The Morning After: RESCUE Album Release Party, Ventura, 08/25/2018

It’s not really “The Morning After,” but yesterday doesn’t count because we were all dead from too much rock’n’roll.

The setlist:
A Werewolf's Been There
Lucy, Tell me a Secret
The Balcony Song
Bear-filled Woods
Getaway (Snitches get Stitches)
Grayscale
Come Back Home
Fake Pearls
Adeline
All of the Nice Things
Over and Over Again
I Get So Scared
The Laboratory
The Label On Your Sleeve
Slip Away (cover from Perfume Genius)

Personnel:
Hollis Webb - Vocals, guitar
Clint Buck - Bass, vocals
Luke Holland - vocals, guitar
Alyssa Long - vocals
Mark Henne - Drums

This past Saturday The Sleuth and I took the stage at Ventura here in San Antonio and played the new album RESCUE from top to bottom–and then some.  Though we have only played a few shows, it will be hard to match the enthusiasm, energy, and love from the massive crowd turnout we had at Ventura.  It was packed!  I spoke to many of you after the show and I was delighted that for a lot of you this was the first local show you had intentionally attended in a long time–and you had a blast!

This show is the culmination of many years and many friends helping along the way.  I'd like to give a shout-out first and foremost to Michael Carrillo at Ventura for hosting us and making us sound so good on stage. Mikey cares about this and always wants to get it right--SO THANK YOU.

One of the challenges of recording a record at home and then finding a band after the fact to perform it is capturing the emotion, energy, and clarity from a recorded platform and then transferring it to a live band performing the same song on stage.  It doesn’t sound the same–and I think that’s good.  I think we all know deep down somewhere that this is one of the joys of seeing live music: you never know what you’re going to get.

Performing the tunes with the exact same personnel as on the record (with the exception of an understandably absent Andrew McGregor) was another aspect of the show that made the release so special.  That performance may be the only time one would hear Mark Henne on drums along with the rest of the group on the record (Mark’s not dying or anything, he just lives in Austin and plays in 400 bands for a living, so when we get him it’s a special occasion).

So in the end, I was sandwiched between big groups of friends: my friends in the band playing my songs, and my friends in the audience, listening and dancing and opening up their hearts to my weird little living-room recorded music.  It’s a big, beautiful feeling I wish I could give to someone I love.

That afternoon I also stopped by the studio of KSYM 90.1, San Antonio College’s student run radio station and sat down with Hot Mustard and DJ Pyramid to talk about the release party and the record.  This was another, more embarrassing, dream of mine that I wouldn’t normally share unless I was somehow invited to do it: I love college radio.  I would follow college radio into battle.  When this civilization ends and the next group comes in after us tasked with picking up the pieces of our forgotten and broken society, I hope that the first sound they hear when they roll the dial on their field transistor radios somewhere, somehow, will be the sound of a nervous college kid saying “Okay y’all, I just ventured out into the post-apocalyptic wasteland and traded a possum pelt for a copy of Death Rides a Pale Cow on cassette–so that’s what we’ll be listening to for the next 43 rock blocs.”

College radio was an oasis for me growing up.  In Lubbock, TX we had a rock station,  pop station, several tejano and religious stations, and then one little scrappy college radio station: KTXT 88.1.  They played music I couldn’t hear anywhere else and somehow the only music that ever really excited me (right before I started playing guitar).  To be invited to speak about my dumb little record on a college radio station was sweet–even though I forgot to scream into the studio mic begging you college kids to like me.  Thank you again to Mustard, Pyramid, and KSYM for having me in!

The new record RESCUE is available now on vinyl, CD, and digital download.  You can listen to the record and purchase it from Bandcamp here: