Tank of gas to drive to and from Nashville: $45
Round trip ticket to PHL from BNA: $203
Nine hours of a rental car [a Saturn VUE, which drove like a wounded manatee compared to my WRX ... DO NOT WANT]: $93, including refueling
Philly cheesesteak: FREE, but only because Gary bought my dinner. [Great to meet everyone on that trip, but I won't lie, I really wanted to finally meet Gary and his wife.]
Number of hours slept from Saturday morning forward until Monday evening: 6.5
Number of hours slept on airplanes: 2.5
Number of hours slept in the breezeway outside Terminal D at PHL: 0.5
Number of hours slept on Monday night before waking up, unable to return to sleep, leading me to come out here and blog this: 5
Number of times I have cursed the inability to sleep until my 0545 alarm: 9 (so far)
Number of week taken off of my life as a result of this trip: Unknown, but probably six
Hearing Derek and Danielle power through “Climb On (A Back That’s Strong)”: PRICELESS

That was fun, but I really don’t want to do it again anytime soon. But like Bryan said in a forum post yesterday: if that’s the last Caedmon’s Call show I ever see, I can die a happy man.

[Yes, I recorded it. Yes, I'm releasing it. This is just a busy week.]

I’ve had a lot of fun conversations this week [and it's just Tuesday]. My favorite was today with my boss.

“Oh, hey, I’m gonna be late on the 25th.”

“What is that?”

“Monday, the week we ship [the hardware job we're shipping on Friday that week].”

“Oh, I don’t think that’ll be a big deal. Where ya gonna be?”

“Well … I’ll start the morning in Philadelphia, and I’ll be in Nashville by 0815 and here by 1030 or so.”

And the fun thing is that my boss didn’t even bat an eyelash. He … well, he knows I’m insane.

Indeed, I am: after two hockey games that weekend, I’ll drive to Nashville Sunday morning, hop a plane to PHL, land, get a rental, drive almost to Trenton, New Jersey, watch Caedmon’s Call in concert [and hang out with Bryan and Mark, which is reason enough to go in and of itself], chill with the band after the show, then mosey back down to PHL and fly home first thing Monday morning.

Won’t be the first time I’ve grabbed a little shuteye at an airport before winging my way back home and then to the office.

Yeah, I’m insane. But this is how I roll. [And I have new camera equipment to roll with! My Canon EF 28mm f/2.8 showed up yesterday, and my EF 85mm f/1.8 USM arrived today. My mics show up, well, whenever Sound Professionals gets off their duffs and ships it to me.] And yes, I’ll have more equipment than other baggage.

My Caedmon’s Call friends have the song that will close tonight’s season-ending episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I personally think that this is a plot by Allan Heinberg to get Derek to co-opt me [and other CC/Derek fans] to watch the show. I’m onto you, Heinberg!

A discussion of this ended up leading to Derek and I talking about Gilmore Girls after the show I attended last night. There we are on a sidewalk outside The Rutledge, talking about Lorelai borrowing Luke’s truck to help Rory move to Yale. I got to tell them that Season Four? IS MY FAVORITE. That was a fun time, because hey … I love talking about GG with people.

Oh, and … Writers’ Night at The Rutledge is hosted by Nathan Lee. Oh my gosh, y’all … that blew my damn doors off. I’ve already bought Down at The Rutledge off of CDBaby this morning, and now it’s my goal to bring him to Huntsville for a show. Wow. That kicked my ass. I just hate that I had recording problems last night [largely to do with it being an SRO crowd and me getting so hot that I almost passed out, but hey]. FUN TIMES.

[Who has two thumbs and got home at 2:00 a.m. this morning? Geof Morris.]

My Caedmon’s Call friends have the song that will close tonight’s season-ending episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I personally think that this is a plot by Allan Heinberg to get Derek to co-opt me [and other CC/Derek fans] to watch the show. I’m onto you, Heinberg!

