practice/partying hard

That party on Saturday was just absolutely tip top. So amazing in fact that we need two blog posts about it!

We rolled in at about 5pm before even most of the hosts were around and started to set up shop in the backyard. Russ, Steven, Molly and I played through some of the old favorites. If we haven't told you a thousand times already, we're gearing up to do a couple of performances in the relatively near future, so we've been running through a set list lately, but still fishing about for some new gems to add to it. All in all I think I was at the party for something like nine hours. We played music straight through till 1am with only the briefest of pauses around elevenish to run in for food. I was starving and Molly & co. had made the best ever vegetables, and I think it was Eve who made some positively first rate guacamole that had strawberries instead of tomatoes - and I still swear I tasted lavender..

But after a few minutes of stuffing myself with any food within my reach, Russ and I decided that we still just want to play music. And man, we played with everybody and for everybody. We finally met Lana who eventually returned with an incredible orangey-gold sparkling accordion, and I'm still crazy about Hilary's cello. It was great to have Vijay back on violin and towards the end of the night we even had Katie teaching us to play Anyone but You by The Moldy Peaches on ukulele. One of Noah's neighbors came by and had us try to play along with any songs he knew so he could sing. We had a big turnout for Hallelujah and did a pretty good version of Sound of Silence even though we hadn't practiced in a while. Noah, Steven, Hilary and I also performed Wouldn't It Be Nice and God Only Knows even though we'd only really gone through them once a month ago.

And people listened to us! And kept asking who our songs were by, so we kept pointing at Steven and Russ. We were competing for a while with one of the neighbors' opera on blast, but you can't really blame anyone for listening to opera at that volume. There's just something epic about it all that demands it. And another one of the folks that lives in that apartment building out back applauded us at one point. The love was just pouring out from everywhere. One kid said he'd looked us up on MySpace and had even read our blog! and came over to shake our hands! How awesome is that?! Russ and I played him Postcards to Italy since he asked if we knew any Beirut. (Thank you, good sir, if you're reading this. You are awesome. We love you.)

So yes, the party was marvelous, and we can't wait to play for you some time soon! Till then, please say hi :)