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Tonight’s my first show since the crappy Denver one in November and my first since breaking up the previous live band. As I’ve mentioned, the last band setup was super fun and a great learning experience, but I got a lot of comments/complaints that it didn’t sound much like my albums (it was a harder rock sound) and I wasn’t sure what to do about that.

After taking a break, I decided to simplify and hooked up with a local guitar wizard named Ben and I’ve been pretty happy with the sound in rehearsals. It’s the laptop doing bass/drums/noise, Ben on acoustic/electric guitar and background vocals and myself on electric guitar and vocals.

I’ve been pretty bummed out about a lot of the sound and technical issues at the last batch of shows I did, so I’m hopeful doing a show in my little hometown will be a nice baby step. We will see!

Update: It all went well technically, was a bit awkward. I’m trying not to be too demoralized.

Bunch of things coming up:

• February 11th – Harvard University [Cambridge, MA] – Q&A and a few songs.
• February 12th – The Middle East [Cambridge, MA] – Full show
• March 7th – Canadian Music Week [Toronto, ON] – Speaking.

Hope to see you there.

Just an FYI: through some mix-up which was not at all my fault, the Brad Sucks gig on December 17th has been cancelled. Total drag.

We’ve also got a Halloween show coming up on the 29th where I am totally dressing up.

Any show that’s preceded by me locking my keys in my car (while it’s running, even) is dead to me. The locksmith showed up in about ten minutes though so that was all right. $53 later and half an hour later I made it there in time for sound check. Other than that, we had a pretty good show last night, though I was in a bad mood about my dumbness.

Hey there’s a Brad Sucks show tonight at the Rainbow starting at 9:30. Jacquie in the Kitchen are opening for us and they’re totally sweet.

I put up ceiling drywall in our rehearsal space (aka my parents’ garage) all weekend so I think I might just lie down on the floor real still with for the whole show. Requests will be honored for any massage therapists or acupuncturists in the audience.

I mused about concerts in Second Life and it looks like my arch-nemesis Jonathan Coulton beat me to it. He’s going to be playing on the 14th at 8pm EST at Menorca (I think). I’m gonna try and be there.

I went out there to take a few snaps of the venue as my alter-ego “Brad Susenko”:

Looks pretty swanky. I’ve always wanted to play in half a dome.

Here’s the view from the stage.

Various clickable posters around. Here’s one of a Creative Commons license.

And here’s one of the Creative Commons front page.

Very neat. I still need a better computer or video card to run this thing on, but I’ll be interested to see how well the audio works.

Things I learned from the show last night:

• Jägermeister tastes like cough medicine and I don’t understand why people drink it
• You can’t bribe an audience to dance with Canadian Tire money for any respectable length of time

Anyway it was an all right show for a Monday night. Thanks to Dave Norris, De’Mos and Jacquie in the Kitchen for keeping it real and also thanks to everyone who came out to have confusing yelly bar conversations with me. Those are the conversations I treasure the most.

Hey, we’re at Zaphod Beeblebrox‘s tomorrow night. Dave Norris, De’Mos and Jacquie in the Kitchen are playing and then we’re on at 10:30pm. Hopefully no amps will be destroyed.

Our next gig is at The Rainbow on Wednesday, August 30th. Sojourn are opening for us. Feel like plastering Ottawa in posters this weekend?

Here’s a PDF for easy printing. And here’s one without the falling guy in case you need it.