January, 20th, 2018

So, I guess when an evening begins with strangers asking us if there's music tonight when they see us loading into the venue and decide to change their plans in order to see us although they've never seen or heard of us – I guess you can take that as a good sign, can't you? And it was! Yesterday's house was packed! No free seats as far as I could see. Friends and strangers enjoying themselves, an all around warm and welcoming atmosphere. Literally the only way to screw the night up would be for us to suck for some unimaginable reason. I mean, the recipe for disaster was there at the start of the week when I could literally not sing one decent note thanks to yet another flu, and I was still suffering on the coat tails of it yesterday, though nothing too obvious, thankfully. Still, placing screamo-rama 'Life In The Service of Others' somewhere down the middle of the set was kind of a ballsy move in hindsight...

But like I said, it was one of those nights where a lot of things just magically click. The right people in the right place at the right time. That sort of thing. And a lovely accommodating staff to top it all off! And for God's sakes: there were people there really actually singing along to some of the lyrics! I mean, what the actual hell-of-a-#nastybutsuperappreciativeword?!? 

A couple of novelties – as we're slowly transitioning out of the puritanically acoustic live realm – were introduced yesterday, most noticeably with the introduction of an intro tape at the start of the show. It's always better to avoid having the audience subjected to my rambling stage banter for as long as possible. I'm "in the gig" somewhere around the sixth song probably – it just takes me a bit of time to feel the room, to feel the situation and the mood – so the less I have to talk before that, the better! We also hooked Tuukka up with a volume pedal so he could really highlight those solos and melodies of his. And we also played a couple of new tunes, 'The Funny One' from the new EP and 'Awake My Soul', a Mumford & Sons cover that we're also releasing in our Youtube cover series 'A Sea of Heroes' next week.

Also, to celebrate the just arrived hard copies of the 'Stuck With A Rhyme' EP we had a special merch sale after the gig "3 for the price of 2", and it might be that you're wondering what the third possible sales item might've been, well... we thought it'd be a nice idea to give our listeners the full experience by giving them the chance to get a hold of Karza's Lyrae project's debut EP 'Answers'. And it went down a storm! Karza ended up signing and dedicating a whole bunch of his EPs as well! Gotta love it. Goes without saying we'll be bringing all the EPs along to the next shows as well.

We played:

1. A Song for the Hills
2. The Funny One
3. Stuck With A Rhyme
4. Trail of Lies
5. The Fairytale Waltz
6. Hurry
7. Life In The Service of Others
8. Awake My Soul (Mumford & Sons cover)
9. Skinny Dip
10. Beggar Princess
11. (sort of an encore) Ugly

See you at the next show!

-Jon