We returned to Albuquerque on Friday, quizzed friends about our tour with questions from this blog (Stef won, even though she just sort of skimmed the blog while Bethany studied it in detail all day long), and barely woke up in time to get to our regularly scheduled Saturday morning gig at Tiles of Santa Fe coffee shop.
Now is probably a good time to divulge that Jason Warshof’s Cactus Tractor is not actually a duo. In fact, it turns out that we are an 8-piece, sometimes 9-piece—aspiring to be 10-piece band (though we’ve only performed with 2–6 people to date). We’ll be adding trivia, stats and measurements for each of our attractive band mates to the “cacti” section of our blog soon! For now all you need to know is that Brandon and Ashley Smith (Stef) joined us on Saturday morning and exponentially increased the quantity and quality of everything.
Margarita took this snapshot of us playing on the porch at Tiles—she would later be enthusiastically thanked by Sebastian!
After two and a half hours of performing music Sebastian proudly informed us that we had been playing in 102 degree heat all morning and that he wanted some pancakes. By this time Samuel (married to Ashley Smith and also in the band) had scootered up, so the 5 of us went to breakfast and then to Bethany’s (also in the band) awesome Friends of the Orphan Signs show at 516 ARTS in downtown Albuquerque. We took some pretty good band photos while we were there:
Today we practiced with Bethany, Ashley Smith, Samuel, Brandon and Tim for several hours. It was when we revisited Jason(also in the band)’s song “River” that it started to rain—in the same mystical way it started raining about a month ago when Jason was visiting Albuquerque and practicing with the band for the first time (that time we were playing Columbia, another rain summoning song).
There’s more to say on the subjects of rain, Omaha Nebraska and audiences entirely comprised of choir members but I’ll save it for my next post. Although Sebastian and I blogged much more than we practiced (or even played music) on our tour of the United States in the shape of Yemen there are still several holes in our story. Hopefully we’ll be filling these holes in soon with lots of true stories and beautiful lies (and maybe a little bit of caulk).
We’d like to thank Jason Warshof and family for sponsoring this blog post.