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Sept. 21, 2008

Noah and the Whale are in North America. This is not the first time the band has trodden musically on United States soil. But this first week of the three week tour has been quite far removed from a brief dalliance in Austin in March. New York was our first destination. And New York is not like Texas. New York City is very high and very high-minded.

On Day 2 of the tour Noah and the Whale stood on the 47th floor of the Viacom building, a kind of Orwellian Institute of Culture that seems to source all media output in uptown Manhattan, with instruments in hand and looking out over the Hudson River. From this vantage point, from this cosmopolitan fortress, on this forward-looking, futuristic, if Conservative, island, the tall windows framed the rest of America.

In the relative foreground of this Western frontier was our hotel, 5 miles west of the Lincoln Tunnel, encircled by the concrete pirouettes and tarmac entrechats of the Garden State, sunny Secaucus. New Jersey Monthly magazine ranked Secaucus as its 11th best place to live in its 2008 rankings of the "Best Places To Live" in New Jersey. It is also worth documenting that Secaucus, on the background of its 20th century proliferation of pig farms, rendering plants and junk yards, has a reputation for being the most odorous conurbation in the New York metropolitan area. On Wikipedia, it also emerges that Dave Draper, bodybuilder, and Henry B Krajewski, pig farmer and "frequent political candidate," are the only two current residents of any note. In one moment, the Noah and the Whale tour van is making evasive measures to avoid the streams of people, boxes obscuring deflated chests, pouring forth from the Lehman Brothers building on Wall Street. The next, Noah and the Whale are discussing the merits of teriyaki pork and beef jerky over sour cream Twinkies in Hudson County.

The United States of America is certainly more than one city. And this tour is about much more than any one show and any one city too. It is an absolute thrill to have to prove yourself again; a privilege to have the opportunity to reach more people. The first few shows, hearing the songs in a new place with a new audience, have reminded the band how invigorating and humanizing a challenge playing live music can be. Gigs at Union Pool in Brooklyn, the Sidewalk Cafe and the Mercury Lounge, besides an instore at Virgin, Union Square, and not to mention a day trip to Baltimore for a further show, all set in the whirlwind of press and promotion, have also reminded Noah and the Whale that making music is also a job.

There was a conscious decision with this first tour to play to as many people as possible, to open ourselves up to whoever would like to listen. This means as many free shows and underage shows as our budget will allow. As a footnote, the notion of a 20-year-old music fan being barred from watching their favourite band because they might be exposed to the frothy chemical intoxicants of lite beer is an unfamiliar and unreasonable one to the mind of Noah and the Whale.

Yesterday saw Noah and the Whale in Boston and an energetic, if cramped, show in the prosaically-named Toad Bar. This blog is being composed in a hotel room in Canada, where, it unexpectedly transpires, everyone speaks French.

Please turn your attention to the photographic evidence of Urby Whale in New York. No-one has been more surprised or delighted at the manifest fact of his presence on these shores than the confused and slightly frightened natives of the Big Apple.

-- Noah and the Whale

Noah and the Whale in Baltimore