CarSeatHeadrest225

Arichive Sunday #29

Added 2023-12-31 17:00:06 +0000 UTC

SD: In August we got the opportunity to play MAHA festival in Omaha. We flew in the night before, and pretty sure the festival booked us a hotel nearby because I remember it being a lot nicer/closer than we were used to. There was this big announcement before the weekend got started that Warren Buffett would be introducing us before our set. We have no idea how or why that became a thing, but I'm guessing he agreed to make an appearance and the only time that worked was before our set.

He ended up stumbling over our name in the intro a little, but hey he definitely gathered a bunch of people to the stage right before we played. It turned out to be a super fun set, and the extra crowd during the early afternoon slot was an added bonus. Afterwards we retreated to our greenroom R.V. and spent most of the rest of the day catching sets from artists like Diet Cig, Diarrhea Planet, and Vince Staples.

Next up on our docket was our first TV appearance. I remember we had to go over the song a bunch in the practice space to ensure it would fit in our given 3:30min time slot. We managed to get it down enough as long as we started at the right tempo haha. Looking back it would pretty easy just to give Andrew a 1 bar click to start us off correctly, but I guess our setup was pretty bare-bones at that point haha.

So we flew in to NYC the night before, and Andrew, Andy (the sound engineer we worked with once before), and I woke up early to get to the Ed Sullivan Theater by like 7:30am for setup. Late night talk shows usually want the band gear inside first thing because the line check and spike taping is the first thing on the schedule. So we arrived with the gear and checked everything with the stage crew as they taped the location of everything. Then Andrew and I had a few hours to kill in the dressing room before our actual soundcheck. We tried our best to keep warm by drinking tea in the freezing basement, and Andrew isolated himself to a corner to listen to his metronome phone app to make he was locked-in to the right tempo.

The other guys came shortly after for our scheduled soundcheck where the crew mapped out camera lines and made sure we had everything in the predetermined time limit. Then we had even more time to kill, but thankfully it was a little more exciting once the rehearsals for the night's show started on our greenroom's monitor. It was definitely the highlight of our day just watching Colbert and crew workshop the jokes and skits to see what was good enough for the cut. Something about the lack of audience noise, the scattered jokes that utterly bomb, and the awkward pacing of the rehearsals makes it even funnier than the actual taping.

Finally after 9 hours of anticipation, we capped off the live audience taping around 4pm with Fill in the Blank. It definitely felt weird jumping on stage (that was set up for the third time seconds before we walked on) just to play one song, especially when there wasn't any room for error. I'm sure some bands play along with tracks in order to be able to fix mistakes in the mix, but we were flying by the seat of our pants and under the impression that one mistake would ruin us haha. But we got through it, and the audience seemed to be really into it! To celebrate we all went out for pizza with Will's parents then we watched the show on TV at the hotel together.