I got a decent night’s sleep last night, so being up this early isn’t about insomnia for a change…

Saturday night’s show was really, really wonderful. Faro and I ran through the set at his house before heading into town — a fairly ragged runthrough, but I knew we’d be OK. Got into Providence where dealing with the lack of parking made me crazy enough to be on edge right up to showtime.

On the bill:

Night started with a magicican named Kai (sp uncertain) who did some decent if somewhat generic close up work. Note to magicians: try not to spend a lot of time out on the street beforehand doing the same tricks you’re going to do in the show. (As a side note, years ago I did a reading with a close-up magician who performed tricks to go with specific poems. It was fun…wouldn’t mind revisiting that again some time.)

Chris Johnson, Yunus Kados, and another guy (whose name I know but cannot for the life of me recall right now but who can sing, Goddammit) were “Spitting Images” who did various multi voice pieces that worked well in the context of the longer sets. They did their own set later in the night but kicked a couple to warm the crowd up before us.

Then, us. Crowd, I have to say, was loaded in our favor — hell, Faro’s family was half the room — but it still went over well. We did the entire “Americanized” album, and I do think it hangs together well as a set. It’s going to be hard to go back to doing the 30 minute set thing, when having the luxury of an hour to play with made it easy to just settle into that groove and go with it. Still, we’ve got so much material now…the gigs coming up will be interesting, and of course we get to do the full set again in December at Storytellers in Worcester.

We got (ok, I hinted for and got) an encore so Faro could solo a bit on the bass, then he dropped it directly into “Snakes on a Plane” which I did off mike and VERY LOUDLY in the crowd just to unwind us all a bit after the heaviness of closing with “Where Do You Live?” The poem, which I admit to having been embarrassed about for a while, works well as a relatively light and upbeat piece with Faro’s music. (Relatively upbeat is odd, as the poem’s about dealing with suicidal ideation and coming to grips with it.) It was fun. Weird to me — people are starting to recognize our stuff from the music alone. I noticed at the Cantab too, where we opened with “Snakes,” that the opening chords get an immediate response.

After us, Chris and Company retook the stage for a couple of things, and we took a break. Sold merch in decent quantities, although we’re still slightly in the hole from production; that will change.

Chris did some stuff with Chris Wood, director of the theater and a fine sax player. Somewhere in there he did a duet with Marlon Carey, and then Spitting Images did their longer set with lots of stuff about manhood redefined. Nice stuff.

Quick break; the show then closed with Red Planet, an interesting duo (one guy on drums/triggering devices/iPod/spoken word and the other on processed guitar/keyboards/loops/singing/spoken word) who are remotely like a more twisted Soul Coughing/Mike Doughty, but slightly less melodic, if that makes any sense.

Night ended with an informal jam session with Faro joining Red Planet on bass and Chris Lawton (our producer) jumping in on guitar. Fun.

Overall, a very nice start and it showed us what we suspected: that “Americanized” as a whole set works well live, keeps moving, and offers a great cross section of what we do.

Yesterday I was in a not atypical post show funk — slept late and kept to myself, watching football and baseball and NASCAR with much switching between channels during commercials. Went to bed pretty early, adn now I’m here…

Again, thanks to all who came out on Saturday night…it was a big night for us and it meant a lot to see you in the audience.