A discussion of this ended up leading to Derek and I talking about Gilmore Girls after the show I attended last night. There we are on a sidewalk outside The Rutledge, talking about Lorelai borrowing Luke’s truck to help Rory move to Yale. I got to tell them that Season Four? IS MY FAVORITE. That was a fun time, because hey … I love talking about GG with people.

Oh, and … Writers’ Night at The Rutledge is hosted by Nathan Lee. Oh my gosh, y’all … that blew my damn doors off. I’ve already bought Down at The Rutledge off of CDBaby this morning, and now it’s my goal to bring him to Huntsville for a show. Wow. That kicked my ass. I just hate that I had recording problems last night [largely to do with it being an SRO crowd and me getting so hot that I almost passed out, but hey]. FUN TIMES.

[Who has two thumbs and got home at 2:00 a.m. this morning? Geof Morris.]

One of my photos from Derek’s show at the Exit/In back in May is now a part of Schmap’s guide to the venue. Why? Well, all my photos are Creative Commons-licensed as Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike.

Derek Webb (and band) @ Exit/In

That said, I’ve had no problems with photos being used in quasi-commercial work; not only has Bryan used photos of mine in layouts for [derekwebb.net] and [andrewosenga.net], but Andrew used one of my photos for the link to the [andrewosenga.net] forum that he has on his sidebar. And if someone wanted to use one of my works commercially, well, I’d do it for a fee.
I feel like I’m starting to find my way with my photography, although concert photography is really still the only thing that really cranks my tractor. Last night, I dumped the photos off of my camera from last Saturday night’s DW show, and I was really happy with what I was seeing come out from the thumbnail view, which I hardly ever am. I guess Understanding Exposure took a little for me.

Well, there are some things that I just can’t say when I’m posting on caedmonscall.net, despite the fact that we emblazon “the officially unofficial fan site of Caedmon’s Call” all across the top of every page. You’d be surprised what kinds of hot water we’ve gotten the band into for things we’ve said. Remember how Bill Simmons jokes about dodging the electric shocks coming from Bristol in his chats? Well, let’s just say that if I said something about a C&D, well, I’d probably get 10,000 volts applied to me the next time I saw someone from Bragg Management.

That said, putting out a greatest hits compilation—the second such release in three years, and this one containing no new cuts whatsoever—less than two months before the release of their next album? That’s a low blow, even for a record company that pushed for two make-lots-of-money worship records from the band.

Maybe I’ll write an open letter to Essential, telling them how much they suck. Or maybe I’ll let Derek do it for me, a decade ago:

It’s not as though this truck’s been up on blocks for years in my front yard
Waiting for the fuel of you to make it go

Essential Records sucks.

Five years ago, my life changed. Sure, our lives are changing all the time, and small, seemingly inconsequential steps are, in retrospect, life-altering things. Call it a butterfly effect if you will—beauty coming out of chaos.

Five years ago, I was single. Still am. Then I was 23 and fresh from college. I was pining after this girl—she’s all over my writings online from 2002, in ways that seem hard to believe now. [Like, I really thought the Internet needed to know all that? Really?] The week after I graduated from college, I got the royal stiff-arm, and well, I sought solace in a song from Caedmon’s Call: “Table for Two“, Derek Webb’s classic ode to singleness for Christian males in their mid-20s. None of that really matters all that much, and okay, maybe you don’t follow those links, huh?

Anyhow. I distinctly remember the first time I saw [caedmonscall.net]: it was in searching for the lyrics for Tf2. At the time, I remember seeing a link for a forum of fans, but … well, I was leery of it. But come 1 Sep 2002, I dove in—because it was a slow day at work. [As I spent today doing a top-level review of hardware builds by our company in our general product category, I don't know how I had slow days back then---but I had 'em.] I got hooked in pretty quick—by that winter, that community of people largely replaced the community of people that I interacted with in college. Sure, I still hung out with my roommates, but the community space that Bryan Allain built for Caedmon’s Call fans spoke to me. Heck, I gained awareness of Calvinism for the first time there. [Unlike many thinking Christians who come from a non-Calvinist tradition and come across my Reformed brothers, I didn't buy their arguments. I do think, however, that they made me a better Methodist because they caused me to re-evaluate why I believed what I believe.]

