So yesterday we had our first show as Great Waves, and I have to say that I’m pretty pleased as to how it went. Don’t misunderstand, we were RUSTY! It definitely was less put-together than I would like our live show to be, but it wasn’t bad for our first show in 6 months, and it was a good learning experience.

I guess I learned that I need to prepare for gigs better - I was stressed and scrambling 4 hours before the show to burn the CDs we needed, and then at the show I didn’t bring a table to put the merch on so it was a little difficult to get our stuff anyway! Oh well, I guess that’s stuff you just learn by doing. I was reading an article by The Last Psychiatrist and he talked about the necessity of actually DOING the creative act instead of simply preparing for it. Although he uses a rather crude example (masturbation vs. actual sex), his point was that you can prepare all you want for something, but doing it causes you to deal with things you could not or simply didn’t know to prepare for - that’s why we’re doing so many shows up to Sound Off! If we just worked our live show in a room for 2 months, we wouldn’t be nearly as good because we’re too inexperienced to know what exactly to prepare for - we have to learn by doing.

Anyway, the show was looking pretty grim at even 7:45, with 15 minutes before showtime the only people there were 3 of Ashley’s friends and a man who I can only conclude had some sort of mental illness by the eerie moans and strange noises he was making mere feet away from us - awkward to say the least.

However, people started to pile in one by one and by the time our set ended I would say there was 30-40 people in there, which was pretty damn cool. Which brings me to a thank you: thank you to all our friends and fans who have come to so many of The Matirns’ shows and that showed up for this one. It was pretty disheartening when we thought we were only going to place to 3 people, when everyone started to show up it really made a huge difference in the band morale. You guys really have been there for us and I can’t tell you how much it means to be able to count on your fans to show up and cheer you on.

Have a good weekend everyone.

- Ryan