IWTDI tour blog, Volume 9 (Day 20), 12 April

On the drive to Medford, we encountered our first snow. And hail. And more hail. And sub-freezing temperatures. We rocked a really fun set filled with songs we really needed to work on for the upcoming Vexations album as well as songs we want to bust out from Preludes, in front of maybe three people we didn’t know/were traveling with. Weeknight in a town where no one has heard of us or really goes out at night for that matter. We had a good time and a great opportunity to work on things. We spent the night in town and set our course for Portland Friday morning.

We tried hard to not have many days without shows. Booking is the least fun part of being in a band, and while our luck has been pretty good, we had a Friday with no show, and that’s always hard to swallow. We were lucky though that Greyday helped us out with a chance to play on the radio at KPSU, Portland State University’s radio station. We busted out a fun set of acoustic songs and had the evening free to pursue our respective fancies. We grabbed some incredible food at Slingshot, and then some of us went out partying and some of us stayed at the house to catch up on things or rest.

We were lucky enough to have a great place to stay the two nights we were in Portland. An old friend Christa had some room in her cute house in town, and she let us more or less have the run of it while she set about her task of righting wrongs and making the world a better place. We crashed out Friday night and got ready for a busy day Saturday.

Saturday afternoon, we did a set of five full rocking songs for an upcoming podcast . That took us a little longer than expected, so we ended up being a little late to our load in at Mississippi Studios. We pride ourselves on punctuality and professionalism, so we were eager to get there despite our outdated GPS trying to kill us. John’s GPS is better than mine. We should have brought his!

Mississippi Studios was a blast! It was our last night with The Trophy Fire, and our last night hanging with Todd from Greyday. We rocked an early show that had us getting out of there by 10, and then we partied down and annoyed those around us for a few hours before parting ways . The next day was another day off, so we slept in, hung out with Christa for a hot second, toured the Greyday offices, helped ourselves to a few free cd’s, drove to Voodoo Doughnuts (leaving due to the prohibitive line going partway around the building), and headed as far as we could towards Salt Lake City.