Well, you know me. I can never leave well enough alone. I offered to help Bryan out with technical details, and suddenly … well, suddenly I was part of Bryan’s volunteer staff. It wasn’t something that I really sought out. I just fell into it. And then that Derek guy left the band for a while, and things hit this whole other level. We got to publicly break that news first [although lots of fans knew long before I did, because they were and are closer to the band than I'd ever hope or deserve to be], and from there, things just became … well, more important to me. What started as a time-killer became, well, a minor obsession. I quickly went from being the chicken at breakfast to the pig.

Of course, all that is preamble. As I’ve said, that community became terribly important to me for a while. It’s far less so now—I stepped back a year or two ago from day-to-day running the forum, although I still am the systems administrator for the server [with all the pain that causes me]. I was having that discussion with one of the few people with whom I am still close last week, and she mentioned that most friendships seem to have lifespans. I wanted to argue with her, but I think that she’s right. [She usually is, although I rarely want to admit it, and she rarely holds it over me when I do.]

Where the hell am I going with all of this? Well, okay, I’m name-checking a new song off of the CD with this entry’s title: “Hold the Light“. [Wanna hear it? I released an MP3 of it last night.] What always really gets to me is the bridge:

Standing round a willow weeping
We’re praying in the backyard
And the chill of the night, the friendship light reminded me
Who we are

I first heard the song in the context of my trip with Doug to Ohio in May. As he noted, we met up with Andy O then, and Andrew played us some Overdressed tracks and some of his Letters to the Editor, Volume I tracks before giving me a copy of the CD. “Hold the Light” is what struck me on my first listen, and it’s what does to this day: because it’s about a community of people gathering together to share good times, bad times, joys, and sorrows. Acquaintances help you move, and friends help you put your life back together when it’s gone to shit. We’re made for community, and while many in Christendom flail about with what community is, this is it—sharing life together, warts and all.

I’ve gotten a better sense of all of this through the last five years. I’m still learning and growing—and always will be, and will always need it.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been promised a copy of a recording of last night’s Caedmon’s Call show, the first real show with Derek Webb back in the band. However, there has been some confusion as to whether or not I’ll get to share it. That said, I say to you, fair friends: if I cannot share the music with you, I will put a video of me opening, confirming the bootleg by playing, and subsequently destroying the copy on YouTube.

Either we all get to listen to it, or none of us get to listen to it.

Last night, I broke out Eric Clapton’s Unplugged. At the time, I tweeted, “Breaking out Eric Clapton’s /Unplugged/. You may hate it, but this was 1992 for me.” As I listened to “Lonely Stranger”, I had a memory and a revelation. The memory: I had a line from the song, “Some will say that I’m no good / Maybe I agree / Take a look then walk away / That’s all right with me” in my MSMS application essay until Mom made me take it out. She had my best interests at heart, to be sure—I didn’t need to be the cocksure kid who didn’t care if he got into MSMS or not. [After all, they were really interested in taking kids who wanted to be there, because it was so damn hard. Honestly, I really wanted to be there, but man, I just didn't care about shit at that point in my life.]

The realization was simple: I self-identified with “Lonely Stranger” because it was really the first time in my life where I didn’t have anyone close to me. I can count on one hand the number of people from my old high school that I even bother to keep up with anymore—and two of them are married to each other, which makes that easy enough. For people that know me now—the person who networks relentlessly, even putting together two folks a time zone away—you might be really surprised to see me back then. Sure, I was still my talkative self, but I rarely if ever truly engaged with any of those folks. Kari has often expressed some … well, I guess concern … about how I consider my life in Mississippi pre-MSMS from when we’ve talked about it. I think that she’s right to do so, but honestly, I think that a lot of it comes from the fact that I was first depressed there—without realizing it until years later—and so I associate all the crappy, negative stuff about myself with that place, which is neither fair nor healthy.

