Playing Music Together

Saturday marked an important day for Russ and Sandy, they got married. Alyssa, Andy Wessell and Chris Hilf (AKA This Side of Eve) played for their reception. It was the first time in over a year that we've played our original music, it felt good. There's something right about playing songs that you wrote your self or with the help of your band mates. I don't know if this marks the beginning of us starting to play and write again or if it was just a one time happening. This particular line up hadn't ever really played together before. In the very early days we played with Andy on drums and our friend Ian White on bass. Later Ian played drums, then Chris Williams. Bill Adams was a key member in the band for years, most of that time Chris Hilf played bass, but for a while Jim Leofler played and later Nate Stevens. Bill's is now playing in his own band, The Red Rovers. Having Andy back felt really natural, He can learn a new song in no time, makes rehearsing sooo easy. Chris was perfect on bass as always. We only rehearsed twice, even with five new covers, pretty much all slow songs for people to slow dance to. We really are not a wedding band, but our choices of covers made it all work quite well. We did "Moon River" and a Nora Jones'ish version of "Love me Tender". We also did "I Want You to Be My Love" and "Go Down Easy" by "Over the Rhine", and a really cool version of "The Fire Theif" by Hem. In the end, it was great to play, especially with two really good friends, and my best friend, my wife Alyssa (even though she did give me a dirty look when I missed a change in Go Down Easy!)

I think, even with two kids and another on the way, it's time we begin to reinvent ourselves, just for our own love for music, and begin writing some new tunes. Many of the old songs miss Bill's harmonica and mandolin, or the songs are just not stylistically what we want to be playing. Alyssa and I have known for a while the direction we want to move in musically, I hope we can find the time to work on it play again.