Jesse sent me an e‑mail this morn­ing, invit­ing me to play a few acoustic tracks on his set tonight at the Elmdale Tavern in Hintonburg. Naturally, I could­n’t say no. I got to his place ear­ly, and in the four hours lead­ing up to the show, we worked out the arrange­ments.

The venue was nice and cozy, with the front tables only a few feet from the stage (which was bare­ly ele­vat­ed itself). There was no kitchen but a bar and a pool table in two main rooms, and this fact meant the place lent itself to peo­ple com­ing to watch some­thing, instead of social­iz­ing and talk­ing over it, as it com­mon­ly hap­pens in a restau­rant or pub with live music.

Waiting for sound check.

I was­n’t ner­vous the entire night until the minute up to the very first song; I was doing the main chords and it would have been painful­ly obvi­ous had I made a mis­take.

And since we were unam­pli­fied, we came off the stage and stood at the tables, with Jesse rest­ing his glock­en­spiel on the front-most one. It made the audi­ence all the more vis­i­ble — and me all the more ner­vous — so I just kept my eye on Jesse for tim­ing and vol­ume cues to take my mind off it.

But with a lit­tle more time, expe­ri­ence, and prac­tice, we nailed every track. Also includ­ed was an appro­pri­ate­ly spot­light­ed group high-five after the Videotape-Write Protected-VCR med­ley, which is cer­tain­ly the most dif­fi­cult piece (on my end) due to the fact that I’m play­ing the vamp that leads the tran­si­tion between each piece and the tim­ing is real­ly tricky to get down. I also noticed that I kept strum­ming my strings habit­u­al­ly to make sure I was in tune to avoid the dis­as­ter that hap­pened last time.

A tall, dark-haired gen­tle­man with a cig­a­rette in his hand said, “Good job, bud­dy. It sound­ed great.” as I was walk­ing by to load gear in my car. It was a nice lit­tle acknowl­edg­ment.