Tour Diary Part 4

Greetings from Madison WI, where I've returned from a long walk to my favorite soup in America - A chicken and andouille noodle soup from Monty's Blue Plate Diner. I jogged over there this morning and sat at the counter. I asked for the soup and the waitress said they didn't have it anymore. I was crestfallen and glumly looked through the menu for something else... but she returned to tell me she had been mistaken, and moments later I had a hot bowl of the very best stuff.

(for the record i've just tried for 5 minutes to have this jpeg show up in the right orientation... but it keeps uploading sideways!) 

Gregg has joined the tour and we couldn't be more happy to have him! We had a lot of laughs backstage yesterday in chilly Minneapolis. It was good to be back at it after 2 days off in the barren flats of Eastern Montana. I did have another great diner experience there, a Penny's Diner which is now the only place we could find to eat in Glendive. I had a roast turkey dinner with mashed potatoes and was very heartwarming.

Glendive has gone downhill though, 2 of the places we frequented last time were closed this time.

During Neil's chunk in Minneapolis I saw news of the disastrous plane crash. We'd been doing Trump's Private Pilot as a stirring and angry protest song to end the night, but I think we'll be putting any songs alluding to plane crashes on the back burner for now.

For the past week everyone on the bus has been infected by the disease of Randy VanWarmer's beautiful "Just When I Needed You Most." We all can't stop humming it and we finally started playing it in soundcheck. I thought it'd make for a great Neil Hamburger torchlight song, so we debuted it with him on lead vocals last night. It was so great. And was fun for me to sneak back to Ellie and Connor's station and just be the rhythm guitar player for a song.

Overall the Madison show was really fun. It was a smaller more intimate venue and everyone felt like they were THERE for it! It continues to move me when I see people out there singing along and boppin their heads to the tunes.

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It's Friday morning and I'm now in Chicago, outside of Thalia Hall, it's dark and rainy out. We are heading out for a band session for something called Audio Tree where we'll be filmed playing some of our set in a proper studio and it then will be released at some point. Will be a busy day, but should be all fun along the way.

Couldn't be having a better time with this gang. See you tonight Chicago!

P&L, T