I could explain how awe­some this night was, but I think this beard speaks for itself.

It’s a cus­tom-made piece by Emily Comeau — named the Smirkin’ Merkin — and a pro­to­type for Jesse’s merch. As a per­son who’s nev­er even come close to hav­ing a beard, I want­ed to keep it SO BADLY even though it was brown and did­n’t match the cur­tains (or the car­pet, for that mat­ter). I wore it for the first song I played, but it got way too warm to keep on in a house full of peo­ple.

 

One of the open­ers was Catriona Sutton, who won every­one over with her charm­ing songs and clever lyrics. She used to be in the band Plumtree, whose indie hit inspired the nam­ing of the Scott Pilgrim com­ic, now made into a major Hollywood movie (Michael Cera is wear­ing a Plumtree T‑shirt when he does the knock­out punch shown in the trail­er).

Jesse’s song No Brainer demon­strates exact­ly how good he is with arrange­ments. His album is usu­al­ly bass dri­ven, but for live per­for­mances he plays gui­tar over Nic’s beat­box­ing (with some har­mon­i­ca thrown in), and Audra on clar­inet. Audra also had a small part rap­ping at the end of No Brainer, and it was awe­some; she’s a nat­ur­al. Nic’s also got a new lit­tle box which drops any­thing he sings an octave low­er, so he can do real bass lines.

I played ukulele for four songs so Jesse could play oth­er instru­ments like glock­en­spiel or the wind organ on Make Hymn Cry. I was a lit­tle ner­vous at first, but even­tu­al­ly I for­got every­one was there. My cheap lam­i­nate sopra­no ukulele does­n’t project sound very well, so I had to strum so hard I was afraid of break­ing a string or enlarg­ing the crack that’s already devel­oped at the bridge.

At one point dur­ing the last track Jesse all of a sud­den said, “UKULELE SOLO”, and I tried mak­ing a sil­ly pick­ing pat­tern based on the chords of the song. I don’t think any­one heard what I was doing over all the oth­er instru­ments though, which worked in my favour real­ly.

It was such an amaz­ing night that I’ve decid­ed to quit my job and sing and play ukulele full-time. Well, maybe not yet, but SOON.