits, teaching gigs and family gigs in addition to our music gigs, it’s fun when some of these overlap. The College of Science at Weber State gave us this space to describe what we do, acknowledging Tim and Adam’s not-so-secret personas in chemistry and physics. (Our interview during the recent Van Session brought this up, too.) So Adam wrote up this piece on their webpage to describe the weaving of our multiple identities.

van session

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We get to play this Friday in the monthly Van Session series, a short set to go along with First Friday arts in Ogden. We’re hosted at The Monarch, and The Banyan Collective provides the podcasting and amplification. We play at 8:00, after Michelle Moonshine at 7:00. It’s a good chance to play some music and talk to the Van Sessions folks about … well, who knows what: Our music? How we work together? Our feelings? We’re excited, come what may.

Details are here, but something to anticipate is that we’ll be outside under tents while The Monarch continues to get its finishing touches as a hub for artistry. So it will be cold. Also, it will be dark. But, maybe it will snow, too. We’re looking forward to it. We’ll wear coats and play loud to help everyone keep warm.

having fun

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Since getting ready for the big public show at the Station and then getting our stuff recorded and out as demos, we’ve been looking forward to getting into a rehearsal that didn’t have any expectations, where we could just kick back and have fun. When you have a catalog of material that’s well rehearsed, it feels good to just enjoy it. This is the difference between “playing” and “practicing,” I suppose.

And yet, this morning when we got together for three hours we worked on all completely new stuff that we’d never played before.

This qualifies as real work. We picked through a few standards, some classic soul and blues tunes, a couple of obscure covers, and one that just came up in conversation and suddenly became part of an upcoming set list. One, a Bob Dylan cover, evolved through versions ranging from a straight torch song (too boring) to an uptempo bossa nova (fun to play, off-putting to listen to) to a twangy country romp (hilarious, but we respect our audience too much) to a smooth swing that Tony Bennett could sing in front of a big band–or, if you’re lucky, Caryn in front of our ensemble.

At my last count, I think we have nine new songs–pretty good for a Saturday morning. So much for taking it easy, but like everything else we’ve been doing lately, it turned out to be a lot of fun.