Marty lives!!!! Our crack team of specialists found a mandolin repair shop open on a Sunday  in Boulder and voila! Marty now has shiny new tuning pegs and sounds better than ever. That was a very short tragic story. Sorry if I got you all worked up over nothing. Everyone go back about your business. Nothing to see here.We played the Boulder Theater tonight and did something very scary. We needed some excitement in our lives so we decided to play, as our encore (if we got one) a brand new song. We have begun writing for the next CD and we have this song that we love and we wanted to see what it would sound like with the band playing it. We figured if the band was gonna play it they might as well do it in front of 500 people and gauge the reaction.

We ran it a couple of times at sound check… till we ran out of time and had to exit the stage so our opening act could set up. We are sooooo nice. Our sound guy and our techs all said, “Don’t play it tonight. It’s not ready.” These people are our guardians on the road. They protect us, mostly from ourselves and from the consequences of the stupid decisions we sometimes make. When they talk… we listen.

Screw ‘ em. We wanted to play the song.

We told the audience that it was new and we would probably perform it “train wreck” style and the roar we got indicated that they were much too excited about getting a sneak peek at our next batch of songs to care if we sang the wrong words or played the wrong chords. That worked out beautifully for me because I did a great deal of both. But it ROCKED! It was so fun. They sang along. The band sounded great. While we still respect our crew’s opinions… it’s nice to ignore them once in a while just so we can see for ourselves that the world doesn’t end.

Hope someone posts the new song on the intraweb. It’s called “Thank You For Reminding Me,” and it is a great start to the next CD.

It also features Marty the magic Mandolin, risen from the dead like Lazarus the Magic Toaster. It’s a shame to play such a beautiful instrument as badly as I do. Oh well. This could inspire me to buckle down and get better. It certainly could. It won’t. Isn’t the world a better place with all the “It coulds” in it?

Tomorrow we head to Beaver Creek. We played there in the summer,  opening for Kenny, and we went over so well that the management asked us to come back and headline. So here we are. We are nothing if not cooperative. We will probably try the new song again.  I will make a few less mistakes. Perfection is boring, don’t you agree?

Off to dreamland… where all mandolins are unbreakable… All new songs are simple… And the Titans are in the Super Bowl.

Sigh.