My friend Mike asked me today, “What would be a good Elliott Smith Essentials playlist? 80 minutes.” Mike does this for lots of artists, and since I really dug his M. Ward listing, I decided to do it for Elliott. Mind you, this is my list, and yours would probably be different. Hell, I’m scared to put this on the Internet, but … what the hell.

Here were the rules I set for making the list:

1. It has to fit on an 80-minute CD.
2. I had to include a song from each of Elliott’s albums. [I included from a basement on the hill because he was working on it when he died. I know that including this already makes some people mad, but ... okay.]
3. I couldn’t put two tracks from the same album next to each other.

With those constraints in place, here it is. I’d intended to make this an iMix, and to provide iTunes Store URLs, but … alas, most of Elliott’s stuff isn’t on iTunes as individual tracks. [Seriously ... my iMix creation attempt pulled up three songs.] You’ll have to pull them together yourself. Sorry. but iTunes is being dumb. Everything has an iTunes Store URL, though, and I’ll keep trying on the iMix.. This playlist is available as an iMix, or you can purchase individual songs with the iTunes Store links below:

1. “Son of Sam” from Figure 8 (3:04)
2. “Christian Brothers” from Elliott Smith (4:30)
3. “Ballad of Big Nothing” from Either/Or (2:48)
4. “Oh Well, Okay” from XO (2:33)
5. “Coast to Coast” from From a Basement on the Hill (5:33)
6. “Baby Britain” from XO (3:13)
7. “Needle in the Hay” from Elliott Smith (4:16)
8. “Independence Day” from XO (3:04)
9. “Between the Bars” from Either/Or (2:23)
10. “Sweet Adeline” from XO (3:17)
11. “A Fond Farewell” from From a Basement on the Hill (3:59)
12. “Waltz #2 (XO)” from XO (4:42)
13. “Say Yes” from Either/Or (2:21)
14. “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands” from XO (4:27)
15. “Memory Lane” from From a Basement on the Hill (2:32)
16. “2:45 AM” from Either/Or (3:20)
17. “Junk Bond Trader” from Figure 8 (3:51)
18. “Bled White” from XO (3:24)
19. “Southern Belle” from Elliott Smith (3:08)
20. “Condor Ave.” from Roman Candle (3:36)
21. “Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud?” from Figure 8 (3:27)
22. “I Didn’t Understand” from XO (2:17)

I want to thank Mark Smiley for getting me into Elliott into the first place, SomeSongs.net for keeping the Elliott bootleg love going, and Elliott for making great music in the first place. Bill Simmons remarked last week that the Ray Allen draft-night trade left him “more depressed than an Elliott Smith album right now.” But I’m with Over the Rhine’s Linford Detweiler, who has remarked several times in concert that, “Sad music makes me happy.” [The first time I heard him say that? I was in Portland.]

Feel free to praise or eviscerate me in the comments.

Sometimes, it pays to be OCD. Last night, I started building Smart Playlists by year [from 1978 forward] to provide another way to slice my music library. As I’m getting new adds put in this morning—it’s Sunday, this is what I do—I decided to add Year to the look in the Music part of the library and then sort by year to find the stragglers that didn’t have that metadata set.

That took me to Five O’Clock People’s Fall EP. So I did my standard set of Google searches, looking to add the data to MusicBrainz. [Again, I add this stuff to MusicBrainz because I'm OCD. No, really---I have over 1000 edits, and I'm damn proud of that.] Along the way, I run into … what is this? A MySpace for FOCP? And … they’re getting back together?!?!?!

Cool. Now I can get to see them live—by the time I had the wherewithal to fly to the West Coast to see them, they’d broken up.

IMG_2240.JPG

Originally uploaded by Geof F. Morris.

It wasn’t the best-kept secret ever, but … Derek Webb recorded with Caedmon’s Call for their upcoming album.

