The house show (announced ear­lier this year) was a huge suc­cess. I moved a bunch of fur­ni­ture around in the liv­ing room and trans­formed it from this:

Venue before

To this:

Venue after

There were almost 30 peo­ple crammed into my liv­ing room for a night of inti­mate music and an ice cream bar1 (on which I spent nearly $100, includ­ing all the fix­ins). Admittedly, I got a lit­tle over­stim­u­lated and pan­icky some­where in the mid­dle, due to all peo­ple, but Pat and Jen came and talked to me, and they calmed me down. It also got really hot with all the peo­ple in there, so I cranked up the A/C a few hours ahead of time.

Arne, who goes by the stage name Duryea Hawkins and was Shane’s sur­prise guest musi­cian, com­pletely blew every­one away with his open­ing num­ber, named Snowman. At the end of the song, you can hear Dan say, “Wow”. It’s so good, I have it on con­stant repeat at the moment.

Once again, Shane ded­i­cated a song to me (woo!), my favourite of course, It’s A Drag. He also did a few new songs I had never heard before; one of the best parts of con­certs is being able to hear new mate­r­ial that a musi­cian is work­ing on.

And for the first time, I got to see Jesse rap in per­son. He was going to do an all acoustic show, with sev­eral exotic instru­ments, but then Nick (who does the back­ing vocals/beats and goes by the stage name Rockefort F. Loopfrog) bought a loop machine, so they decided to use that instead. Quite dif­fer­ent from the stu­dio pro­duced sounds that I’m used to hear­ing from Jesse, but just as good.

The artists all went home happy with the money that was donated2 and made from the swag they sold.

Since it was my first house show, I really wanted to enjoy it instead of fuss­ing with get­ting the proper shot, so I set up my cam­era and left it on in the cor­ner. Next time, I’m going to do a bit more cam­era work.

  1. This must have been a fairly mem­o­rable part, because peo­ple like Jess called it the Ice Cream Party instead of the House Show. [↑]
  2. Legally, as the venue, I’m not allowed to make money, so I have accept “dona­tions” as a cover charge. [↑]