.
Nashville, TN: Saturday day, I flew from LA to Nashville, listening to my
Josh Rouse mix. The mix contains a few songs from his various albums but all of
Nashville and
1972. These are two of my top favorite JR albums - and honestly, they're two of the top albums from my entire music catalogue.
Saturday night, I saw Josh Rouse perform live in concert. But he didn't perform a smattering of songs from his collection, as one would tend to do when one hasn't played this city in a few years. Instead, he performed Nashville and 1972. In their entirety.
The thing is, I've loved Josh Rouse for a long time. Those two albums make up part of the soundtrack of my life and served as a bittersweet parting gift from a past relationship. Then coincidentally (or not?), he opened for
JM in 2007 and I got to hear those songs performed live every night for a few months. I tried to do my best to play the part of cool Assistant TM who is unaffected by musicians -- specifically those who are from Nebraska, lived in Nashville and wrote songs that can conjure up specific memories of former love. Clearly, he could see right through me:
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| February 2007 |
Side note: there was a super cute / facing the camera & smiling photo taken right after this one, that I accidentally
wiped out five months later. It was then that I learned the importance of backing up, even while on the road. I did manage to somehow salvage this cute one with the rest of his band & Robbie from JM's band:
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| Robbie McIntosh, Daniel Tashian, moi, Marc Pisapia & James "Hags" Haggerty |
In addition to making sure I was in monitor world stage left at the top of his set, he also let me take some pics of him & the band on one of his last shows on the tour. Five years later, I see the fedora look has made its way from DT to JR.
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| Top: DT & JR, 2007 / Bottom: DT & JR, 2012 |
There are a plethora of things I love about Saturday. That I would listen to two albums on my iPod with my
closely-watched-after headphones, then hear those two albums performed live hours later. That I would see him & DT walk into the club and he would actually remember me from five years ago (you never know what musicians may or may not remember?). That my date would be one of those I-stand-in-the-front-of-the-stage kind of guys... and that after about three songs of feeling awkward (remember me trying to play it cool?), I decided to forgo the act, loosen up and enjoy singing along to every single line to every single song. That I was in Nashville, listening to
Nashville and not anywhere else in the world that I might have been that night if my path would have gone a different way.
Enough of my poetic waxing. Or, in the words of Josh Rouse, "I'll spare you all the bullshit, I will spare you all the desperate details." Instead, just enjoy -- appropriately -- Saturday.
