Ants Marching

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Great news! We’ve decided to become a Dave Matthews Band cover band! Isn’t that cool ?!?

No. Not really. We’re not actually doing that. What we are doing, it seems, is starting to build some momentum. We’re playing more gigs, working on new material, writing some original pieces. SuperDuper Stardom and merry buckets of cash are just around the corner.

Except they’re not. Turns out, this is a lot of work. Hustling for new bookings, endless rehearsals, dealing with equipment, writer’s block, on top of our other jobs and families and such to manage. It can actually get to be a bit of a grind.

And then we have a gig like this past Friday, where we played O’Connor’s Pub in Phoenix, and everything just seemed to work a little better than usual. Setup in under 20 minutes, quick sound check (sans our usual sound guy, even.) and a good crowd that was totally willing to be a part of the fun. It was grand, so it was. And in the midst of the laughter, and the old familiar place with the new faces, and right smack in the middle of some mighty fine music, it occurred to me that all the other stuff, the work and the hustle and the grind? That’s the job. What we were doing on stage? That’s the payoff.

I’ve heard a lot of musicians say that they “do it all for the fans”. I’ve never seen us as being quite so altruistic; we’ve got bills to pay, and a new mixing console doesn’t come cheap, after all. But it dawned on me that we desperately need our fans. Without them, there’s really no point to what we do. We can stay at home and make music. Hell, for $10/month we can listen to all the music there ever was on Spotify, and go for years without repeating a single song. But none of that will give us what we get when we’re standing in front of you. We pour our hearts out, we’re funny and witty and weird, we throw a wall of sound at you. And you? You sing along, you laugh, you pound on the tables, you dance, you buy Erin endless cups of coffee…

And just like that, we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves, bigger than three dreamers on a tiny stage. And so we’ll keep hustling, keep practicing, keep stretching. Because there’s nothing finer, I think, than doing it all, not for the fans, but with them.

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