Return of the King...er... ENY

Right, so we played a show this past weekend. Our first show in almost six weeks. Were we a little rusty? Maybe, but we did a ton of practicing over our break and things sounded good. It was one of those nights where the sound was great both on stage and in the crowd. We were the opening act at Back Booth, supporting Auto! Automatic!!, Inkwell, and History.
First off, I have to admit that this show almost didn't happen for us. Doug and JoAnna were both under the weather and JoAnna was slowly getting worse as the day went on. By the time we were loading up the van to head into downtown, she was on her hands and knees in the yard unloading her lunch onto the grass. Sorry JoAnna... hope that's not embarassing for you.

We started off the night around 9:30 to a reasonably packed house. We had planned for nine songs but only managed to squeeze in eight. We made that difficult decision of not playing Girl Like Her. That's always scary not playing that song since it usually is the deciding factor on how many CDs we sell in a night. Somehow we only managed to play three songs from "Sarcasm" and instead decided to focus on jamming out our newer, stronger material. We even debuted a brand new song called The Sick Charade and honestly, it was probably one of the best songs in our set. Even with JoAnna barely able to stand, so made it through the entire set without missing too many beats. She's such a trooper.

Auto! Automatic!!, from Tampa, were up second and played some cool instrumental songs. I'm usually not into that type of thing, but they had song structures that were like normal songs, and you never really noticed that no one ever really sang. I must say that they were really nice dudes. Really nice dudes who love to party, apparently. They had never played the Back Booth before so they were all walking around with big smiles on their faces. Their drummer talked to me forever and updated me on all the cool places to play in Tampa and Ybor. Once we were finished playing he caught me at the bar and was telling me how much we reminded him of Piebald. That was probably the best compliment I received on our music all night.

Inkwell was set to play third and as always, decided to bring 600 different intruments to the stage. They had 2 drum kits, many many guitars, a keyboard and an instrument that may or may not have been a farfisa. They rocked out a great collection of new and old songs and the crowd went nuts. It's always so much fun seeing those guys live. They just get on stage and make noise and the crowd just eats it up.

History played last. What a band. These guys and girls are definitely doing their own thing. They also have a Moog player and a gal playing another synth and manage to stick lots of crazy sounds into their songs without sounding cluttered. They're all very nice people as well and we had blast hanging out with them throughout the night.

Overall, we met a ton of great people and heard a lot of great music. Thankfully JoAnna pulled through and is getting better, and I'm currently the ill one. Thanks to anyone who came out to the show, hopefully we'll be back at Back Booth for their New Year's Eve show and rock the place all over again.

On Saturday we all jump on planes and head our separate ways for the Holidays and then we come back, have less than 24 hours to practice and then get our butts to the next show. Good times all around.

Lastly, my next entry here WILL have our Top 5 end of the year lists. So tune in to see what the members of ENY have been rocking out to as of late.

Cheers!