Forgot how many potholes the streets have here. Also forgot how non-verbal or taciturn many people are. A grunt or a nod instead of the Westcoast’s ever-present cheerful have a nice day. I don’t mind it at all, it feels very real. The potholes can be avoided, except at night. Then it’s not so much fun.

First show of the tour. A few gremlins always appear on the first day. Stephen (Front of House engineer) had to run down a few problems, but then the soundcheck went well.

At the very start of the first piece I noticed that the upright bass was super loud in my monitors. I have always turned the bass up pretty loud in my mix because Jon sounds so great and because it helps me to really tune in to him. But this was another level of loud. No idea what happened. None. And, wearing IEMs (In Ear Monitors) there is no escaping the sound. One can’t turn one’s head away from the loudspeaker because the speaker is INSIDE MY EARS. So I did the best I could, partly suffering through it and also finding pauses in the music to adjust the volume on the little mixer on my left side. Once I had that dialed in the rest of the show was fun. I love performing with Jon and Robby. The audience was great and performing for them was a pleasure. A few mistakes were made but moments of real beauty happened as well. David Kirschner came to see us. He has been coming to shows for literally decades… We age together, you could say. He thought he saw Robby play with us in 2008. No, I replied, that was 2004, a tour we did with Robby playing cajon and djembe and Ron playing tablas and dumbek. Time flies.

Also forgot that there are huge areas in New England without coffeeshops. Only Dunkin… Dunkin is for emergencies only, in my opinion. Yesterday we found a nice ramen joint for lunch and on the way back to the hotel we saw Caffe Nero. We went there this morning and enjoyed coffee and ambience.