Yep.

I took a bunch of photos when I was in the studio, and they’re available in a photoset on Flickr. But Derek and Andy, together? This is a beautiful sight to my eyes. It’s great to see this, for me. You may not feel the same way, and you know … that’s okay with me.

IMG_2732.JPG

Originally uploaded by Geof F. Morris.

Well, as I’m doing 24 Hours of Flickr, my mind is on photos, so I took some time to sort photos for the 19 Apr 2007 Derek Webb show down in Birmingham.

I love that the UCF House had some color-changing on their lighting system—it gave me reason to take more photos than I might normally take. I love how the blues and the greens came out in this set. Now if I’d only had a 105mm lens, I might have had some even better shots … ah well.

Jeremy Casella, a very good musician and an even nicer guy—yes, Sufjan Stevens, I’m in the risk of “friend rock” here—passed along a great gift to me tonight: MP3s from his upcoming release, Recovery. Tomorrow, you’ll be able to pre-order this record on his site. I’ll post about it tomorrow on the appropriate places, but tonight … tonight I just want to steep in the goodness that is this record.

Jeremy, you have made a great work of art here. It has grabbed me and will not let me go. I don’t want to sleep tonight. I just want to listen to this record. In fact, I might put it on the stereo in my room and listen to it all night.

[And if you're saying to yourself, "Hey, is the title of this entry an Eric Peters allusion?" you not only win a donut but free tickets to see EP and Randall Goodgame on Saturday night here in my hometown.]

On the surface, EMI’s decision to remove DRM from its online music offerings seems like an awesome thing. Engadget sees some issues with it, though:

The finer details of EMI and Jobs’s announcement today were also dubious. Despite the silver lining, which is that full albums should cost the same but will now default to DRM-free files, the two businesses still conflated DRM-free music with the discerning tastes of audiophiles. Steve mentioned that 128-bit AAC just isn’t good enough for the sharp-eared, so uncrippled tracks are being bumped to 256Kbps. This gives Apple the ability to sell the music as a separate product and price point, while giving consumers the illusion of greater value. But we don’t believe having free, usable, uncrippled media is a feature — it’s what we deserve, and we demand it. Asking customers to pay 30% more for no DRM and a higher bitrate is a distraction, a parlor trick to take our attention away from the philosophical issue: EMI is still selling DRMed music. EMI CEO Eric Nicoli said, “Not everybody cares about interoperability or sound quality.” Since when did the two become so intrinsically linked? Sure, not everyone cares to vote either, that doesn’t mean it’s a premium privilege. Nicoli also stated EMI has taken the view that it must “trust consumers.” It’s true, today’s announcement shows more trust than they ever displayed before — but it’s still conditional trust.

They certainly have a point. I’m willing to wait until the actual implementation shows up in the iTunes Store, but I think the point is made: the value may not be apparent to the average iTS customer, most of whom are probably iPod users and not concerned with the technical issues that others are. [After all, the iPod has FairPlay on-board, and most of these same users probably don't know that there's a difference between AACs and MP3s.] And while the geeks have a point about all these technical concerns, I’m far more concerned with the variegated price scheme: chances are that your average iTS customer doesn’t consider himself to be an audiophile, so the two-fold penalty of DRM-free tracks—larger filesize and higher cost—will suppress the cost of these things.

Of course, I could always be wrong … the iTS implementation could favor the higher-cost tracks, easily and efficiently explaining the advantages of the high-quality, DRM-free tracks, or I could be totally wrong about the average iTS customer. Why? Most of my iTS purchases are non-music—mostly NBC shows that my TiVo records but my cable system fuzzes out with so much static that the show ends up unwatchable. I rarely purchase music in anything but physical CD form because I’m weird like that.

It will be interesting to see how it goes, but I think that Engadget’s fear—that the pricing scheme will imply that DRM is “good enough” for most users, who won’t make the switch—is a reasonable one. I’ll definitely watch it with interest, as I’m sure most music geeks will.