Home Alone...

Matt is in NYC right now with BT, seeing Phish from super-fancy box seats at Madison Square Garden.  He sent me photos... ooh la la!

It's weird having the house to myself.  This afternoon I was working on some new songs that Durkin sent me in prep for our house concert we're having in NJ Saturday night, and these new songs are heartbreaking and wonderful.  Durk is flying to NJ tomorrow, and we're gonna get together Friday to work on these tunes and then present a joint house concert on Saturday night; 30-ish minutes of Sunnyvale tunes (Sunnyvale is the name of the Durkin/Knapp/Casarino project), and 30 minutes of Hot Breakfast!  I'm excited.  

Anyway, just as I was wrapping up working on these tunes for the afternoon, my pal James texted me to tell me he was back home from his solo cross-country-finding-America jaunt, so I invited him over to sit in the backyard and eat cheese sticks and grapes on the swingy-chair.  It was such a perfect day out... maybe 82 degrees, not a lick of humidity, light breeze, no bugs... just glorious.   I love James so much. 

Guest DJs

Matt Casarino and I are going to be the guest DJs on Hometown Heroes on 93.7 WSTW tomorrow (Sunday) night from 8-10pm.  We're filling in for Mark Rogers who goes on vacation for these two weeks every year.  It feels really great that he asks us to fill in for him.  I guess that FCC Radio License I got in 1991 is actually useful for something. :-)

Anyway, if you're in the Delaware / DelCo / South Jersey listening area, you can tune in to 93.7FM.  If you're not, you can listen in on the web: go to wstw.com and click the huge, blue LISTEN LIVE button.  And if you can't listen live, you can listen to the podcast at which is usually up around lunchtime on Monday (download it from  wstw.com/hometown-heroes/ ).   

Hometown Heroes spins local, original music from Delaware, south and central NJ, Maryland (Baltimore and closer), SE PA, Philly, and even into the Lehigh Valley.  

If you do listen live, feel free to text in to say hello (text 56221), or comment while we're on the air via the Hometown Heroes Facebook Page.  

Or not.  We're not the boss of you. ;-)

That's it for now!  Gonna work on these songs a bit more.  OK bye.

Tonight was the 10th Annual WSTW Homey Awards ceremony at World Cafe Live in Wilmington. We jokingly call it the Music Prom because everyone from the Delaware, Philly, South Jersey and Baltimore original music scenes get together and get dressed up and celebrate the cool shit we all did this year. Yeah, there are awards, but even if you don't win, it's still a really cool, warm, celebration. (Trust us. There've been years we didn't win. It was still great.)

This year we were nominated for 7(!!) categories and took home three(!!) awards, which is blowing my mind. We won:

• Best Live Act (we also won that last year-- holy crap!)
  
• Best Collaboration with Jake and the Stiffs for our punky punky song "New York Drama." (We also won that last year with our EDM parody song with Todd Chappelle called "This is Our Hit Song")
  
• And I won Best Lead Singer, also for the second time, but it'd been two years since I won that. I am reeeeeling. (I'll post photos and links to songs later... but if you wanna see photos, the event hashtag on Instagram and Twitter, which barely anyone used, but enough that you'll get the idea) was " #Homeys10 "
  

There was a funny running gag throughout the night-- when we were announced for our first award, Joe Trainor jumped up on stage to accept the award for us saying, "Hot Breakfast is sorry they couldn't be here tonight so I'm just gonna..." and then we dragged him off the stage.  So for the rest of the night, anytime we were called to the stage (even to present awards or to play), either someone else would stand in for one of us and the other would say, "Jill's sorry she couldn't attend" or "Matt wishes he could be here, but..." or something along those lines. It was good and silly.  I love our people very much. 

Anyway, we were also nominated for Song of the Year for "Kids Today," which we were fine not winning, so much so that even I voted for the band who won it (Wave Radio, for their song "Unbreakable") instead of voting for my own song. But because we were nominated for Song of the Year, we had to play it live (rules is rules). It was fun to play for our peers.  Later on, one of our favorite bands (Glim Dropper) were playing the closing set of the night and asked us to jump in on three Bowie tunes: "Star," Hang On To Yourself," and "Ziggy Stardust." Glim Dropper uses in-ear monitors, so the sound guy forgot to give me and Matt (and Kevin Niemi who also joined in bass) any monitors until the middle of the second song.  (If you attended our CD release show, Glim Dropper was the band who backed us up. We LOVE them, and they are honestly probably the best musicians I know, period, hands down.)

Anyway, I wanna tell you more about it, but Matt's folks are gonna be at our house in less than 7 hours because this weekend is our "we don't buy each other Christmas gifts and instead pool our money and spend a nice weekend in NYC seeing a play, an opera, and eating some good food" weekend. We're taking the train up, so we're on a schedule.

See you on the flip side!

ps: oh! My iron infusion went well. I was achy when I got home (normal) so I slept for the rest of the day/night, and woke up today still craving ginger (so my pica wasn't completely eradicated yet) but hour by hour I'm feeling better and have more color. After next week's infusion I'll be rockin' extra hard at 110%. Yay!

OK, bed. 

Happiness!

(x-posted to xtingu.livejournal.com)