Nashville with Hardly a Plan

Saturday Night Live just isn't funny anymore. I tuned in to see Beck perform and his band was set up just like the last time he was on while touring Guero. I almost thought they were showing archived footage of the performance. SNL just really doesn't have any performers worth watching other than Darrell Hammond and he is no Wil Ferrell.
Thursday we will be leaving to go to some bluegrass festival at the Ernest Tubbs Theater in Nashville. We will be playing a 3 song set in the morning and a 3 song set in the afternoon on Friday, before heading home some time on Saturday. It should go well, but we don't practice enough to ever be flawless, which would be nice. I forgot to post about the last few outings we had over the course of three months.
We went to Alabama to play at a church that Marty Stuart frequents and we played for part of the Sullivan Family while we were there. They wrote a couple of the songs that we play and seem quite talented. Their banjo/guitar player and back singer Chad played a few songs on his own and sounded great. If he was more charismatic, he could put out a solo album and rock Nashville. Unfortunately, the church only had about forty people there for the concert, so it seemed like a lot of trouble for nothing but politics. On the way back we stopped at a church in Breaux (pronounced "Bro") Bridge and had a much better response with a hundred people. I don't think we sold a lot of albums at either place, but it was fun. Our most recent performance was at a family reunion in east Texas. There were probably about sixty people there and it was the most relaxed performance we have had lately. We played until we ran out of songs. Of course they had more songs, but none that I knew, so I got to pretend which is always an adventure.
Centerpoint sounds like it would be an important place at the center of somewhere besides nowhere, but it really is the center of nowhere Louisiana. We went to weekend restaurant where bands play southern gospel in exchange for food and we got great food. It was all fried and will help me to an early grave. There were about forty people there who sat and watched us like someone staring out of the window at a nursing home. A mentally disabled man greeted us as we drove up by yelling that we were late (always a nice way to start things off) and he actually took care of the financial dealings. The old people who stayed around afterwards asked us a lot of vague, stupid questions which didn't help things along as we ate.
Nashville will definitely move things along for us since we will get to play before lots of people. Hopefully, more bookings will come out of this and make it worth it.

Mercy Me's latest album Coming up to Breathe has blown me away. I listened to the whole thing today and wasn't annoyed by a track. Please understand that this is a rare thing for me since I have a short attention span (not ADHD). Muse's Black Holes and Revelations was great background music for cleaning up around the house. The song tempos varied and parts of it were dark, light, and a mix of both. How We Operate from Gomez hasn't made it out of my cd player at work. I hardly make it past track 6, but when I do, I get surprised by the quality of tracks on the second half of the album, since they are usually the ones which lack energy and greatness.