Charlie Ruminations
Hey all, felt like tossing a blog up here, ruminating on, if not all things Sugar, at least a few. It's been quite a ride so far since we first started playing together back in January, mercurial, meteoric, glorious... and there have been a few plateau moments too, where I looked around and thought "what exactly is happening now?" as we found ourselves in a momentary lull due to outside forces like work, family, time, logistics, other projects, other bands.
This morning I was paging through my instagram feed from the last year, trying to see if it showed the day that Sarah and I met, or the week. The closest I could find was a photo from First Slice Cafe dated November 18th, but we're pretty sure we first met in early to mid October. There's no actual photo of Sarah, but it's inferred that she's there, the only reason I'd ever been to First Slice was to watch her play with her other band Led Astray (performing tonight at Red Line Tap!) or sit in on a song or two.
The photos from the the 2-3 months before that show my travels on my bike through Wisconsin, recording solo tracks at Jon Hain's place and Dan-O's studio in Madison, Greg D'Alessio's place in Cleveland. Meeting Josh Harty, Chris Plowman, Hayward Williams, and John Statz at the Song Shack and becoming really close friends with Josh and Chris in the following months as I was house sitting for Stephanie and Jacob in Madison. Seeing Dustin's graduation from Basic Training at Great Lakes Naval Academy. Then there's a quick advance into my bike trip from San Francisco to LA, a week of recording in LA... and suddenly... in some strange lightning strike of unexpected fate, there are photos of me in Chicago, and Sugar Still pretty much dominates my feed from there on out. Like it came out of nowhere and exploded into being... which looking back, is pretty much exactly what happened.
Here's a photo from the now rather mythical journey Sarah and I took from one end of Route 66 to the other in late December 2014. This trip was when Sarah and I wrote our first songs together and discovered we wouldn't kill each other on the road. Sarah took the snap, you can see her shadow. It was from a side trip to the Grand Canyon on our 2nd day out of LA, after we'd stayed at Walter Salas-Humara's house in Flagstaff.
We've been busy this month revving up the engines again, booking like crazy and getting things in order. We had new posters designed by Tory for one thing, and man do they look great.
We've played around 50 shows already, give or take, toured though Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois... released our debut album, recorded a 30 minute television appearance, and now we're playing in Chicago this weekend at Transistor on Friday, at Anodyne Coffee up in Milwaukee on Sunday, and then back in Chicago at Uncommon Ground on Devon on Monday. We're busy booking our first major Amtrak tour to the west coast in the end of December, and we've landed quite a few gigs in Wisconsin and Michigan coming up this fall. A lot of those shows are listed on the calendar already, but more are coming. Can't wait to sing with you.
We've also written a few new Christmas songs that we've rehearsed over the past few weeks and plan to record in the next few weeks for a fun little Christmas EP to be released somewhere around November 1st, we'll keep you posted. So many things.
That's all for now. Love from Chicago. -Charlie