You There, Geography Nerds, You Win

The first complete cycle of this whole kit-n-caboodle I call the Monthly Mix contest is wrapping up, so congrats on getting through it. I know it's a little tricky, what with there being polls and obtuse titles of mixes with surprise songs coming at you in the mail. But it will all make sense soon! I'm putting the finishing touches on the first mix, "What Happens When You Add a Violin," and will post the track listing once the winner is announced.

The mix for this month, then, which one by a single vote in the poll, is "Beyond Sufjan: the U.S. Geography Mix". The runner-up, "I Pretend to Read a Lot," stays in this month's poll, and two fresh titles are there for you to ponder and vote on.

And for those of you who wrote Amazon reviews last month, thank you thank you thank you. I've recently found out there's been a pretty significant delay in The Crater EP getting released on iTunes, so Amazon is the most popular vendor I'll be distributed through for a while longer. I'll announce which one of you review-writers won the very first mix in the next few days.

Oh, Pride Parade, All You Care About Is Being Long.

Chicago's exponentially growing Pride parade was yesterday. The last time I saw Chicago Pride was before Barack Obama was elected to the senate, and he was actually in the parade (if I'm remembering correctly), although to be fair, his contingent of T-shirted supporters was still the largest in the parade that year (as it was this year). Point being, it was a while ago, and in the meantime, the parade has grown a lot. It is now visible from space and, this isn't verified, but I think they had to use northwestern Indiana as a staging area. I don't know where else it would all fit. It started at noon, and when I left at four, there was still a line of floats stretching from Addison to Roscoe.

Well I'll have a more substantial update for ya'll soon, including the next phases of the Monthly Mix contest. Remember, today's your last day to post an Amazon review and get into the drawing for my first-ever custom mix giveaway, and the last day to vote for next month's theme.

Things to Do This Week

If you're in Chicago:

Tomorrow (that's Tuesday) at 9pm at the Empty Bottle, Canasta will be joined by the Battle Royale, who played with us up in Minneapolis. They brought out a really great crowd for us when we were up there, and we'd love to return the favor. Hot hot dance party guaranteed.

If you're not in Chicago (or you like going to bed early -- pfft):

There's only a week left in this month's Mix contest (complete details here). A couple of Team Chicago peeps have mentioned to me lately that they didn't know how to write music reviews, so they were intimidated to go onto Amazon to write one. Don't be afraid, it's the internet! You're anonymous! Plus, chances are, if you're reading this blog, you are in the upper 10th percentile of Internet writers and grammarians: people who (a) write in complete sentences and (b) have never used more than three exclamation points in a row. (But it's so fun!!!!!!!!!!) I'm just trying to generate a little buzz for the EP, so if you have two minutes, head over to Amazon and buzz away before July 1st.

Crater EP available on Pandora

Good news for Pandora users today! The Crater EP is in rotation now, which means you can add it to existing stations, create new stations from it, and hopefully hear tracks from it come up when you're in the listening neighborhood of acoustic- and piano-based music.

I've also created a shared station based off of The Crater and Canasta's album, We Were Set Up, and so far it's been a nonstop hit parade of indie piano-influenced bands. You can get to the station via my Facebook profile.

Touching/corny side story: I wrote a sappy cover letter to Pandora when I sent in my CD. It was about how when I was still back in Boston and had little to no clue what I was doing music-wise, I went to one of Pandora's very first town hall meetings at MIT and met one of its founders, Tim, and gave him a very, very handmade demo in a cheap crappy jewel case. I knew it wouldn't get cataloged, but Tim was emphatic about how important it is to get your music out into the world, and he seemed like just a genuinely nice and supportive guy. It's not often you can make a personal connection to a website the way you can with a band or a writer on a book tour, but Tim did exactly that, and I think it's helped make Pandora the relative powerhouse in the internet radio world that it is.

Minneapolis Tour Diary (Part 2)

[Housekeeping: Click here for the lowdown on this month's mix contest. Pretend Readers and Geography Nerds are currently tied. Send your friends over here to vote.]

We start the day together at Galactic Pizza in Minneapolis, which has been mentioned in every prior conversation related to this Minneapolis show, all past Twin Cities shows, past touring of any kind, our website, and (natch) our upcoming Pizza Fest gig. (It's that good.) We order six pizzas, each at least medium-sized, two of which have white sauces on them, which I think should count as at least 33% more filling than normal in the competitive eating standards set by our fearless leader. Some of us feel slightly ill from this amount of pizza, but had we known at this point that the return trip would take 10 hours, I think we would have eaten more.

