Steve and Joe arrive this weekend!

There is something so great about the Friday before a weekend of songwriting. I’m at work right now, and all day long I have been thinking of the two guys on the road from New Jersey, in their vehicle loaded to the roof with music and sound equipment. I wonder what music they’re listening to as they burn through hundreds of highway miles. Maybe they’re just talking. Hopefully the roads are free of snow and ice.

When I arrive at home, there will be a few hours of calm before a storm of guitars, cables, amps, and pedals floods the living room. Dan will come in and bash around on his drums, probably take something halfway apart, then ask to borrow tools we don’t have so he can put it back together again; Joe and Steve will spend 45 minutes standing over Joe’s pedal board making ear piercing electric screeches with their guitars, figuring out which guitar pedals aren’t working and why; Trevor will set up his gear in approximately 37 seconds and then sneak down to the basement to keep building his latest bass pedal; and I will constantly pop up from the piano bench, Whack-A-Mole style, to see if our collective gluten-free dairy-free meat-free dinner is on fire in the kitchen. We have certainly found a rhythm for these weekends, and it feels good.

On Sunday afternoon, we will be exhausted. We will have spent anywhere from twelve to eighteen hours playing one, maybe two, songs. It will feel funny emerging from the house to interact with other people in the non-musical universe. We will pack Steve and Joe’s car with frozen hands, shiver in the street for hugs, and then wave goodbye. The house will be so silent. We will all be humming the same tune for the next week. And that music, the themes and choruses of new songs, will hold us together, thin and shimmering like precious threads over the miles between New Jersey and Pittsburgh.

This is the only way of being a band that I have ever known, and though it is not so easy, I think it is very beautiful.