We’re waking up in Chattanooga this morning to the sound of wet streets and a torrent of sneezes that are either the result of Tennessee ragweed coating our nasal passages, or a brief moment of reckoning with the dusty bedding of the Rivergate Days Inn, where we’ve been camped out for the last two nights, catching up on sleep, catching up on Breaking Bad, and eating nearly every meal at the 24-hour City Cafe diner downstairs, which has shockingly good beans and rice and huge slabs of Butterfinger cake. After breakfast – at City Cafe, most likely – we’re headed to Charleston, seven hours to east, where we’ll be playing the Pour House with the Explorer’s Club tomorrow night, and running around with Cary Ann Hearst and her husband Michael Trent in the meantime. Most importantly, we’ll be checking out Deer Tick on Letterman tonight, who are sharing the show with BILL CLINTON! They have a new record that’s dropping two weeks from today, and when we passed through Providence in the Spring, we lent backing vocals and a tasty cowbell track to a song called “Love is a Four-Letter Word” (or something along those lines) that last I heard made the record. I’m hoping they get a chance to teach him how to inhale tonight.
Tomorrow will be the fourth date in this week-long run that began last Friday in Knoxville, passed through Nashville and Chattanooga on Saturday and Sunday, and visits Raleigh on Thursday before wrapping up at the “Fall for Greenville” festival in Greenville, South Carolina on Friday evening, along with Dawes, Kopecke Family Band and Dirty Dozen Brass Band. This is one of our last tours of the Fall and of this entire record “cycle” that began with the release of the album in July of last year, and once we get back home, it’ll be a winter of writing and demoing, broken up only by a brief run up the East Coast in early-December, and a show at the 9:30 Club with the Drive by Truckers on December 30th. We’ll be scarce until the Spring thaw, but when you do see us again, it’ll hopefully be with most of a new record in tow. Or several 7″. Maybe a Phil Collins covers EP. You’ll just have to wait and see.
Van summons has been issued. “Once more into the breach…”