Our first delay happens near the Wisconsin border, a slight gaper's block as we pass an RV, pulled over, that has reportedly run a car with stolen tires into the shoulder. Stolen Tire Car bolts the scene upon realizing their tires have been identified, presumably in some sort of interstate database of Stolen Tires and The Vehicles They Propel. All of this is related to me by a friendly road crew worker on the shoulder of the highway, staring at a gas gauge slightly above empty.

Slightly. The gas gauge was totally wrong.

While we are waiting for the other half of the band to rescue us with a gas canister, a deer approaches the highway near the car. Perhaps the deer was looking for its friends, many of whom are dead in the breakdown lane behind us. Sad. I'm preparing to be traumatized watching this stupid deer lope across the highway into an SUV. El is envisioning, perhaps, that the deer even ricochets into our windshield as an added bonus trauma. Matt, in the driver's seat, honks the horn repeatedly. Nothing. The deer maybe thinks that since our car is stopped, the rest of the highway is going to follow suit. Stupid, stupid deer. The honking finally convinces it to turn back to the forest, which kind of makes us running out of gas worth it, El reasons, because we have saved a deer's life today.

A few hours later, a lake floods one of the eastbound lanes of I-90. Awesome. We finish an entire crossword puzzle in the time it takes to pass the flooded area. At this point it's not even thunderstorming, which starts soon enough, about the same time we receive a call from the other car. During a gas stop they've been told that a tornado touched down about 20 miles in the direction we're driving in. Awesome. We stop at a McDonald's to try to figure out if driving further south is stupid. If we were deer, this is when we would start listening for insistent honking. We hear a lot about Cedar Rapids, not a lot about Wisconsin. We book it back to Chicago.

And if you thought all of that was exciting, we're playing with the Battle Royale again next Tuesday at the Empty Bottle.

Minneapolis Tour Diary (Part 1)

[Housekeeping: Click here for the lowdown on this month's mix contest. Pretend Readers, you are beating the Geography Nerds by a Clinton-ly slim margin.]

I arrive in Minneapolis with half of Canasta on Tuesday night, with the other half driving directly from Chicago to soundcheck the next day. In the morning, miraculously, there are pancakes made for us at the house we're crashing in. I can't imagine future tour accommodations will be this hospitable. In the house with us are two very young children who speak more German than I did after a year of night classes. If that doesn't encourage you to start learning another language right away, I don't know what will.

The rest of my car has social and professional visits to pay, so I have a full day to do some solo exploring. I've heard the city has great neighborhood hangouts (a trait it shares with Chicago), so I set an aggressive agenda of hanging out in various places for the day. My first stop is a queer-friendly coffeeshop near the river. In Chicago most queer-oriented businesses predominantly attract either men or women, rarely both, but this shop reminded me that in smaller cities don't get to be so picky or self-segregating.

My second stop is "Eat Street", a strip with a self-explanatory commercial plan. What I don't expect is a plethora of Vietnamese grocers and competing Banh Mi sandwich shops. I have a "mock duck" sandwich and move up the street to coffeeshop #2, a joint a few blocks away from the art school with a correspondingly artistic interior. Extending the theme, I kill a few hours at the modern art museum before soundcheck. While I'm there, I notice a lot of teenagers dressed in (their version of) club clothes and overhear various pre-concert plans being made. This does not strike me as an Iron & Wine crowd (playing next door to us tonight), and eventually I piece together that Kanye West is playing across the street. I'm reminded of the scene in Hedwig and the Angry Inch when Hedwig opens the door of the little seafood shack she's performing in and is cartoonishly blasted by light and sound coming from the competing Tommy show, also across the street.

There's enough love to go around for all three shows, though, and we have no trouble getting our share of club kids to fill up our corner of Minneapolis' music triangle. Getting back to Chicago the next day is a different story.

[to be continued...]

On the road...

[Reminders: Vote for me in the I-Go contest and get your Amazon reviews up for the Monthly Mix contest.]

I'm up in Minneapolis with Canasta today for our 7th Street Entry show. I'll do a full "tour diary" -- for this one-day tour -- once we're back in Chicago, but so far the story points have been:

(a) Culver's, the only frozen custard chain I'm aware of, is at virtually every exit from Wisconsin to the Twin Cities. I haven't spent enough time in the midwest yet for the novelty of abundant frozen custard to wear off. It makes me giddy.

(b) Somehow mosquitos got, like, inside my sleeping bag last night. I was indoors.

(c) There's a queer coffeeshop in Minneapolis! And it's open right now! And there are other queer people awake and hanging out before noon! What's not to like?