Weekly Update - May 24th - 30th - Midlake

I worked Monday and taught a lesson on my way home.  We started work on my student's second original song and I am encouraging the young songsmith to take the reigns more on this one and he is doing a great job.  After work on Tuesday I headed up to Minneapolis with my close friend and RVM bassist, Jason Ptacek, to see Midlake's show at the Cedar Cultural Center.  The Cedar is one of my favorite venues because it sounds amazing and you can literally stand at the foot of the stage with no one pushing on you etc...  The show was really good and I was impressed by the tightness of the 7 member group who often had 4 guitars going at once.  The drummer was also very impressive and seemed to play a larger role in the live situation than he does on the records.

I had the day off Wednesday and continued working on new songs as well as the seemingly never-ending laminate floor project.  Wednesday night was a Moth Mountain practice sans Evan who was otherwise engaged.  Joe and I worked through the 4 finished songs a few times each and were starting to feel more comfortable with the material again by the end of the night.

Thursday night I headed down to Del's bar in La Crosse, WI to drum for Michelle Lynn with Adam on bass.  The show was a lot of fun as our weekly rehearsals have continued to increase the amount of material we are comfortable performing together.  Driftless Music founder Adam Wiltgen has been kind enough to tape some of these performances, check out Black Hole from our set at the Acadia Cafe last week below:



Friday was spent doing work around the house.  I was also able to make it down to the Root Note to catch a portion of the Adam Without Eve CD release party where I watched 3/5 of Mouse Pocket deliver a quality set followed by good sets from a collection of local rhyme slayers including Hyphon and Efftupp.  I spent the rest of the holiday weekend relaxing around the house doing cleaning, laundry and playing some music when I could.

I am taking the month of June off from playing any Brahman Shaman shows to focus on recording a talented local band, Neon.  More soon...