EXPANDING MARKETS
released MAY 2, 2018
RELEASE 43
The first full-band HW show! A club at my college was putting together an outdoor concert, and I wanted to play. Someone else in the club, Jared Poehlman, said he also wanted to play, but his bassist was still in high school (coincidentally, I knew his bassist in high school) so he didn't want to do his own stuff. He asked if he could play with me, and I said sure. Then, someone neither of us knew very well walked in, overheard us, and asked if we needed a drummer. That was Angela Branchek, who would be involved in Hello Whirled on and off over the next 4 years. That was exactly one week before the show. We rehearsed exactly twice. The first song in the set went so badly that I've retconned it from the setlist. It is officially "soundcheck" because we were missing some cables and weren't set up properly. Once the ball actually got rolling, we played okay and the set went well enough. Later that day, I got into a nasty argument with someone who I would not have called a friend, but who my friends were hanging out with. Fortunately, I didn't record that, so the scrapbook that is my Bandcamp only indicates that HW history was made on May 2, 2018, and that's it. That this show went as well as it did is thanks to Jared organizing our rehearsals and keeping things moving on that front. I had zero bandleader experience and he actually knew how to organize people like that. I would not figure out how to actually lead a band until 2022. As far as the songs themselves are concerned, I don't know why we played "Her Flaming Absence" that fast. It worked, but I've recorded three different versions of that song over the years and I never played it this fast.