Hello!

The Grebes — Live at Ev’s is out today! Check it out on Bandcamp, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

I’ve been reading David Byrne’s brilliant book “How Music Works” lately, and it is a great reminder that recorded music is a very recent innovation that has completely re-oriented how we listen to music and what we expect music to sound like. With digital audio editing software we have come to expect music to be played perfectly on tempo with no mistakes—voices are pitch corrected to the right note, drum hits are shifted directly onto the beat. But of course that is not what real performance actually sounds like!

The recording has become the “real”, “authentic” version of a song and musicians are expected to replicate it as closely as possible in a live setting. How strange that we are all walking around listening to our own private soundtracks of perfectly constructed music, when 150 years ago the only way you would hear music would be in a live setting. A song would never be played the same way twice and would only exist while it was being played. I am reminded of the Mount Eerie lyric:

Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall
The flashing glint on the marble where the eye once was
On a taxidermied marlin's frozen leap

Anyways, I guess I’m trying to say: check out the live album! Maybe it is slightly closer to the real waterfall? Of course, it is still a recording.. but it is also full of mistakes, missed cues, wrong notes, shifting tempos, my shaky voice getting warmed up. It’s what we really sound(ed) like playing these songs together alive in a room (filtered through microphones and a computer). I think that’s cool!

In other news, Maple Fest 2026 is fast approaching! On June 6th we’re running it back with another year of tamales, beer, music, fire dancers, magic, comedy, a bouncy castle, and much much more. The Grebes should be going on around 7pm. Hope to see you there. 

My buddy Matthew Thompson made this amazing poster:

Thanks everyone for listening and reading!