Our tour went surprisingly well, and we're eager to get back out into the world again. Nonetheless, we'll be staying around home for a while, tending to real-life concerns even as we dream of the last tour and whatever our next tour might be, and going through the painful withdrawal of not seeing Sexy every night anymore.

The scene of the last show of our January tour was the perfect place to kick off the recent tour. We played with some awesome local bands (Is Resaca, Georgia, local to Chattanooga?) and some secretly Christian bands. Eww.

We dashed off to Bloomington, Indiana, for a fun basement show that yielded one noise complaint and no money for any bands. Then we spent Saturday night in Milwaukee, where we discovered the city made famous by beer (or vice-versa?) is a place you can't buy any beer after 9pm. However, thanks to the kindness of the awesome folks in the back house off N. Pierce, we got to drink ample beer, while nibbling on cheese nuggets, before enjoying a delicious spicy lentil soup. (Thanks, Allison!) The show was incredible, with dozens of eager, excited fans we never knew we had.

At the end of the night, Modern Machines ascended the stage and played...and played...and if we hadn't seen him in New York the following week, we'd believe it if you told us Nato was still down there playing old Replacements songs. But we were off to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where we helped inaugurate "The Bad Idea," Josh's good idea for a new music venue on the outskirts of town.

We were excited to go to Cleveland, but this was before we had to play to a listless, pre-crack-smoking crowd. Around the time we finished, someone passed some rock around, and folks got way more enthusiastic...for the radio! It was still worth it, though, to drop by the waterfront and catch Kim from The Fastbacks coming out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with her new band, Visqueen.

We were barely in Oberlin long enough to cadge dinner and play a short split set with Sexy, before seeing a startling set by King Cobra. Thanks, Dean, for setting the whole thing up. Oberlin is almost unreal in its collegeness, and it was a good way to shake off the crackhouse residue. Stay in school, kids!

Hightailing it over to Pittsburgh, we arrived in the not so wee hours at a friend of a friend's house, where we caught up some on the sleep we'd missed over the last couple of days. The show at Modern Formations (1887?) was, uh, interesting. Always fun to play on a stage beneath an arch, but less so when the audience is utterly silent between the end of the smattering of polite applause and the beginning of the next song. Luckily, by this point we had an entourage of sorts, and could count on our own ringers to liven up the audience when necessary. The opening band, The Lazy Boys--perhaps not even boys at all!--were fun to watch, and took me back to the old open mike days....

The creepiest show was in Philadelphia the next night. In a basement...fine. Apparently not well publicized...hey, it happens. A video camera on the wall so people can watch on the living room TV...yuck! A bit weirded out, we hightailed it to Leyla's house in Brooklyn right after the show.

But back in that Philly basement, under Big Brother's relentless eye...could this be the night OFR and Sexy fell in love?