Friday Norman and I headed out to the Shonen Knife at 7th St. Entry. It turns out the opening bands were way better than I had hoped. Blind Shake was the opener, followed by Heavy Cream which was good enough for me to decide I needed their LP, and signatures. They reminded me of Those Darlins which is another great band from Nashville, and they actually turned out to be friends. I picked up the Shonen Knife LP as well just because they are not from this country, and definitely worth listening to.

Saturday Norman, Libby, John Volpe (he rides a Volpe), and I saw tUnE-yArDs who put on a great show. Very very dancy. The show actually sold out the main room and was so packed it was impossible to move. We ended up getting pretty good views though, mostly because Norman made a friend pretty quick who was farther up than we were. I think I am going to have to listen to more tUne-yArDs (funky capitalization).

Monday was Noah and the Whale Noah & The Whale which was a lot more low key. They were very British and put on a good show… the singer reminded me of The Doctor. The opening artist, Nikki Lane, reminded me of a southern Zooey Deschanel. She mentioned thrifting before the show… I couldn’t tell if that was to win indie points.  Some nights I definitely prefer the 1st Ave. shows that don’t sell out… more room, and more intimate feeling. I definitely felt a bit old though when I saw the crowd that showed up for the show. *shrug*

Once we got to the Triple rock we all sat down for some AMAZING food. I suck at names, but Justin from Off with their Heads and his girlfriend (wife?) joined us as well which was fun. Minneapolis has such a wonderful music scene. I was a little unenthusiastic about seeing the opening band after listening to a couple tracks from ‘Into It. Over it.’, but Evan is really great live and I ended up picking up an LP from him. The holy hitch seemed to be my camera flash batteries dying during AJJ’s set. If just listening and singing along instead of taking photos was the worst thing to happen in a day, that is a pretty awesome day. I am excited to see some other people’s photos from the show, as I was pretty out of practice (months) and want to just see some great photos from the night. Here are some of the photos from the night.

Evan from Into It. Over It.

Norman with a new friend

Ben and Sean from Andrew Jackson Jihad

Ben and Sean with TONS OF FANS

Long exposure of Ben

Ben at the merch table

Sean in the back of The Triple Rock

Crowd surfer during Frank Turner's set

SO MANY PEOPLE

Frank Turner

I have been doing pretty well getting myself ready for the trip up to Brainerd, MN. I can do 40 miles pretty easily and way under 3 hours. Thursday night after work I went for a 40 mile ride, and yesterday I went for one as well… so far so good. I had to replace my rear tire though as it basically became shredded after one of the 40 mile rides, much of it through gravel. I am thinking about doing the same for the front as a precaution, but it is only 140 miles up to Brainerd, which isn’t really THAT far. Anyhow, here is a photo from the Saturday ride.

Luce Line back to Minneapolis

It was also nice to find out the GPS does work in rain. I had a chance to test that out thoroughly.

Anyhow, in other news I also have a bike trailer and a new office chair thanks to my boss. Already made two trips with the bike trailer. One was to pick up the office chair and the other to grab a million groceries. Loads of soda (12 pack of Barq’s Root Beer, 2x 6 pack of Sanpellegrino), orange juice, grape juice, chocolate cake, pretzels, pasta, gushers, and a bunch of other stuff fit great. Ah, summer.

The first band to play was Little Ships, and of course they announced themselves by saying, “We are Little Ships”. I had to laugh, and so did a few others. Brian went back to the mike to make it known they were not little turds. The band consists of just a guitar and cello, which make them another band to show to my little brother.

Anyhow, I promised Carlos I would get the photo of him playing banjo for Laura Stevenson and the Cans up this weekend, which made me think I should try to get all of the photos up today… that won’t happen, so here are the two I do have ready…

Carlos being a badass

I really like how the photo of Carlos came out… seriously awesome. By the way Carlos, if you want the non edited version, just let me know and I can send it over. I just thought this one looked immensely more cool.

Laura Stevenson

I really like this photo of Laura. Yes, I know this look is cliche for some, but it really makes a photo feel more like a memory. Also, it hides some of the lameness of the original photo. I am only shooting from a point and shoot while down here, so need to find some way to compensate for no external lighting or ability to change the depth of field.

I got a chance to see Fran and Ryan who recently moved from Phoenix to Santa Monica. They seem to be doing well in their new life they carved for themselves. I didn’t get a chance to see where they are staying, but maybe next time out there. I do hope to take a ride back before I head to Minneapolis to get things ready for yet another trip back down to Phoenix.

Fran and Ryan were pretty hard to find, especially because the cell towers were getting hammered by the hipsters updating their twitters and the like for the show. Roughly 9 in 10 calls/texts were dropped making it hard when our group got separated. Fran brought one of her friends, Sunny, to the show who seemed really nice and does freelance design work. All in all our group consisted of Norman, Norman’s cousin, Fran, Ryan, Sunny and myself… so many combinations of  ”getting lost potential”. Amusingly, Ryan seemed to be the only one really getting lost.

AND NOW THE PHOTOS…

Parking Garage View

Northern Howl

Northern Howl

Total Babe

Here is someone trying out a tallbike for the first time…

Porches

Stephen Steinbrink

Sunset From San Pedro

...and of course Sean and Ben from Andrew Jackson Jihad

Arizona really has amazing people and amazing music.

I will be starting a music blog unlike anything you seen hopefully. I have already purchased the domain and contacted companies I will be developing from (getting info on the API). So far the idea seems sound which is good considering this will be a music blog. There will be social aspects of the site that I haven’t decided if they should be integrated with facebook or not. If not, I surely don’t want to make my site dependent upon someone having an account offsite. The content will be pretty awesome hopefully, and I will probably contact some people who write for other music sites to do some writing on mine (even they will only do it to drive traffic to their site). I figure if I embrace the interwebs with the idea, that they will embrace me.

Site design will be started shortly after I get an email back from one of the companies a service will be provided by. If I don’t get an email that the first step will be creating a system from scratch to do what I would rather do through an API. It is still feasible regardless of what happens, which is nice. I can guarantee the site will at the very least intrigue. Being the visionary and developer has its perks, mostly when it comes to the lack of compromises that are made.

This was the first time I saw Final Fantasy, which consisted a man doing amazing things with a violin. He is definitely worth listening to sometime. The Mountain Goats’ new album, The Life of the World to Come, includes Owen Pallett from Final Fantasy on the recordings. They definitely had some chemistry on stage together leading to an incredible performance.

Owen Pallett

John Darnielle

Seeing others smile while listening and likely relating to the music made me smile.