AIRPLANE:
Hey there everyone. Well, here it is, I'm on an airplane once again. You would think that by now I'd know how to fly these things. The captain of this particular airship is flying his last flight--I hope he doesn't decide to make this the time to try out loops and other manouevers like that.
Australia was incredible. Complete magic. I hardly know where to start. I guess this would be a good time to introduce you all to "Tuffy". Tuffy is also known as Brian Knight. He's been out with us on this whole promotional tour of Europe and Australia and will be continuing along on the U.S. tour. He's a many of many talents. When the whole band is out on tour, he is our stage manager, monitor guy, guitar tech and general man about town. When I go out solo on promotional stuff, he turns into a tour manager and sound guy and the only person I get to see day in and day out.
Tuffy and I were faced with three days of "boredom" on a beautiful resort island in the great barrier reef at a sony conference before I had to go play three whole songs. Not exactly slave labor. We dealt with the "boredom" through swims in the ocean and trips to the bar (for soda of course). After the time on the island it was back to Sydney for some real work. I did about twenty interviews over a couple of days and did a showcase in Sydney and one in Melbourne. On a fun note, we got to go see Jeff Buckley play (we only caught the encore actually) after my show in Melbourne. It's a trip to go see someone you know from back home play for a couple thousand people in a foreign country. He did a great version of the Alex Chilton song "kanga-roo".
Other highlights in Australia included all the folks from our record company. The people responsible for us down here are all amazing and complete music fans. It was so nice to ride around the city, have meals and talk about music with these folks. I can't wait to get back here to do a tour with the whole band--it should be amazing.
So now I'm on my way back to LA where we'll do a little rehearsing, a show with Cracker (March 2 at the Troubador), record a song for the sweet relief, perform live on the radio (KSCA) and then head up to SF to properly start the tour.
With all that's happening with our record (radio, video), it all seems pretty abstract. I'm really looking forward to touring as it's my favorite thing to do. It's going to be so great to see Michael Kroll play every night and then do our show.
I'm starting to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of e-mail, as I've told you before, so I'll be answering most of it more generally in these updates. I hope y'all don't mind--it's just that my replies are getting shorter and shorter. Things are really busy at the moment, so just know that I've got a bunch to do and that I really appreciate all of the mail.
See y'all soon out on the road.
Peter