Amazingly enough, it snowed last night. There was a good two inches on the ground and everywhere, although it mostly melted by noon.
Saturday night the Relix played a great gig at the Vintage Lounge in White Plains. This was our first gig in a while and our second gig at the Vintage since I joined the band. It’s a great place to do a show, a big room and large stage and a great bar. Also it was a good crowd, the room was full and the people were really digging it.
We’ve added a lot of new songs since our last show (eighteen I think), including Good Times Bad Times by Led Zeppelin, Burnin’ for You and Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Öyster Cult, Touch Me by the Doors, Domino by Van Morrison (both great sax songs), You May Be Right by Billy Joel, as well as the soul classics I Can’t Help Myself and This Old Heart of Mine. I’m feeling much more relaxed now than I was when I first joined the group. Not worried about remembering the chords anymore, more focused on listening and performing. Also my vocals have gotten alot stronger and more confident. I feel like I’m well on my way to finding my voice, as they say, both literally and figuratively. I really love singing harmony and we have quite a few really good songs for that, so that part of our sound is coming along nicely too.
You never know what’s going to go over with an audience, although we front-loaded our set with some sure-fire crowd pleasers which we know well. Midway thru the set we were hitting on all cylinders with the Zeppelin and BÖC. I was a bit surprised by the strong response to Reaper since even though it’s a great song it’s also a bit of a downer. We finished the set with a soul medley, which brought the energy up to the next level and got everyone up and dancing.
We had more soul numbers on the list for the second and third set, which also happen to be a lot of the sax tunes. We’ve been organizing our songs in to blocks of three or four of a similar mood and vibe. So we just burned thru all the soul numbers for the first half of the second set. Then it was onto 60’s psychedelic rock and an 80’s medley. By the third set the list was completely our the window and we were just calling tunes on the fly. I think I sang the first five songs in a row, to give Paul a rest after all that Motown. But it was fine, we had way more tunes than we had time to play so we just went with the best stuff for the last set. It was a great show and a really good time.
In other news the weather was beautiful and we got the major part of the spring yardwork done over weekend, at least until it’s time to start the trimming and mowing and putting in the garden. I have a few days of from work coming up and hope to get caught up on my rest and a long list of random tasks.
